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Homeless

“Foxes have holes, and birds have nests,
but the Son of Man has no place to lie down and rest.” — Matthew 8:20

Homeless Filipinos

Many families throughout our country have lost their homes and loved ones as a result of the series of natural calamities that visited our country. This is not to mention the continuing armed struggle in the countryside that forced families to abandon their homes as well as the demolition of shanties of urban poor squatting in public lands. Whether we like it or not, we have what we call internal refugees in our land, people who have nowhere to lie down and rest.

We celebrate during the advent and Christmas season God’s coming in Jesus Christ to share our human situation. As a child, Jesus and his family suffered the loneliness and deprivation of being uprooted from their homeland. They became refugees in Egypt due to King Herod’s attempt on child Jesus’ life. In his lifetime, Jesus felt the sting of parental disapproval; misunderstood by those closest to him; betrayed, denied, and abandoned by his own friends; tortured and a victim of judicial lynching.

In Matthew 8:18-22, Jesus expresses the bitter anguish of homelessness. He has nowhere to lie down and rest. Jesus is like those families in our country and elsewhere who are seeking for a shelter, a place to lie down and rest.

We realize more and more that hunger and homelessness require more than individual acts of compassion. Malnutrition and inadequate housing is not simply the result of the lack of food supplies or not enough wood and concrete to build houses. Many families lack food and shelter because of the failure of our political and economic systems to appreciate the priority and urgency of human need. Thus, in our nation today there are increasing numbers of families who have nowhere to lie down and rest like Jesus Christ our Lord.

We may ask, what does it mean to be homeless? This question can be best answered by looking into what a home is all about. Basically, a home is a shelter, a place to be, and a network of relationships. Not to have a home means not to have access to one or more, perhaps all three, of these essential ingredients of a home.

Home’s essential ingredients

Let’s take home as a shelter. Shelter is one of our most basic needs. The Bible abounds with references on how God shelters us (Ps.61:3). For thousands of years, human beings in every climate have demonstrated the elemental place of shelter in human life. Without shelter, the excesses of nature are too powerful for human frame to bear. The right to shelter therefore is a fundamental human right.

When we provide a roof and a warm place for homeless families or when we try to alter our society’s priorities so that affordable housing is on top rather than at the bottom of the list, we believe we shelter our Lord himself.

Moreover, home is also a place to be. In addition to walls and a roof, home is the place we lie down to rest, recuperate, and orient our selves after the inevitable jangling and dislocation of the day. The physical location of a home can change. For centuries, the Gypsies and other nomadic or wandering peoples have demonstrated that where home is can change often. But Gypsies are not homeless people. They too return to a place, however temporary, from which they can look out on the confusion and unfamiliarity of the world with some degree of security.

We may have noticed how we need to transform a new and strange place into something like home. Without a place to be, we can be swept away in the swirl of life. To have nowhere to lie down and rest means more than not having a roof. It means not having a place to be. To have such a place, however simple or small, is a basic spiritual need, in the same manner as protection from cold is a basic physical need.

Furthermore, home is also a network of relationships. It is, for most of us, a set of relationships always changing to some extent as death and birth. The coming and going of children, and other factors alter the pattern. But still, home is where the heart is, or as a folk saying goes, a home is “where they have to take you in when no one else wants you”.

Home refers to that basic knot of human bonds without which human life becomes something less than human. To be homeless therefore means not to have that network or not having the shelter and the place that nourishes it and makes it possible. The right to be a part of a human community is a basic right as anyone could think of. It is a right that is integral with the right to a home.

God with us

This is why we believe that homeless families are being deprived of a God-given right. Utterly central to the Christian faith is the assertion that Jesus Christ died so that we might live. As one of the Ancient Church Fathers puts it, “He became what we are that we might become what he is.”

Jesus Christ our Lord suffered under the pain of homelessness. He shuddered with the cold. He had no place to call his own. And at the most critical point in his life, his network of relationships broke and he died without his friends.

Could we say then that Jesus Christ our Lord became homeless so that we might be sheltered? That he wandered in strange streets that we might have a place? That he died alone and rejected that we might become a part of a community that bears us up when things go wrong? If we can, then we must also recognize that God created every human family to find the same fullness, that God’s love reaches to the loneliest, most forgotten, and most destitute.

We truly believe that in building a shelter, clearing a place, and mending a network of relationship for families deprived of their homes, we entertain angels in disguise. For in as much as we do it for one of the least of these, we do it for Jesus Christ our Lord himself (Mt.25). #

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