Homelessness: on the road to Theology

Why am I doing this – there are two reasons. One is Housing Justice’s engagement with ARCS (which is as one of the participant projects). The second reason goes right to the heart of what Housing Justice is about. Housing Justice was formed through the merger of the Catholic Housing Aid Society (CHAS) and the Churches National Housing Coalition (CNHC) in 2003 and then we merged again with UNLEASH (London Churches Action on Homelessness) in 2006. We are a national voice for churches on housing and homelessness issues and we provide practical support to churches that are engaged in work with homeless and badly housed people.

However, it is not, as you may have thought, the latter aspect that led to our involvement with ARCS and my presence here tonight. All three of our constituent organisations, but especially UNLEASH, have engaged in theological reflection about homelessness and housing. When Housing Justice was formed it was decided that this work, this responsibility, should be continued. So in our strategic plan we have tasks which include: “Speak with a distinctively Christian voice and develop our theological thinking” and “Resource others in the Christian community to speak authoritatively on housing and homelessness issues”. We are also tasked with building the capacity of churches and other groups to provide effective services to homeless and badly housed people, another piece of work which really should be underpinned by theological reflection.

Furthermore I am very conscious that the resources within denominations and other organisations for this sort of reflection and engagement have diminished substantially in recent years as funding has been cut and posts focussing on homelessness and housing have disappeared. (This is a process of attrition that is still underway with urban officers seemingly the next target, despite the current recession…). Thus Housing Justice as an organisation is concerned to foster engagement between theologians in academic and non-academic frameworks in relation to housing and homelessness, to support homelessness practitioners in theological reflection and to explore doing theology alongside homeless people. This is why, rather than being approached by the ARCS team, we made an approach to them.

So, Housing Justice has a history of theological reflection on homelessness and a responsibility to our members and to the wider Christian community to do this work. This background also means that I have been acutely aware of standing on the shoulders of giants like Ken Leech as I was preparing my words for this evening. And it relates to why I was pleased to have ‘road’ in the title of this lecture. I feel I have stepped out on to a path that has already been well trodden in some parts but where the way ahead is not quite clear, and where there is definitely a need to do some serious under growth clearing as well as some re-tracing of steps. My particular starting point this evening is an attempt to offer some thoughts and insights (and these are very much work in progress, another link to the idea of being on the road rather than having reached a destination) which are garnered from my own contact with homelessness.

I should make it clear that I believe that how we think about, talk about, and what we understand of, God are all shaped by our experiences as well as by age, gender, relationship history, nationality, ethnicity etc etc. So what I say may resonate with you, or it may not because your standpoint is not mine; but I can only speak from my particular context. Further, I am not trying to stand outside that context, to abstract myself from my experience, because I think that we human beings have been created to be experience processing engines and pattern matching organisms and that these are qualities which bring us closer to God and thus are useful theological tools. So this is a sharing of things that have been processed through the prism of my experience.

My own experience of homelessness is mostly second hand, taken from working with and alongside homeless people. However, I have been in the situation of walking away from a relationship and spending some time sleeping on friends’ settees, and as a family with three small children we ended up with my parents when there was a few weeks gap between rented properties.

So I have been amongst the hidden homeless, the largest group of homeless people in our country at the moment. There are more than 400,000 people in these sorts of situations, many of them young and often without family support. (In fact there is no accurate and up to date number for the hidden homeless. The figure everyone uses comes from some estimates made by the New Economics Foundation for Crisis in 2004. It includes people sleeping on sofas and floors, in cars and squats, and in the uncomfortable and insecure situation of being a household within a household. The number has surely grown significantly in the last five years…).

I have never myself slept rough but one of the reasons why I am in this line of work is because of the experience of being an overnight volunteer at the Wintercomfort night shelter in Cambridge. So I am not offering a theology from the experience of the 500 or more people who will be sleeping out on the streets across England tonight. Rather I am speaking of how close contact with people in these situations has influenced and affected me.

So, who are homeless people? What are their characteristics and condition? Well, there are different categories of homeless people, but the ones I am concerned with here are those mentioned above – street homeless and hidden homeless. That means they do not have a place they can call their own. No where safe and permanent where they can keep belongings, have some privacy or offer hospitality to others.

