A Step Off America

The straw mat at their door read "GO AWAY." Few, it seems, took this seriously. Drawn together years earlier by common interest in theology and social ethics and a strong personal bond, William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne left New York in the fall of 1967 in body, if not entirely in spirit. They established a place for rest, reflection, and writing on 14 acres of land overlooking the cliffs and Old Harbor of New Shoreham, Block Island, Rhode Island.

Anthony Towne was a satirist best known for his farcical obituary of God written lightheartedly at the expense of the "Death of God" theologians. His poetry was published in many journals and periodicals. He contributed thoughtful, often humorous, and always insightful narratives to volumes that he co-authored with Stringfellow.

There could scarcely have been a sharper physical contrast between these two men: Towne, a towering hulk of a man, full beard giving him a somber, almost threatening look belied by his personality; and Stringfellow, since his radical surgery in the late 1960s, a frail echo of his former self, seemingly only half the size of Towne. Life for Stringfellow and Towne was essentially a theological vocation. According to Stringfellow, "Every person, if they reflect upon the event of their own life in this world, is a theologian." One day when first on the island, peering off into the Atlantic from the fog-shrouded cliffs near their house, a friend remarked, "It seems like the end of the world." Thereafter they called their home "Eschaton." They later described Eschaton as "our own monastery."

At Eschaton hospitality was gratuitously extended to pilgrims of various sorts who happened through in a seemingly unending string. There was abundant physical nourishment, some gleaned from Towne's garden plot.

Meals typically were cooked by Stringfellow; guests weren't allowed to lift a finger until they had been there for at least three days. Meals sometimes began with a reading from the New Testament or the Book of Common Prayer. Towne wrote, "Dinner was principally conversation, lamentations, wonderings and ponderings, and gratitudes for good men and women already in jail. Grace we sometimes uttered, but more often did not, on Stringfellow's contention that the meal had been amply blessed in the making of it."

I recall meals where we sat for hours, peering out the large bay window overlooking a sweeping pasture to the harbor. There was generous opportunity for reflection, afforded to one's self both by the fecund silences and by engaging conversation with others at the table. World events, the life of the church, and happenings on the island all fueled discussion of what the gospel has to say about America and living in an end-time.

Conversation was often punctuated by news broadcasts (the radio was left on virtually 24 hours a day) or from the daily papers. Life at Eschaton resembled Christian life a la Barth: the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other, striving to discern the relationship between the two.

The daily routine included Towne's trek to the post office to retrieve their mail and to pick up the papers and groceries as needed en route. Their four-wheel-drive Toyota jeep had "Question Authority" stickers prominently displayed on each side. Towne would often tarry along the way to speak with one or more islander. Taking a heavy draw on his cigarette, with a wry smile or gentle grunt, a scarcely noticeable nod of his head or a sigh, he gathered impressions and anecdotes of the human family, its strengths and foibles, from which he derived hope or still further confirmation of the dehumanizing forces set loose during "these wretched times."

ESCHATON WAS a refuge for battered activists, a nexus for theological currents and political movements. It was a haven for fugitives.

Daniel Berrigan was apprehended in August 1970 at the Stringfellow and Towne residence after six months underground eluding the FBI. This fact won them a place among the "core members" of the "Catholic left," even though they were both Episcopalians.

The notoriety of being one-half of the "Block Island Two" was an honor that sat uneasily with Towne. It forcibly placed him in the public eye, in legal jeopardy, and lent something of an air of celebrity which, as a rule, he avoided. Some months after Berrigan's arrest, he and Stringfellow faced prosecution for harboring a fugitive. In an act of vindictiveness characteristic of the Nixon era, they were also charged with being "accessories after the fact" in the Catonsville Nine draft-file burning two-and-a-half years before. Pained, Towne protested, "One thing I am not—an accessory."

In those days fear and repression abounded in the United States. Government surveillance, infiltration, and provocateurs were employed in a vicious rooting out of anti-war activists, Black Panthers, and others working for social change. The likelihood of protracted legal struggle and financial drain, juxtaposed with Stringfellow's recent illness, perilous health, and continued convalescence, added a dimension of cruelty to the government's legal strategy.

Soon after their indictment, Stringfellow and Towne joined my sister Diane Kennedy Pike and me in Israel. They spent several weeks with us while researching their biography of Bishop James Pike, Diane's husband. The first afternoon, over lunch, they caught us up on developments at home. Towne's sometimes fierce loyalty to Stringfellow was evident. Leaning over the table, his large frame quaking with rage, hurt, and disbelief, Towne blurted out, "They're trying to kill Bill." In a letter from that period, he spoke of times being "irretrievably evil."

