William Stringfellow

When I write that my own situation in those months of pain and decision can be described as prayer, I do not only recall that during that time I sometimes read the Psalms and they became my psalms, or that, as I have also mentioned, I occasionally cried __esus_ and that name was my prayer, but I mean that I also at times would shout __uck!_ and that was no obscenity, but a most earnest prayerful utterance.In the final analysis, no matter what the vocabulary of prayer, or where muteness displaces words in prayer, the content__hat is communicated by a person in the world before God__n prayer is in each and every circumstance the same and it can be put plainly in one word: Help!That is the word of Gethsemane__ prayer; that is the word of the Lord__ Prayer; that is the prayer when Christ repeats the Twenty-second Psalm from the cross.It is the prayer of Christ interceding for all people, and it is the prayer of a human creature acknowledging God__ vocation in affirming the life which God has called into being.

This, too, is the Biblical description of work. In sin men lose their dominion over the creation which God gave them, and their relationship with this creation becomes toil. __ursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for our of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return._ (Gen. 3:17-19)Work represents the broken relationship between men and the rest of creation. Men, literally, work to death.The fallenness of work, the broken relationship between men and the rest of creation which work is, involves both the alienation of men from nature and from the rest of creation, including the principalities and powers. In work men lose their dominion over the principalities and are in bondage to the principalities. Instead of men ruling the great institutions _ corporations, unions, and so on _ men are ruled by the great institutions.

Biblical spirituality means powerlessness, living without embellishment or pretense, free to be faithful in the gospel, and free from anxiety about effectiveness or similar illusions of success.

That means, in turn, that this is an experience which shatters time and liberates people from the confinement of time by at once recalling all that has gone before and anticipating all that is to come.

Too commonly sex does not have the dignity of a sacramental event because sex is thought to be the means of the search for self rather than the expression and communication of one who has already found himself, and is free from resort to sex in the frantic pursuit of his own identity.

Reckon your weakness as praise of God__ power, endure suffering in joy, risk your life on the veracity of Christ, count your loneliness a means of grace.

Don't be afraid. There is no more to fear. Do not fear rejection. If you fear rejection by another you do not love the other, though you may profess it. You are only being anxious for his love of you. The free man does not seek the love of others, nor fear that his love will be rejected, for rejection - as is known from the night Christ was betrayed - does not destroy love, and it does not destroy the one who loves. Don't be afraid, you are not alone.

Thus the vocation of the baptized person is a simple thing: it is to live from day to day, whatever the day brings, in this extraordinary unity, in this reconciliation with all people and all things, in this knowledge that death has no more power, in this truth of the resurrection. It does not really matter exactly what a Christian does from day to day. What matters is that whatever one does is done in honor of one__ own life, given to one by God and restored to one in Christ, and in honor of the life into which all humans and all things are called.The only thing that really matters to live in Christ instead of death

The biblical lifestyle is always a witness of resistance to the status quo in politics, economics, and all society. It is a witness of resurrection from death. Paradoxically, those who embark on the biblical witness constantly risk death - through execution, exile, imprisonment, persecution, defamation, or harassment - at the behest of the rulers of this age. Yet those who do not resist the rulers of the present darkness are consigned to a moral death, the death of their humanness. That, of all the ways of dying, is the most ignominious.

Hence the vocation of the Church of Christ in the world, in political conflict and social strife, is inherently eschatological. The Church is the embassy of the eschaton in the world. The church is the image of what the world is in its essential being. The Church is the trustee of the society which the world, not subjected to the power of death, is to be on that last day when the world is fulfilled in all things in God.

The Fall is where the nation is. The Fall is the locus of America.