21
" Yet even among those who are not economically poor, work remains, as a matter of experience, a great burden. Those whose work consists of serving the great corporate principalities, for instance, are subject to dehumanized, enslaving, frequently idolatrous claims over their lives. Does anyone seriously suppose that the high-ranking executives involved in the price-fixing scandals in some of the great corporations in this country are anything but prisoners, no more truly free than serfs, confined and conformed to the interest of the principalities they serve? "
― William Stringfellow , Instead of Death: New and Expanded Edition
22
" Now you can love. Love yourself. That is the rudiment of all other loves. Love yourself: that means your final acceptance of and active participation in God’s love of you. Love yourself. If you love yourself you will become and be one who can love another. Love yourself and then your love of others will be neither suicidal nor destructive, neither jealous nor possessive, but then your love of yourself will enable, embody, enrich, and elucidate your love of others, and your other loves will do the same to your self-love. And when you love others – tell them so – celebrate it – not only by some words but by your life toward them and toward the whole of the world. Your specific love of another is verified and supported in your love of all others and all things, even those that which seem to be unlovable, which seem unworthy to be loved. Let that be the manner of your witness to the One who loves all though none are worthy, not even one. You are not alone. "
― William Stringfellow , Instead of Death: New and Expanded Edition
32
" The language of the Bible regarding principalities – the ruling authorities, the angelic powers, the demons, and the like – sounds, I suppose, strange in modern society, but these words in fact refer to familiar realities in contemporary life. The principalities refer to those entities in creation which nowadays are called institutions, ideologies, and images. Thus a nation is a principality. Or the Communist ideology is a principality. Or the public image of a human being, say a movie star or a politician, is a principality. The image or legend of Marilyn Monroe or Franklin Roosevelt is a reality, distinguishable from the person bearing the same name, which survives and has its own existence apart from the existence of the person. "
― William Stringfellow , Instead of Death: New and Expanded Edition
33
" There is a boy in the neighborhood...whom I have defended in some of his troubles with the law. He used to stop in often on Saturday mornings to shave and wash up, after having spent the week on the streets. He has been addicted for a long time. His father threw him out three years ago, when he was first arrested. He has contrived so many stories to induce clergy and social workers to give him money to support his habit that he is no longer believed when he asks for help...He is dirty, ignorant, arrogant, dishonest, unemployable, broken, unreliable, ugly, rejected, alone. And he knows it. He knows at last that he has nothing to offer. There is nothing about him that permits the love of another person for him. He is unlovable. Yet it is in his own confession that he does not deserve the love of another that he represents all the rest of us in this regard. We are all unlovable. More tan that, the action of this boy's life points beyond itself, it points to the Gospel, to God who loves us though we hate Him, who loves us though we do not please Him, who loves us not for our sake but for His own sake, who loves us freely, who accepts us though we have nothing acceptable to offer him. Hidden in the obnoxious existence of this boy is the scandalous secret of the Word of God. "
― William Stringfellow , My People Is the Enemy: An Autobiographical Polemic
39
" death is the moral power upon which the State relies when it removes citizens from society for preventive detention or other political imprisonment, or when it estops free speech, of when it militarizes the police, or when it drives youth into exile, or when it confines millions in black ghettos and consigns millions more to malnutrition and illiteracy, and when it manipulates inflation and credit to preoccupy, demoralize, and thereby conform the middle classes, or when it collusively abets a governor’s defiance of the courts, or when it hunts priests as fugitives. "
― William Stringfellow , William Stringfellow: Essential Writings (Modern Spiritual Masters)
40
" And no wonder, at this moment, in this country, where the power of death is so militant in the universities, in the corporate structures, in the churches, in the labor movement, in the political institutions, in the Pentagon, in the business of science, in the technological order, in the environment itself, in the realms of ideology, in the State, that, as with Jesus, the Christian, living as a free man, living in transcendence of death’s power, living, thus, as an implacable, insatiable, unappeasable, tireless, and resilient revolutionary, should be regarded by all authorities as a criminal. As in the time of the trial of Jesus Christ, so in this day and place, to truly be a free person is to be a criminal.—ST, 59–68 "
― William Stringfellow , William Stringfellow: Essential Writings (Modern Spiritual Masters)