|
|
|||
|
See All Blogs Blog Home
Glenn Beck and Apostolic Authority 8/31/2010 (25) A Moving Event 7/19/2010 (124) Gay Marriage to Become Law of the Land 6/21/2010 (153) Facing Death at the Center of Life 6/14/2010 (187) Rand Paul Exposes Tea Party Racism in Libertarianism 5/20/2010 (235) Equal Freedom: The Obama Doctrine 5/7/2010 (240) The Last Protestant is Leaving 4/9/2010 (256) Economics in Pastoral Consciousness 3/14/2010 (256) The Strategic Consciousness of the Protestant Pastor 3/1/2010 (271) Memesis and the Culture of Personal Crisis 2/15/2010 (317) Watch Out for that Communist Folk Music 1/22/2010 (305) The Political Cross at Xmas 12/23/2009 (369) There are Socialists and Communists in the White House 10/15/2009 (509) Send Money to ACORN Now! 9/19/2009 (642) The Moral Blindness of Glenn Beck 8/11/2009 (694) The Media Creation of Whacko Conservatism 7/30/2009 (628) Seven Pentecostal Mountains and Sarah Palin 7/16/2009 (736) Major Media Unfairly Presents Anti-Abortion Rhetoric 6/3/2009 (744) You Can Get Killed in a Public Church 6/2/2009 (720) Historical Jesus Theories: Bringing on the Reign of God 5/20/2009 (792) It's Not Socialism, It's Insanity 5/20/2009 (727) When Life Begins is Not at all Clear 5/19/2009 (735) The Political Use of Torture 4/25/2009 (737) Jesus is Not Some Phony Spook 4/22/2009 (720) Poisoned Waters, Chicken Shit and Smart Growth 4/21/2009 (809) The Significance of the Killing of Robert F. Kennedy 4/13/2009 (823) The Last Book by Neuhaus: America is Babylon 4/10/2009 (858) About the New Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships 4/9/2009 (785) Seeing the Truth about God and Economy 4/2/2009 (761) Big Bankers as Terrorists 3/23/2009 (903) Without Trust, No Economy 3/19/2009 (851) Exposing the Dual Structure of American Governance 3/19/2009 (829) Another Big Book on Justice 3/17/2009 (815) Why Pastors Need to Understand Rush Limbaugh 3/16/2009 (829) The Freeman Affair and the Israel Lobby 3/16/2009 (777) Uncreative Destruction 3/16/2009 (804) Some Truth about Income Tax Rates 3/13/2009 (1010) Cultural Redemption: The Jewish-Arab Peace Song 3/13/2009 (921) The Poor Reputation of Evangelicals around the World 3/13/2009 (842) They have Stolen Our Language 3/11/2009 (811) CNBC: Mouthpiece for Business Ideology 3/11/2009 (847) Why Habermas? 3/11/2009 (897) Sex in God's Family 3/8/2009 (881) Please let us know what you think of these blogs or if you see something inappropriate.
|
Facing Death at the Center of Life
6/14/2010
I have placed on the website a couple articles about William Stringfellow. He was a significant figure for me in my intellectual development. When an undergraduate at St. Olaf College someone there believed it was important enough to provide a bus to another midwest Lutheran college to hear a lecture by Stringfellow. He talked about evil, with an example of Marilyn Monroe, not as a person but as a bodily image, how her image was used in the media to represent the perfection of beauty, and how when other women viewed that image they internalized it as a standard of beauty against which they imaged their own bodies negatively, thus rejecting themselves and their own bodies. Evil is that which leads us to reject ourselves, to think of ourselves lesser than we are able to think of ourselves as creatures made in the image of God. We let evil into our minds when we let the standards of this world negate us as unworthy. Then, later, Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota, invited Stringfellow to speak at its commencement ceremony. A group of us who were going into the seminary went to hear him talk. He spoke to the graduates of death. I thought it was a strange topic for an occasion oriented to the future, facing death at the center of life seemed strange. Lutherans were somehow interested in this Episcopal layperson and lawyer speaking about death. Part of the reason for this was probably that Stringfellow had gone to set up a legal practice in the midst of the black community of Harlem. He was speaking about death from the center of the city, where he saw the results of modern institutions in their total failure to deliver on peace and justice for all in the city in the 1960s. It was from Stringfellow that I received the sense that to really do the work of the gospel one needed to go into the midst of the city, as I later did during an internship on the west of Chicago at Community Lutheran Church. That was in 1965 just as Martin Luther King had decided to come to Chicago to begin his movement to end slums in which I was involved. While still in college a group of us participated in a field trip to Washington D.C. to study politics and government there. After the conference we drove our car to New York City and one of us remembered that Stringfellow lived there, so we stopped and called him up and asked if we could visit. He invited us to his apartment where we spent a couple hours talking about death. He connected even sex with death. Through sex comes new life but for Stringfellow one could not understand sex without facing death. Later after I got married it did seem that within the sex act one is spent, one gives up one's self and one's powers entirely to the other. I read Stringfellow's books and it was there that I came to see the radical nature of the affirmative word of God over against the false promises of the principalities and powers of this world, powers such as carried in the images such as Marilyn Monroe. Not that she is evil, not that her body is evil, but the way her image is used for evil which causes death of the human spirit. It is only recently that I have become aware that Stringfellow was homosexual. We now live in a time, thankfully, when that fact is not something to hold against him. I can now also better understand his experience as one who was rejected and isolated and made to live as if dead. But it is even more amazing for me to recognize in this man the strength of faith which comes from a real hearing of the Word of God at the center of life. | |||