Not an Ounce of Fat

When I think of him, I first think of his Bowery face, a face that seems to have passed through holocaust—whiskered, skin thin on the bone, eyes that have taken in much death and suffering, and yet eyes sharp and quick. At his home, in the years when I lived in New York as a member of Emmaus Community and saw him on Block Island from time to time, he seemed to wear a bathrobe more often than any other piece of clothing. His legs were as bony as his face, and his words were as lean as his legs. Not an ounce of fat in thought, word, or writing.

Bill had passed through death, his own, going into an operating room with the near certainty that he would die on the table. But a very clever doctor saved his life and gave Bill what he called his "second birthday." He had already become well-known for his commitment to the living, especially the afflicted such as he had come to know in East Harlem. But after that experience of death and re-birth, he seemed to connect more than ever before with what might be called the "life movement," rather than the peace movement, since in that phrase "peace" seems to be an amazingly vague and abstract word.

What did I learn from him? More than I will attempt writing here. Something about idolatry, that first of all. Bill made me realize that idols are not only things of wood, stone, or metal that primitive people pray before, but rather that we live in a world, and in a church, crowded with idols, the main one being the national flag. Many of us offer it our own lives and even frequently offer it the lives of our children.

We worship money, status, security, race, and church—various borders of position, belief, and power. Stringfellow, perhaps because of his Lazarus experience, made it easier to live without these standard, everyday modern idols.

Bill hung on to the gospels as a child hangs on to a hamburger. This was certainly the source of his insistence about followers of Jesus being disarmed people, people who don't use death, or the threat of violence, as a method. At the same time, he was committed to seeing the world and its people in a quite unromanticized way. He didn't minimize the reality of evil or the grip evil has on us, the way evil seems to possess so many of us and so many of our structures.

Bill was a theologian, doing his theology with the precision he had learned as a lawyer, and yet was remarkably free of the scholar's tendency to keep things abstract. He was not interested in God in general or people in general, but in God in particular and people in particular.

Bill was in some ways a bit like Merton: a contemplative monk living at the edge of the world, living with a body that was not easy to live with and that gave him a great deal of pain. And yet he was not made bitter. In fact one of the main things about him was his passionate love of the circus, that most non-bitter, non-austere institution whose main sacrament is the clown. Bill had built a miniature circus in what had once been the garage of his house. It was enormous and extraordinary in its attention to detail. And circus posters were all over the house.

He could do things on a grand scale. During a retreat with him in the early '70s, in which maybe 10 or 12 people were taking part, he took us to a Block Island restaurant owned by a friend, and before very long we were presented not only with a lobster dinner but with a tray heaped with red lobsters. It was followed by a similar tray when the first was emptied. As lean as he was, and careful, Bill was not tight or sparing in the ways he communicated love and welcome.

Jim Forest was general secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR) and a Sojourners contributing editor at the time this article appeared.