Thus Towne was to write in his account of the Berrigan affair: "Death ... busybodied all about us and even in us, clouding even the most halcyon of our respite Island days." In a typically sobering comment, he added, "It is my considered opinion that any society that locks up priests is sick and any society that imprisons poets is doomed."

Fittingly their defense, partially based on Matthew 25:34-40, argued the unconstitutionality of government attempts to inhibit their religious duty to offer shelter, especially since no attempt was made to conceal Berrigan. The government's case was eventually dismissed.

It was an indictment of those times that Stringfellow and Towne were so buffeted by political events. When Daniel Berrigan called me on Monday, January 28, 1980, to say that Anthony Towne had died unexpectedly, there came to mind a phrase by James Kavanaugh, "There are some too gentle to live among wolves."

THOUGH WE NEVER spoke of it, I think Stringfellow and his friends all assumed that Towne would survive him. It is hard to believe that Stringfellow lived another five years after Towne's death. New routines were established. He learned to drive, a necessary evil he had avoided for five decades. A series of live-in companions were found to help care for the house and monitor Stringfellow's health. Continued medical interventions staved off amputation of one leg and partially saved his eye-sight as Stringfellow's health continued to deteriorate. Some of the island land was sold to meet mounting medical expenses.

In some ways it seemed things were never quite right at Eschaton after Towne's death. Towne's poetry, the bulk of which was unpublished during his lifetime, was left unattended in boxes in his "manger" office behind the house. A major work on baptism was left unfinished. Stringfellow did complete several works, including A Simplicity of Faith and The Politics of Spirituality, but he never seemed to regain stride. In fact, the viability of his staying at Eschaton came into question.

Whereas the earlier period was dominated by national politics and resistance to the war in Vietnam, the years following Towne's death were characterized by Stringfellow's failing health. He endured constant, at times excruciating, pain. At times the pain consumed him. Even at that, he theologized his experience and wrote, "There are no grounds to be romantic about pain. Pain is a true mystery, so long as this world lasts. Yet it is known that pain is intercessory: one is never alone in pain but is always a surrogate of everyone else who hurts—which is categorically everybody."

Stringfellow was perhaps foremost among theologians for speaking directly from and to the American experience. The theology of Stringfellow and Towne coupled biblical orthodoxy and fidelity to the gospel with a political radicalism. This confounded those whose faith nurtured a culturally kept pietism and those in the church whose social activism manifested the same false hopes, narrow dogmas, and vain fixation on technique and result as secular movements and ideologies.

Though Towne was less outspoken in public, his thinking was, by Stringfellow's estimation, the "more radical, both theologically and practically." After Towne's death Stringfellow put it simply, "Anthony is my conscience."

Thomas Merton once wrote, "The monk is essentially someone who takes up a critical attitude toward the world and its structures ... somebody who says, in one way or another, that the claims of the world are fraudulent." According to Stringfellow, "We have entered dark ages, and it's very hard to see when they will end. One thing that becomes very clear is that it is important to retain, even in a very modest way, some sense and practice of civility ... the Dark Ages is a time of monasticism, is a time in which enclaves are established in order to preserve and hopefully transmit ideas and art and thought and humanizing values."

Eschaton was just such an enclave for many people, a transmitter of Christian, that is, human, values.

MANY CHRISTIANS SOUGHT out Eschaton, or were solicited by its keepers, to avail themselves of the relatively rare opportunity to step off of America and look at our lives and times anew. Just as Eschaton afforded many of us a reprieve from the claims of America, it gave Stringfellow and Towne a chance to simply live out their days as Christians.

In his poem "Capernaum," Towne wrote, "Once in a month of Fridays there is good." He felt—he knew—that we are living in an end-time. Human life is constantly tested by the encroaching reality of death. The moral reality of death stalks the global landscape, seizing random victims at will.

Stringfellow and Towne, in their writings and with their lives, railed against death's triumphal procession and its "collateral casualties"—the poor, the outcast, and the marginalized. They announced that the penultimate claims of death, whether poverty or illness, racism or war, institutional self-preservation or social convention, were not the final word.

Twice I attended Bill Stringfellow as he faced death in its most immediate personal form. Once I saw his formidable will pull himself back across the threshold to reclaim life. This last time I saw him exhausted, laboring to breathe, his chest rising with great effort and falling as though in collapse. He once said, "Every time you say no you also say yes. To say no to this regime, you are saying yes to something else. You ought to be clear about what you are saying yes to."

In his death William Stringfellow was saying yes to that which he had affirmed in his life—freedom from the idolatry of death, which is the resurrection.

At the time this article appeared, R. Scott Kennedy was on the staff of the Resource Center for Nonviolence in Santa Cruz, California, and had worked with William Stringfellow as a research assistant for a biography of Bishop James Pike.