WORKING IN HOMELESSNESS AND SPIRITUALITY: CALLING (PART 2)

Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash

After I graduated from university, I decided to return to where my family lived and put my degree in philosophy to good work by working in Trust and Company Administration, creating and maintaining tax efficient structures for high net worth individuals. Around this time, I started volunteering at a homeless shelter in the capital. In that environment, I sat and shared food and conversation with those that were in unsuitable housing, taking time to talk to them and hear about their stories and, as needed, put together beds for when emergency accommodation was required.

There was a huge contrast between the life that I lived during the day and the life that I lived at night. There is no need to be overly romantic about it, as there were enough moments in the drop-in centre that led to feelings of discomfort, disgust and anger – at statutory services that should be available, sensible decisions not being made by the guys, and at legislation not being passed. It was a time of unfolding and learning what the gospel meant in this context and to these people. I would always come away thinking through the situations that I had just faced, the conversations that I just had, and the people I had just met, wondering what God was doing in that place and with those people, and what the gospel could mean to them.

And I felt deeply unsettled by the work that I was doing.I didn’t feel entirely satisfied with it and it was affecting working relationships. Meanwhile the volunteering that I was doing was bringing so much more joy to my life. It was clear that God was speaking to me through the drop-in centre, but I couldn’t work out what was being said. To help guide my thoughts I started reading Gerard Hughes’ book God of Surprises which nudged me to consider how to incorporate Ignatian Spirituality into my everyday life. Conducting the daily examens helped me to discern where God was calling me at that time. It was clear that something was unfolding within the setting of the drop-in centre, where I could witness local churches coming alongside those that were in poor living conditions (if at all) and providing them with companionship.

So, I left my job and eventually began working in the drop-in centre. It was a fantastic but challenging place to work for numerous reasons. There would be the same mind-numbing jokes made as if it was the wittiest remark ever uttered. There were the times when people had questionable levels of hygiene. There were frustrations when housing, job, or recovery appointments led to no “success.” In and amongst that, the persistent prayer was for God to show himself in a new way,for God to speak in and amongst all of the chaos. I remember one night reading Henri Nouwen and just weeping at how gifted he was at seeing God’s work in L’Arche and the desperation to be able to see God’s work with the same clarity. I say this because frankly, in drop-in centres and night shelters, it is not always easy to see what God is doing.

After getting married, we moved to a new city and I began working for another charity with the mission to help churches house the homeless. It was an interesting process because it involved journeying with church groups, helping them to understand what it meant to house the homeless, and if they had that calling as a group. One of the things I learned with clarity in this context was that every church that I came across had gifts and resources that could bless others – even if they did not know it. There was one church that was predominantly a group of retired people. In those conversations, they asked what they could bring. What were they possibly able to offer? They hadn’t realised it, but between them they had an abundant resource that so many of us wish we had to give: time. What they had not realised they could offer lay in the quality of relationships that they could offer. So many of the people that I worked with were facing profound relationship breakdowns with partners, friends, and family. Their options for people that they could meet to talk to were severely stunted. 

An objection that was often brought up was about the quality of the relationships they might build. Why on earth would anyone want to talk to them? They had nothing in common. This was a fair point; it was a feeling that I faced when I first volunteered at the drop-in centre. I told them of the stories of relationships that I had built. Like how I realised that actually I had a lot more in common with the lads that would go to the drop-in – we made jokes and had banter about song titles by The Smiths that suited certain situations (“Big mouth strikes again” came up frequently). There was a valuable lesson that I had learned whilst there: in a world where people had turned away from them, the attendees really valued knowing that the volunteers in the drop-in remained there for them. They had been rejected from friends and family or had developed unhealthy relationships during this time, so they valued the simple presence of another person. Although they had favourite volunteers, they didn’t seem to care too much who it was that they would spend time with – they just valued the consistent presence of another. 

Since being ordained, I have been reminded that whenever you step into an environment of profound isolation, you see people value the presence of another. If we think it’s possible to find meaningful conversations with a person in a retirement home or in a hospital, we have every reason to believe that we can have such relationships with those who find themselves vulnerably housed too. The challenge is then not to find things that we have in common, but to be willing to approach those who we would not usually consider having mutual interests with and be willing to dig a little deeper to discover those shared interests.

There comes a point  when a church’s sense of calling to ministering to the homeless can only be affirmed or denied by stepping out and actually doing it. I remain convinced that every church is called to house the homeless in some way - how that looks may vary depending on congregation. The churches that I worked with made visible sacrifices so that they could house a person, spent time with them, and got to know them. Could this be a visual reminder of the gospel? That just as a church takes these steps - these sacrifices for other people - it is giving a glimpse of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection, enabling us to live our lives in communion with God. Can we be the church that visibly reveals what we believe through how we serve the most vulnerable in society?