After Harvard, Stringfellow followed the Word of God to East Harlem, where he offered his legal services to penniless tenants and sex offenders, among other citizens of Babylon. Amidst the black-and-white 1950s, Stringfellow, a closeted gay man, made a lonely home for himself in a gray space beyond the margins of polite society. In 1962, however, Stringfellow met the love of his life, the poet Anthony Towne, and they moved into an apartment on West 79th Street. Stringfellow continued his legal work on the behalf of the urban poor, even as he extended his advocacy to the underground culture of gay New York.
However much the law provided an arena in which to intercede in the suffering of others, Stringfellow continued to find it a stumbling block. Legal advocacy was forever bound up within an “adversary system, with all its implications of competitiveness, aggression, facetious games, debater’s craft, and winning per se.” Late in his life, Stringfellow wrote, “I continue to be haunted by the ironic impression that I may have to renounce being a lawyer the better to be an advocate.”
Biblical spirituality demanded both self-sacrificing involvement with the world and an avoidance of the world’s emphasis on achievement, efficacy, and power, an emphasis particularly acute in the courtroom. Perhaps to ease the “relentless tension” between the words of the law and the Word of God, Stringfellow and Towne moved from the city to Block Island. While their departure from urban life may have looked to some like a flight from trouble, Stringfellow and Towne saw their new home, which they named “Eschaton,” as another station on the apocalyptic road. Far from the secular center of things, Stringfellow and Towne used Eschaton’s isolation to engage in new forms of biblical politics.
In 1970, they sheltered the Catholic poet and war-resister Daniel Berrigan. Two years earlier, along with eight others, Berrigan had entered a selective service office in Catonsville, Maryland and burned over three hundred draft cards with homemade napalm. Following his conviction for destruction of government property and interference with the draft, he went on the lam, denying the authority of the court to convict or imprison him. After a months-long search, the FBI arrested him at Eschaton.
Subsequent to the arrest, the government kept watch over Stringfellow and Towne’s modest island home and interrogated Stringfellow several times. During one interview, an FBI agent confronted Stringfellow with Chapter 13 of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, which Christians frequently interpret as a command to obey legal authority. At the time, Stringfellow was at work on a book—Conscience & Obedience—that would challenge this standard reading of Paul. The agent apparently got an earful. Stringfellow explained that Romans must be read in concert with the Book of Revelation, which pictures the demonic growth and final destruction of all worldly authority. Authority, Stringfellow assured the G-man, must only be obeyed to the extent that it cooperates with the Word of God.
Stringfellow returned to this story several times in his writing; he clearly felt it was a moment when he had struck the right balance between biblical and legal advocacy—speaking the Word of God to a government official. This strange balance, standing both inside and outside the law, speaking to one authority on behalf of another, was Stringfellow’s vision of authentic spiritual practice.
Currently, I am neither representing poor tenants nor sheltering fugitive war-resisters. Reading Stringfellow has in some ways been an escape for me, a hopeful daydream. His life is a hero’s journey. In law school, courtrooms, hospitals, churches, city streets, Stringfellow challenged authorities unmoored from God’s simplifying command. He once performed an exorcism of Richard Nixon on the Washington Mall. Behind my fascination with this crusading and converted lawyer lurks the question that occupies many law students: What am I doing here?
The fear, and the thrill, that something you are doing right now could be the first step of a glorious, or at least fulfilling, journey, puts a spring in the law school student’s step. Ever- expectant, my gait marries reaching for a prize and ducking a blow. Stringfellow’s way of dealing with this domination of the present by the future was in his account of ceaseless work of the Word of God. There are no ladders to climb, no lesser authorities to appease. As long as you recognize the presence of the Word of God the only thing to do is obey its command. Such higher obedience can be a spiritual and a legal decision, influencing one’s lawyerly practice as much as one’s inner life.
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