They are mainly male but by no means exclusively so. Their ages range from late teens to old age with a bias towards the younger end. Many of them (43% according to the Salvation Army study, Seeds of Exclusion) were emotionally abused as children. The same study found that more than half spend most of their time alone. They have few friends and limited contact with their families. If they have children it is quite likely that they have no contact with them. Many, but not all, have psychological problems, including drug and alcohol abuse and issues related to bereavement and relationship breakdown. A long term street homeless man who shared his story as part of our Voices from the Edge monologues project told us that he spent a lot of time walking around and this sense of being on the move seems to be a common characteristic even if people cover the same route day after day. Their physical health is often poor (and they struggle to get proper medical attention) and life expectancy is short – around 42 for a male rough sleeper.

One of the places where the condition of being homeless links with other theological reflection is in relation to pilgrimage. Now before I say the next thing I need to tell you something else about myself. I have to confess that I am a serial pilgrim. For more than thirty years I have spent Holy Week on the road with a large wooden cross and a mixed group of fellow pilgrims. So I am speaking from my experience of pilgrimage as journey rather than of pilgrimage as arrival and time spent at a shrine. As we walk on these cross carrying pilgrimages, even when we are on roads and passing through towns and villages, we become detached from ‘normal’ life. There is a strange mixture of freedom from cares and responsibilities (other than continuing to put one foot in front of the other) and a new state of dependence because we are dependent on others for food and refreshment, for places to stay, for toilet facilities and many other things. When I began to volunteer at the night shelter it was at once very clear to me that the condition that I voluntarily embraced for ten days each year was the (mostly) involuntary condition of our guests. For being without homes or (in the majority if cases) work, they were free of many of my own day to day responsibilities. Yet they were dependent on us volunteers, not just for somewhere to sleep but also for making cups of tea, for washing clothes, for switching the lights on or off… They were free but with hugely curtailed choices in life.

Others have written and spoken (and here I am especially indebted to the records of the UNLEASH theology workshops kept by Pat Logan) about homelessness as being a state of exile, or, in the terminology of the anthropologist Victor Turner, a liminal state. In this they have picked up not just the pilgrim state of walking and waiting (and seeking escape and oblivion) but also made a link between the waste land places to which the desert fathers and early hermits retreated. The urban jungle of the modern city is envisaged as a marginal space just as the desert was in the past. The homeless person is understood as someone who can be close to God because they are divested of possessions and the trappings of the material world; as someone who has the time and space for spiritual expression. So there is a strong link with one of the trademark spiritualities of the early Church. There are inferences here too of monastic practice and of contemporary contemplative spirituality with its clear rejection of twenty first century consumption and continuous communication. Sometimes this is accompanied by an idea that in order to be closer to Jesus we need to experience and share physical suffering.

I have said how research shows that many homeless people spend much time alone. They are often isolated both by their rejection of family and society and by being rejected by their family and by society. Again this can be linked to the situation of the contemplative. There is definitely some truth in all of this. However, there is also a big danger. The danger is that we romanticise the condition of homelessness, seeing rough sleepers as modern day noble savages, and then, possibly, that we support people in remaining homeless, remaining in a condition of suffering, rather than empowering them to change and to move on. Nevertheless by being alongside people who are living as exiles and strangers we can be aware of being in the presence of witnesses to something about the nature of God and of Jesus, without necessarily supporting or endorsing their ‘lifestyle’.

Next I want to pick up this idea about the witness of homeless people. I have found that I have learned several things about the life of Jesus through the presence, words and actions of homeless people.

So in the first place there is a witness to Jesus on the road. There is something, not an exact parallel, but something, about the life of a rough sleeper which is similar to the mix of freedom and dependence which Jesus and his disciples must have experienced on the road in Judea. I think this is in itself worthy of contemplation. Furthermore, in a talk to an UNLEASH group in 1991 Ken Leech spoke of an experience that many of us who have worked with homeless people will recognise; that in this work we become aware of Christ coming among us in the person of the homeless stranger. This was eloquently expressed by Thomas Merton in Raids on the Unspeakable. Merton said of Christ that “because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others for whom there is no room … with those for whom there is no room Christ is present in this world”. So sometimes, not always by any means, but sometimes, in soup runs, night shelters and drop ins, amongst the sweet tea and the cigarette smoke, we glimpse the person of Jesus.

