WILLIAM STRINGFELLOW’S A SECOND BIRTHDAY: A PERSONAL CONFRONTATION WITH ILLNESS, PAIN, AND DEATH
How does the experience of physical pain impact one's life in Christ? How can the church respond to pain in light of the Biblical witness?
Former Bishop of Western New York and Union Theological Seminary professor Bill Franklin offhandedly mentioned Stringfellow in one of our evening seminars. I then read what is likely Stringfellow's most well-known work An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. In that, Stringfellow takes on the question of how to live within the Fall, the era of time we find ourselves, and more specifically, how to live within the Fall in America.
I found Stringfellow's analysis of the Bible and of America extremely compelling (you should go read that book as well), so I read through the rest of his body of work. And so, I came to A Second Birthday: A Personal Confrontation with Illness, Pain and Death.
I was in the midst of living with complex regional pain syndrome in my dominant arm following an accident a few years prior. This condition causes intense burning pain in one's limb in addition to a host of other changes and made it difficult to write, type, or do much of anything.
I wasn't quite sure how to think of the pain in a theological sense at all, or how to incorporate it into my life as a Christian, or how to view my pain in light of my Christian faith. Others around me offered that my injury and subsequent pain would make me a better chaplain, a better priest, since the pain would make me more empathetic to those who were suffering. I found that view tiring; the pain did not really make me a better person, and I was often emotionally, physically, and spiritually exhausted. Touching the metal cruets to assist at the altar sent a shock of pain up my arm. I thought carefully about how to bear the chalice without causing myself more pain. And sure, I picked up some new skills because of the pain, such as the ability to preach fairly decently without writing a manuscript, but the overwhelming reality was that the pain was simply pain.
I was tempted and still remain tempted at times to think that the pain is some sort of a divine punishment, yet that did not fit in with the God that I had come to know.
While looking for another way to understand this pain, I came across A Second Birthday. The book chronicles his experiences with an extremely painful abdominal cyst, how he made a decision to undergo a risky surgery to help with the cyst, and what happened after he did survive surgery. This book was the first book I came across that incorporated physical pain into Christian theology in a way that felt true to me, in a way that did not attempt to make the pain into something it was not. Stringfellow allowed the pain to be pain. He did not attempt to find the silver linings of his pain, and, most importantly, he rejected the idea that pain is somehow in any way linked to justification.
He writes:
The putative interdependence of pain and justification harks back, of course, to the barbaric Protestant idea that pain is punishment for immorality, a penalty to be paid by pleasing the Almighty, an inverse way of obtaining justification by works where bearing pain is substituted for doing good deeds. The pursuit of justification by any means — moralistic conduct, dogmatic conformity, charitable enterprise, daily work, or burnt offerings — is, in the biblical perspective, the essence of human vanity in its denial of God's freedom to affirm life without contingency, dependency, or equivocation. (52)
To Stringfellow, pain could not be a punishment and is not a means of justification. If pain is not a form of punishment or justification, then what is pain? Where should we place it in our theological framework?
Pain is a type of work, Stringfellow writes, that is, "work is a reality of fallen existence, that is, of the present era in which, by the veracity of human experience, all relationships are sundered, all persons and principalities exist in profound disorientation with respect to themselves, and to one another, and all things are subjected to death, and all experience is premonition of death" (62).
Pain is placed in the realms of death and pain: "All work — including so called non-work — is pain because work manifests the fallenness between men and the rest of creation, and, since pain is a specific instance and endurance of that same fallenness, pain is a type of work." (65)
By placing pain in the realm of work, in the realm of fallenness, Stringfellow was able to find consolation. His pain was not a punishment; and his pain was not there as some spiritual test in order that he may reach his salvation. His pain did not even cause him to have to re-think his theological framework. The pain simply needed to be placed where it belonged: in the category of work, a symptom of the fall, another manifestation of the lack of proper ordering between man and the rest of creation.
So Stringfellow was able to continue living in the midst of his pain by acknowledging the pain, by looking towards death: "It is, so to speak, only then and there — where there is no equivocation or escape possible from the fullness of death's vigor and brutality, when a man is exposed in absolute vulnerability — that life can be beheld and welcomed as the gift which life is" (67).
Stringfellow underwent the surgery, survived, and had a drastic reduction in pain. While some complications arose after surgery, the surgery was successful. However, what happens after the surgery, after the healing, makes up a short portion of the book.
*A Second Birthday* is not a book about the ability of God to heal or the ability of God to work miracles. Stringfellow rejected the idea that what happened during and after surgery was a miracle: "there was no miracle in any such sense in [his] being healed" (201). In this way, *A Second Birthday* provided a model for how to live a life as a Christian in chronic pain that was not predicated on the idea that God needed to heal me. A miracle in the future is not the consolation that Christ provides, but rather through Christ we are able to enter fully into the gift of life today without the fear of death.
We are able to have "a love of self which, esteeming life itself is a gift, expects or demands no more than the life which is given, and which welcomes and embraces and affirms that much unconditionally" (201-2).
Stringfellow concludes his book with a concise summary of his theology out of this experience:
Well. one can write of faith, and thus, as here, speak of prayer and providence, vocation and freedom from time, work and dominion, recall and absolution, healing and love, the transcendence of death in many ways and Eucharist for life. Or, one can be succinct: life is a gift which death does not vitiate or void: faith is the acceptance, honoring, rejoicing in that gift. That being so, in my own story, it did not matter whether I died. Read no resignation or indifference into this confession. It is freedom from moral bondage to death that enables a man to live humanly and to die at any moment without concern. (202–3)
At the time of writing this, I, like Stringfellow, have undergone a medical procedure that has greatly alleviated the pain. I currently have a spinal cord stimulator that has given me much of the use of my arm back and alleviated the vast majority of my pain.
And similar to Stringfellow, I am not drawn to the idea that a miracle occurred, or that God has somehow healed me. I found that, as Stringfellow writes, the task remains the same: "Life is a gift which death does not vitiate or void: faith is the acceptance, honoring, and rejoicing in the gift" (202). While I am no longer experiencing as severe of pain as I was, I, as we all do, still live under the conditions of work and fallenness in this world, and in these conditions, I attempt to honor the gift of life while no longer fearing death.
Stringfellow, William. 1970. A Second Birthday: a personal confrontation with illness, pain and death. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday (subsequently cited using page numbers only).
