Listening is a rare happening among human beings. You cannot listen to the word another is speaking if you are preoccupied with your appearance, or with impressing the other, or are trying to decide what you are going to say when the other stops talking, or are debating about whether what is being said is true or relevant or agreeable.

William Stringfellow

Categorized in : Giving Talking Listening

The practice of the Christian life consists of the discernment of (the seeing and hearing), and the reliance upon (the reckless and uncalculating dependence), and the celebration (the ready and spontaneous enjoyment) of the presence of the Word of God in the common life of the world.

William Stringfellow

practice christian world

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.

William Stringfellow

biblical risk darkness

Where money is an idol, to be poor is a sin. by William Stringfellow

Where money is an idol, to be poor is a sin.

William Stringfellow

lawyer money idols

Being holy . . . does not mean being perfect but being whole; it does not mean being exceptionally religious or being religious at all; it means being liberated from religiosity and religious pietism of any sort; it does not mean being morally better, it meas being exemplary; it does not mean being godly, but rather being truly human.

William Stringfellow

godly religious mean

The characteristic place to find Christians is among their enemies. The first place to look for Christ is in Hell.

William Stringfellow

christian looks enemy

Perhaps the moral ambiguity of money is most plainly evidenced in the popular belief that money itself has value and that the worth of other things or of men is somehow measured in monetary terms, rather than the other way around.

William Stringfellow

belief men way

The Fall is where the nation is. The Fall is the locus of America... by William Stringfellow

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

William Stringfellow

nations america fall

Dorothy Day, of blessed memory, did not like to be called (as she often was, for good reason) a saint, because it usually meant that she was not being taken seriously. She heard it as an accusation — a device ostensibly distinguishing her from ordinary people so as to simultaneously discount her words and deeds while exempting others from moral responsibility to speak and act.

William Stringfellow

taken blessed memories

Biocides, for example, are designed to kill bacteria—it's not a b... by William Stringfellow

Biocides, for example, are designed to kill bacteria—it's not a benign material.

William Stringfellow

benign bacteria example