ON MARCH 2, 1985, WILLIAM STRINGFELLOW died at the age of 56 (see "A Tribute to William Stringfellow," Sojourners, April 1985). Stringfellow was a lawyer, a theologian, and an author. He was well known as a defender of poor people and unpopular causes, especially during his years of practice in East Harlem, and as an outspoken opponent of oppression in all forms. In 1974 he was defense lawyer for 11 women irregularly ordained to the Episcopal priesthood, a case which led the way for ordination of women in the Episcopal church.
In 1969 Stringfellow moved to Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island. He named his home there "Eschaton," the Greek word meaning "the end of the world which is the beginning of the kingdom of God." He served a term as second warden of Block Island, the municipal name of which is New Shoreham. During his term he fought land speculators and developers, who threatened to destroy the island's ecology.
In 1970 Daniel Berrigan was picked up at Eschaton by the FBI, who was in search of him for burning draft files in protest of the Vietnam war. Both Stringfellow and Anthony Towne, a poet and satirist who shared the Block Island home, were indicted for "harboring a fugitive"; the charges were later dismissed.
On March 5, three days after his death, friends and family of William Stringfellow gathered at his island home. Daniel Berrigan offered the following eulogy at the memorial service that day.
—The Editors
I feel reasonably certain I can count on your patience, as I speak from scattered notes in a time of deep distress.
A sophisticated people is struck by a shortage of words adequate to describe a bad time and how one might meet it. So we grope about with negatives: nonviolence, non-compliance, non-betrayal. In such a time, it occurs to me that friendship is reduced to the bone; it becomes a matter of non-betrayal.
Stringfellow saw betrayal on all sides—as indeed all but the purblind must see—the large betrayal of public trust, public monies, the public compact. He went about the world, having come on another way than this. He was nonviolent, non-cooperative, non-betraying. He began his professional life in a good place, among the poor, who, according to his faith, were non-expendable. So he succored them.
When one president, among many, flagrantly betrayed the public trust, Stringfellow was the first who urged that he be removed from office, to the enforced status of non-betrayer.
In the wake of the women's outcry, he understood immediately the injustice of exclusive male orders in his church. He urged non-compliance and stood among the first, in the church courts, demanding justice for women.
He was elected to public office on his beloved Block Island. Here he railed against the betrayal of public trust, the waste of public land, the degradation of the sublime ecology, the greed that was carving the island into a freehold of the absentees and the irresponsibles. He thundered against the contempt leveled at island folk as the elderly, the workers, the productive and hopeful, were reduced to a landless servant class by the high and mighty, beyond accountability.
He came to believe that the betrayal of the island and its people was very probably irreversible. He may well be right. In any case, money and self-interest served him a hard lesson: he was swept from office. The lesson of the times was brutally clear: there was less and less room for conscience in public life, whether in Washington, Providence, or New Shoreham.
He retired, but hardly in order to nurse his wounds. His political career on the island had been brief, stormy, and electric with hope. Who will ever forget the town meetings, how people came alive under the lash of his rhetoric, how issues long buried were laid out and perfidious deals made accountable? He spoke for the powerless, he enraged the powerful. A burning clarity of mind pierced through the smog of sophisticated betrayal.
The times were hostile to such fervent public civility. It was the servile, the violent, the wheelers and dealers who, by and large, owned America. Betrayal had become a credential for public office, high and low. In such times, what could such a one as Stringfellow offer?
What was manifestly impossible in public life, he could create and cherish up close. He was skilled in a host of ways of defining non-betrayal, non-concession, non-surrender. He would bide his time and explore those ways. There could exist in such a world a community of non-betrayal, non-cooperation, non-surrender. It required that the members enter a covenant, say their prayers, gather, and then scatter to their work—and, above all and first of all, cherish one another.
Whether they, or he, affected the course of events in the mad world, freed as they were from lust after power or prestige, this was manifestly beside the point. They were to keep the word of God, in a time when very few kept any word at all. Keeping one's word, making the word of God one's own, that was the point.
MY ENCOUNTER with this spirit of Stringfellow and his non-betraying friendship dates notoriously from 1970 and the events that occurred just up the road from this chapel. I was lifted from the home of Stringfellow and trundled off the island into prison. From that rather unusual vantage, I learned of the subsequent indictment of William and Anthony for the crime of harboring a fugitive. (It was, among other things, a strange foretaste of the present sanctuary movement within the church.) But for those few days, Stringfellow's home was the only church I knew; it was the only safe place in the universe.
And this was the aspect of Christ that this Christian kept opening up before his friends. Christ was our friend, in such a world, in such a lifetime as ours, precisely because he does not betray. He keeps covenant; he keeps his word, even with us. Even when we break covenant, break our word, betray.
Christ keeps his word with the poor, with the blacks, with the women, with the gays, even when all these are betrayed—betrayed by the church, betrayed by the state, betrayed by racists and sexists and power brokers and money grubbers and militarists and office seekers and property owners and real estate developers and weapons researchers. Betrayed by all those who know with a kind of overmastering cynicism that the business of America is not justice or peace or bread for the poor or housing for the indigent or land for the landless or compassion for the powerless. Who know, in the words of a classic political entrepreneur, that the business of America is business.
And further, since the business of America is business, it follows ineluctably that its business is also violence and war and racism. And it follows that such as Stringfellow, or you or I, are simply irrelevant to the main chance. Or if indeed we are determined to be relevant, we had best get in line, get into the business of America—the business of words without substance, claims without honor, promises broken, covenants betrayed. For these are the tools and skills of America and knowledge of the tools grants passage from the estate of the betrayed to the exalted status of betrayer. And the passage, and its attendant rites, might be described as entrance into the American dream.
But there are other rites, another passage. We think today of the word of God, the word of Stringfellow. I scarcely can distinguish the two, as we celebrate a rare non-betrayal, the man who kept his word. It is to his supreme honor I mean this; that in his life, the word of God and his own word merged and were one. He kept the word of God so close, so jealously, with such fervor and attention and acute irony and sense of judgment and anger and reverence and fear and so much more—he kept that word in such wise that the word of God and its keeping became his own word and its keeping.
For thousands of us, he became the honored keeper and guardian of the word of God; that is to say, a Christian who could be trusted to keep his word, which was God's word made his own. To keep that word close, to speak it afresh, to make it new.
Thus, for me, a single notorious example of non-betrayal became a kind of icon of understanding. He could act honorably and courageously on occasion, in the breach, because he lived that way, over the long haul. In public and private, in good times and ill, in health and sickness, he kept his word.
And that word, which he kept and guarded and cherished, it now keeps him. That is the way with the word, which we name Christ. The covenant keeps us, who keep the covenant.
And if we are assured that the covenant keeps even those who betray the covenant, that God is not bound even by our betrayals, does not cast us off, what then shall we say of the reward of this good and faithful servant, for whom the keeping of the word was a simple definition of life itself?
I think we must rejoice that his reward is exceeding great. The "small matters"—to which the Bible reduces in all sobriety the inflation and fury of this world—these "small matters" have yielded in death to something else. Stringfellow has entered into "great matters," matters of great and pressing moment.
He would like that: a vocation consonant with his great talents. "Well done, good and faithful servant; because you have been faithful over small matters, I shall place you over great ones." His vocation has just begun.
When this article appeared, Daniel Berrigan was a Sojourners contributing editor.
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