Next I want to talk about witness to Jesus as servant. One of the ways in which we are called to follow Jesus is through service; whether service of the destitute as in Matthew 25 or through servant leadership as in John 13. Working with homeless people, especially in a night shelter, provides many opportunities to imitate Christ in this way. One of the reasons volunteers give for providing and serving food at soup runs and shelters is that it is a simple act that clearly does good. It is a physical act. The most profound act of physical service of this kind that I have performed is to wash and massage the feet of a homeless man. It was an intimate physical gift which comforted and restored, and it felt much more sacramental than the symbolic foot washing that takes place in many of our churches on Maundy Thursday.

To continue the Holy Thursday theme, the stories of homeless people (and they all have stories) often speak in a deep and painful way of being alone and struggling to face an inevitable, unavoidable agony. For me this has suggested a condition of being trapped in the garden of Gethsemane. It is a reflection which illustrates the importance of Jesus’ surrender, to both the will of God and to the arresting soldiers, and it seems to be that only by doing the former could he face the latter. There is so much going on in the Passion narrative that even after years of prayer and study, being alongside people who are fixed in one part of the story can change our perspective and provide new insights. Furthermore it is possible that sharing the story of Jesus’ agony in the garden can help those who have been unable to move beyond their solitary pain.

This brings me to the next point of learning. One of the mysteries, the difficult to explain bits, of the resurrection narrative is why Mary Magdalene does not recognise the risen Christ in the garden. Well I am fortunate enough to have met people who were homeless and are now housed, employed and securely settled in society. One of the talks in the UNLEASH archive spoke of people having an ‘expression of mature security’ which seems to me an excellent description of what is often more prosaically called ‘successful resettlement’. These people are physically changed and can be difficult to recognise at first sight. This is not only because they are now healthy and have overcome their addictions but also because there is a new light in their eyes (the light of hope perhaps?). These are people who have been resurrected, brought back from the dead like Lazarus. For me they are sacraments of the resurrection.

I warned earlier about the dangers of romanticising the condition of homelessness. However, I think that what is legitimate, is even good, to do is to explore the sacramental dimension of work with homeless people. In my description of washing the feet of a homeless man in a night shelter I alluded to a sacramental dimension to the experience. In another of the UNLEASH theology workshops Sr Lynda Dearlove, who is now Director of the Women@thewell project for street sex workers, gave a talk entitled ‘A consecrated cup of tea’. Lynda spoke of how only today is real for the homeless person and so people working with them need to enter into that today, making the immediate sacramental. When we glimpse the presence of Christ in the now of these encounters, whether foot washing, cups of tea or fragments of conversation, they do become the outward sign of an inner reality, allowing us to see how the presence of God infuses the world. That is a vision that can then inform and enrich participation in the more formal sacramental rituals of our churches.

To sum up, here I am, here we are, on the road with a theology, a theological understanding, informed by the experience of homelessness and of working with homeless people. For me the most important insights to take away are about openness to seeing God in all our encounters and about recognising the vital place of surrender in our relationship with God. To go back to the agony in the garden again, it seems that true progress is impossible for any of us unless we make the step of giving up control to God.

I want to end with a prayer. The words are from Thomas Merton again, but altered so that I can speak for us all, housed and homeless alike:

Lord God,
We have no idea where we are going.
We do not see the road ahead of us.
We cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do we really know ourselves,
and the fact that we think we are following your will
does not necessarily mean that we are actually doing so.
But we believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And we hope we have that desire in all that we do.
We hope that we will never do anything apart from that desire.
And we know that if we do this,
You will lead us by the right road
though we may know nothing about it.
Therefore we will trust you always
though we may seem lost and in the shadow of death.
We will not fear, for you are ever with us,
and you will never leave us to face our perils alone.
Amen

(Thomas Merton)

Alison Gelder
3 June 2009