Text to go with video clip 12/07/2020

William Stringfellow

The word ‘systemic’ has been in the news. On Friday 13 March, earlier this year, I went to the Circus. It was a birthday present. I love the circus, and I’d been looking forward to it since November. It was the first time I’d ever seen Cirque du Soleil. And it was the first of the 42 productions now by them that takes place on ice. Titled Crystal, it was everything I’d hoped it would be. There were acrobats and jugglers, trapeze artists and clowns – live music. It was magical.

        And the reason I am such a fan of the circus is because I think it mirrors the Kingdom of God so well. In all sorts of ways. That it’s temporary, for example – the fact that the Big Top is here one week and then it’s not (all that’s left are torn posters) – there are signs of the kingdom, but they can be elusive, and we can ignore them, overlook them, miss them altogether, and then when they’re no longer here we’re regretful. But, if we do seize the opportunity to enter into that world then it’s a place where danger, and even death itself, is acknowledged and respected; and yet night after night, show after show, defeated. There’s resurrection. The Circus is a celebration: of life – in all its fulness, as well as its folly.

And I’m not the only Christian to think this. Another one, just for example, was the late Bill Stringfellow. From Rhode Island in the United States, his dates were 1928–1985. He was incredibly bright. Able to study at University level from age 15, after graduating from Harvard Law School Bill chose to live in Harlem where he worked among poor African Americans and Hispanics representing them as their lawyer when nobody else would. White, he was extremely active in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, but even as a teenager in the 1940s he’d organised a sit-in at his local restaurant in Maine to protest their refusal to serve people of colour.

        As a lawyer, Bill Stringfellow was also a theologian who was sharply critical of both mainstream approaches in theological colleges, which tend either to be fundamentalist or liberal. Bill arguing that either way what they manage to do is to appease what the Bible calls the ‘Principalities and Powers’; which is where that word ‘systemic’ comes in. By whichever means, both fundamentalist and liberal theologies managing to neuter the pursuit of justice which Bill said was at the very heart of the Christian Gospel.    

Rather than appease those principalities and powers we read of in Romans, in Ephesians, in Colossians and in Titus (‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places’) we need to understand that what Paul was talking about was systemic evil; and of the sort that led then, as it does now, to violence and social injustice.

        Bill Stringfellow once harboured a fellow theologian, Daniel Berrigan, from the FBI; an activist who campaigned against American involvement in the Vietnam War and against the arms race during the Cold War.

        That Bill Stringfellow loved the circus – he spent a whole season one year as resident theologian with one as it toured the States; he had a prized collection of circus hats. He believed the cooperation required, and the unconditionality with which all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds and cultures are accepted – the trust required . . .

        . . . there are all sorts of reasons. But for Bill (and for myself) it was – and is – the case that we (and there are others as well) think of the circus as a parable of no less a place than paradise itself, Amen.

Page last updated: Sunday 12th July 2020 9:18 AM
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