A Spirituality of Homelessness

Part 2: Discovery

You can read Part 1 of this article here

“When you are prepared
To lose everything
You are on your way
To manage everything.”

T. D. Lakha Lama, Tibetan Buddhist Teacher

After living at the homeless hostel for a while, I started looking for somewhere that might nurture me spiritually. One day I came across a centre run by a Christian minister that offered rented accommodation. From its description it seemed very spiritually open. I was hopeful. I got a reply from the vicar suggesting we meet up to discuss if they could accommodate me.

When I got there, I was met by the Reverend Alston* who ushered me into the living room. He explained his wife was feeling unwell but would be joining us later. We started talking about my situation and the conversation seemed to be going well. He seemed an amiable, slightly unworldly gentleman who wanted to be helpful, at least in principle. Then his wife came in and the atmosphere changed. She complained about being ill and seemed angry. She subjected me to a cross-examination which became increasingly hostile. Perfectly innocent details of my life were viewed with great suspicion. My hairstyle (I had a ponytail then) would cause problems with the neighbours: they would think I was a criminal.

At this point the vicar made his one and only intervention, vainly protesting that this was unfair. But she was not to be put off. Gathering steam she launched herself into an attack about my application. She had, she told me, good students staying at the centre, not just anybody. Presumably this was meant to imply that they were not to be contaminated by mixing with the likes of me. But she hadn’t finished. “What you need,” she angrily declared, “is a hostel, not a home!” At which point she erupted into a fit of coughing and left the room.

I stared silently at the floor not knowing what to say or do. I was so shocked by her hostility towards me that I went numb. Then I asked Jesus inwardly for help and I found the words to say that I wanted to leave. Reverend Alston went off into the next room where I could hear him having an agitated conversation with his wife. I felt all my social clothes had been stripped from me, layer by layer, in the course of her angry tirade and I was left naked. I wasn’t fit to be with others. I wasn’t fit to live in a home. I was a nobody. Everything was laid bare.

And yet at that moment I felt - more strongly than I have ever felt in my life - the presence of Christ. It was as if the entire room was filled with light. The Christ was with me when she returned and said maybe I would like to come back in the spring and work for them; and with me when I told her I felt insulted and rejected. And I felt the presence of Christ on the train back even though I was feeling very upset.

Sunlight bursting through clouds

When I got home, everyone was gathered round having supper and I told the story of what had happened to me. I knew they had all experienced this sense of rejection at one time or another in their lives and they were very supportive.

Over the following days and weeks I thought about what had happened to me and why. This was important because although the incident with the vicar and his wife was very upsetting, it was also potentially an immensely valuable one. If I simply rested on the surface of the event, I could see myself as the victim of some unprovoked hostility and prejudice. With compassion, I could also see a sick woman at the end of her tether lashing out in her anger at the one person that she perceived to be below her, however wrong that was.

But she also acted as a Divine instrument. Through her behaviour she removed the last remaining props to my sense of being who I was simply because I had a job, a home, a place in society. For without being consciously aware of it, all these things had given me a sense of being somebody. In the course of my travels I had let go of all these things and now someone had told me that made me a nobody. Yet at that moment in Christ I had truly become somebody. Stripped of the last vestiges of attachment to ‘respectability’, I had become myself. I was that much freer to do my work, as it was that much easier for the Spirit to work through me. Now I could make of my life what I willed. The social slate was wiped clean.

What this incident serves to illustrate is that so much of spiritual evolution is about learning to see things differently. In dumping their emotional garbage over me, the vicar and his wife provided the materials I needed for a moment of awakening in my life when I felt the presence of Christ. What I went through was a very difficult but also an incredible liberating experience and I am grateful for it. No one likes feeling the victim more than me but if I can get beyond that, I can learn so much as I turn the situation to my advantage.

At the end of my travels...

In the years that followed, I returned to work but set boundaries to limit the pressures I was under and generally I tried to take more care of myself. The sense that I had at the start that I would never be secure in my home has left me. Insights I have had over time have given me an understanding of where my sense of homelessness came from.

Group of people in silhouette around a campfire

The experience also deepened my sense of shared humanity. Living in a hostel for the homeless, I gradually noticed I had crossed an invisible line that separated me from the rest of society. In other people’s eyes, I seemed somehow to cease to be a fellow human being, someone with a history, with thoughts and feelings and all the things that make up an individual character. Instead I became part of a collective entity, “the homeless”. For some people that meant I was a social problem. For others I was an object of charity or to be pitied. In any event I was not of their world. I have never forgotten that experience and from it the need to always recognise our common humanity in each other has stayed with me.

By Simenon Honoré

*Names have been changed to protect the identities of the characters in the story.

Any views expressed are not necessarily those of Spirit of the Rainbow as a whole.

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