SAINT WILLIAM STRINGFELLOW

William Stringfellow 1928 - 1985

"Can the pope speak infallibly?", Stringfellow was asked at an ecumenical gathering. He reply was swift and sure. "Any Christian who speaks in conformity to the gospel speaks infallibly." It was typical of the pithy pronouncements which would endear him to many. Yet he was ever as profound as he was precise. When Karl Barth visited the United States in 1962 he pointed past the seminary professors to the diminutive lawyer and remarked, "This is the man America should be listening to."

William Stringfellow was born in Johnston, Rhode Island. His father was a knitter in a stocking factory. Needing money for a university education, he held three jobs in his last year of high school, yet managed to gain several scholarships and find himself at Bates College by age fifteen. Another scholarship took him to the London School of Economics. It was here, he was to write later, that he learned the difference between vocation and career. Military service followed with the Second Armored Division of the U.S. Army. When other soldiers complained that they were deprived of an identity in the armed forces and couldn't "be themselves", he disagreed. He knew that it is the living Word of God, Jesus Christ, which gives us our identity and frees us to "own" ourselves, cherish ourselves, profoundly be ourselves, anywhere.

Next was Harvard Law School. While a degree from this prestigious institution was a key which unlocked many doors, the door on which he knocked belonged to a slum tenement in Harlem, New York City. He had decided to work among poor blacks and Hispanics, the most marginalized of the metropolis. The move from Harvard to Harlem was jarring. His apartment measured twenty-five feet by twelve feet. Earlier five children and three adults had lived in it. The kitchen contained a tiny sink and an old refrigerator (neither of which worked), an old gas stove, a bathtub, and a seatless toilet bowl. Thousands of cockroaches were on hand to greet him. "Then I remembered that this is the sort of place in which most people live, in most of the world, for most of the time. Then I was home......"

His frustration with seminaries was inconsolable. Liberal schools of theology, having disdained the bible, offered little more than "poetic recitations...social analysis, gimmicks, solicitations, sentimentalities, and corn." Fundamentalist institutions, on the other hand, had yet to learn that "...if they actually took the bible seriously they would inevitably love the world more readily...because the Word of God is free and active in the world."