A story of a family who lost their home
About six years ago a man came into our charity’s Support Centre asking for help. He was about to be evicted from his home, and he didn’t know what to do. After a short chat we learned that he had three children and his partner living at home, and they only had days before they would all be on the streets. He told us that they were being evicted because he had a mental health condition, that he’d had a psychotic episode and had smashed the flat up. Now the landlord wanted them all out, and that was that. When that day came around we helped the family to speak with the local council about their situation and were told that they had made themselves “intentionally homeless” because of the damage caused, which meant that they wouldn’t be entitled to be re-housed.
The whole family had been sitting in a room in our offices in Wycombe, England all day while we were making phone calls and trying to sort something out. The kids were fairly small and were drawing pictures and having some snacks we’d given them. They were, to some extent, oblivious to the seriousness of the situation. As I sat with them, I found myself reflecting on the fact that these kids hadn’t done anything wrong, they just needed a safe home. This man’s partner hadn’t done anything to deserve being made homeless either, and, to make matters worse, the man himself was struggling with an illness. My thoughts then moved on to another level: Why do we even have to grapple with the questions of whether people deserve housing or not?
Why the past is all about the future
I’ve been reading quite a few history books lately. I’ve had a plan to read a book about every period in British history, from the earliest times right up until the present day. Whilst reading them I keep thinking that history books aren’t really about the past; they’re about the future. This may sound odd, but nothing we can do, say, or write in the present has any impact on the past. Things we do, say, and write can only have an impact on the future, whether that’s lessons learned, a deeper understanding to allow us to make wiser decisions henceforth, or just reflection on what kind of trajectory we seem to be on as a society. I think looking back at creation can be a bit like that too. While it’s interesting to try to understand what happened when the universe was formed, those events have passed. What matters now is what impact a Christian theology of creation could have on the way we’re going to live our lives, both individually or collectively.
Creation ex-nihilo, what is it and what can it tell us about homelessness?
The Christian doctrine of creation ex-nihilo was first fully “fleshed out”, by Augustine of Hippo who lived 354AD to 430AD in what is modern-day Algeria. It can be summarized in a simple statement: “We believe that God created the universe from nothing.” But it’s surprising just how much can be drawn out from that!
If God created the universe from nothing then he can’t have had to depend on anything within the universe to do it: he did not require any help from the things which he created. If God doesn’t depend on us, our existence is therefore completely dependent on him. His existence could be described as “necessary” in a way that ours is not. If we are not necessary to God’s existence, he must have chosen to create us. That seems to be where our claims that people have inherent value stems from, that God created us out of choice. He decided to bring us into existence. He desired to do so.
The existence of the created world is also finite, whereas God’s existence is infinite. We are bound by time and space, while God is not. For me, when I reflect on this and keep in mind the story about the homeless family I started off with, a picture begins to emerge of a humanity which is vulnerable, has needs, whose existence is dependent on them being met, and yet has also been brought into existence by loving choice and is, therefore, precious. This sums up the nature of our “creaturely existence” rather well.
Sin as a failure to recognize our true, created natures
This is also where a consideration of sin needs to come in. If we take the view that sin is a failure to live in right relationship with each other and with God, then perhaps an element of sin is a denial of our true natures, a failure to recognize each other’s creaturely existence. Creatures are needy, dependent, fragile, and flawed.
How ‘home’ conceals our creaturely existence and homelessness over-exposes it
When people who are housed have arguments at home, or show love in intimate relationships, it’s behind closed doors. When people who are housed need to use the bathroom. they usually have a room they can go into with all the facilities they need, and a lockable door for privacy. When people who are housed are tired after a long day and want to grab some snacks and zone out in front of the TV, they can usually do it without having to apologize to anyone. People are often at their most creaturely when they’re at home, whereas in their public lives most of their basic needs have been met in advance; they don’t have to argue, kiss, defecate, cry, eat, or wash in front of the world.
Homeless people do. If they are going to do these creaturely things, they’re either going to do them in public, or, at best, in a place where their presence is merely tolerated. Not in a place where they get to just exist unapologetically. Housed people, who are not used to seeing so much of this on display, are at risk of seeing themselves as less creaturely, less finite, less needy, and less flawed. On the other hand, homeless people are at risk of being seen as especially creaturely, especially finite, especially needy, and especially flawed.
The concept of home is of a safe place where one can exist unapologetically. When the homeless family I mentioned earlier was evicted and no one would help them, they faced a situation where they would not be able to meet their basic needs, where, ultimately, they had, as finite creatures bound by space and time, no place in which to exist. In a modern society where every scrap of land belongs to someone and where every place has its purpose, homeless people have to eke out an existence on the streets, in buildings which aren’t meant for them to live in, and temporarily stay with people who are willing to put up with them.
The spatiality of rights, particularly the right to life
In our modern western context, we often use the language of rights, sometimes aspirationally, and sometimes as a minimum legally enforceable standard. Homeless people do not have a place where they have a right to exist. It’s easy to imagine a “right” as a kind of floating concept, but I now realize much more fully that all rights have a spatial element than when I first started doing this work. All rights have to be enjoyed and experienced somewhere. The right to life, as the basis of all rights, cannot exist in any meaningful way if in every place you put your body down to rest, or any place you attempt to meet a creaturely need, you get asked to move on. A society which leaves some people with nowhere to “be,” whether intentionally or not, denies people’s true nature and relates to those people wrongly. As Thomas Aquinas may have put it, this is not in accordance with the eternal.
