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A Second Birthday: A Personal Confrontation with Illness, Pain, and Death QUOTES

A Second Birthday: A Personal Confrontation with Illness, Pain, and Death QUOTES

1 " 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 “Jesus” and that name was my prayer, but I mean that I also at times would shout “Fuck!” 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—what is communicated by a person in the world before God—in 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’s prayer; that is the word of the Lord’s 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’s vocation in affirming the life which God has called into being. "

― William Stringfellow , A Second Birthday: A Personal Confrontation with Illness, Pain, and Death

2 " It is the ubiquity of God's judgment - extending to every time and place - and the universality of God's judgment - reaching every person and every principality or power - and the secrecy of God's judgment - which embraces all creation - taken together with such knowledge as there is of the character of God's judgment - namely that judgment is a facet of God's grace - that authorizes the emphasis of Saint Paul on the extraordinary freedom of the Christian, in making decisions, from anxiety about how those decisions are being judged by God. "

― William Stringfellow , A Second Birthday: A Personal Confrontation with Illness, Pain, and Death