How should this change the way we treat homeless people?
So, if we were to try to move our society more into accordance with the eternal, what would that mean? It would mean reforming the way we deal with homelessness and housing issues. Traditionally, a lot of the methods for providing support for homeless people have been focused on trying to modify an individual’s behavior. The individual has lost work, faced abuse, became ill, or lost a long-term relationship and now they’re hurt, angry, and trying to work out how to survive. They may be depressed or anxious and have lost their sense of self-reliance and belief in themselves. The response from many charities and people seeking to help has generally been (and I’m being deliberately a bit provocative here) to attempt to fix the individual in order to make them worthy of having a home again.
I want to suggest, after 16 years of working to tackle homelessness, and 3 years on a theology degree, that there is quite a good theological basis for saying that we should flip this around. It’s true that many people who are homeless in our society often have a whole range of other issues, such as mental health struggles and substance misuse issues they’re struggling with which have both contributed to and been caused by their homelessness. We should provide people the housing they need first—not as something they have to earn, but as a right. We should remember that while we are all created as finite, needy, and creaturely, we are also all equally loved by God. We should remember that leaving people in a state of homelessness denies this. It makes people who are housed appear to be less finite (perhaps even closer to godliness) because they are able to conceal much of what makes them human, and it makes homeless people appear to be something less than human, with less value. It also puts them in an impossible position where they have no settled and stable place to call home, no place to enjoy their simple right to exist. So, to remedy this, along with providing such people with housing (a place where they can experience relative safety, and not have to deal with the very real horrors of homelessness) they will have a place to put their lives back together. The fact is, that for them to effectively deal with addiction issues, to recover from mental and physical health issues, and to restore previously broken relationships, they need a place to call home.
We, as a society, should say that they are worthy of a home and of dignity because of who they are. Because they were created in such a way that they need these things and that they are loved and valued by God, irregardless of what they have done.
A final story
I’ll finish with another story. We had another client who had been coming to us for help for years. It was far from easy. He would come into our Support Centre in terribly bad moods and we would repeatedly end up having to ask him to leave. He would come to stay in our night shelter and be incredibly demanding, even aggressive, and fairly regularly storm out when things didn’t go the way he wanted. We recognized that he was a grown man, but we also had the reality of the situation to contend with. We wanted to get as many people off the streets and safe from the freezing cold winter nights as possible. To do that we needed to have certain set rules, just to keep a sense of order in the place. This man found that really difficult, but we persisted and persisted, knowing that we were literally his last resort. He had no access to benefits (welfare) in the UK due to his immigration status, and he was too ill to work. He had spent years on the streets, and he had been told countless times to move on—not to sleep in this stairwell, or not to loiter on this bench, and even asked to leave places he went for help because of the way he behaved. This doesn’t mean everyone should have just tolerated his aggression, but seeing this from his point of view, he clearly felt unwelcome everywhere. Eventually, when the Covid-19 pandemic started, he was offered a place in a bed & breakfast, for his own safety. The usual concerns about eligibility for benefits in the UK were put aside. The usual questions asked of such individuals, about whether he was sufficiently engaging with support offered, and all the other terms and conditions, were also put aside. We saw this as a clear public health emergency and we just had to get people off the streets. We didn’t know how he’d manage in an accommodation without having very much direct support.
To our surprise (and we really learned something here), this man got on brilliantly. He hasn’t bothered anyone else in his accommodation, has been working part-time, and now, with some help from our advocacy team, he’s got his immigration status in the UK resolved. Things are starting to move forward for him, and I enjoy a chat with him when I see him in town. This period of stability and dignity is working for him. He’s no more or less perfect than anyone, and if we had started out from the perspective of trying to work out if he deserved a home, someone might have successfully argued that he did not. Had he helped himself enough? Had he sometimes been rude to people who tried to help him? Should he have returned to his home country?
I think the answer to all of these questions, in terms of whether he deserved to have somewhere to experience his right to life, is emphatically that they’re irrelevant. This man deserves somewhere to live because he is a person—created by God, loved by God, and a person who is finite, whose existence has to happen somewhere and who has needs just like the rest of us. These needs ought to be fulfilled with a bit of dignity. This is not a magic formula, or an appeal for the government to solve these problems for us. The way this works out practically will be different in every context. But the fact that everything seemed to just fall into place for this guy when he was offered a place without all the usual strings and conditions, to me, feels like evidence that this just might work if we dared to try it for everyone who is homeless.
James Boultbee, CEO of Wycombe Homeless Connection, has been working with homeless people since 2005 having founded a charity, worked as a volunteer, a placement student and a support worker in various different settings, and in more recent years has been leading our work at Wycombe Homeless Connection. He has a Certificate in Supporting Homeless People and graduated from the Clore Social Leadership’s Emerging Leader Programme. When not at work he likes to play the drums and go walking in the countryside.