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Anna Rankin

From the director: Finding ourselves in the City
David W Porter

Traveller, the road is made by walking it
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The Word made Flesh: A Sign and Foretaste in Limerick
Peter McDowell

Comment: The Architecture of Faith
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The Word made Flesh: Down and Out in Dublin
Peter McVerry

The Word made Flesh: Cork Methodist Church, Ardfallen
Laurence Graham

The Word made Flesh: Reflections from the Maiden City
Pat Storey

Cathedral Quarters: Interviews with Rev Dr Houston McKelvey and Very Rev Hugh Kennedy
Anna Rankin

Review: Journey Towards Holiness
Claire Martin

Economics and the economy: what are they for?
Tony Weekes

Bible Study: Beyond Silver Coins
Glenn Jordan

Reflection: The 'F' word
Celine Lefebvre

Review: Christianity, Climate Change and Sustainable Living
Ethel White

Difficult Conversations: Looking for God in the City...
Lynda Gould

New Resource
New Loyalties
Divided Past: Shared Future

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I am a Jesuit priest, working with young homeless people in Dublin. I began this work in 1974, when I was ministering in the inner city of Dublin and there discovered a small number of homeless children. I set up a small hostel in 1979, believing that this would be a brief interruption to my more traditional ministry to young people. However, the problem of homelessness began to grow very rapidly at that time and I eventually opened three further hostels for both children and homeless adults.

THE WORD MADE FLESH:
Down and out in Dublin

PETER McVERRY

WHEN THE DRUG PROBLEM hit Dublin and many homeless people were coming to us with addiction problems, we opened three further residential drug treatment centres. What began as a small and temporary response to an emerging problem of homelessness has developed into a structured response to a major problem of our day.

People sometimes ask me why I, as a priest, am running hostels for homeless young people. “Why don’t you leave that to the social workers and do what you were ordained to do?” To answer that, let me explain a little about the experience of homelessness.

The hardest part of being homeless is not sleeping rough or in hostels, it is not being hungry or cold during the day, it is not being bored with nothing to do – bad and all as that is. The hardest part of being homeless is knowing that if you disappeared off the face of the earth – nobody would even notice, never mind care. You are of no importance, no value, your life has no significance for anyone else. You have totally lost your dignity. If you are homeless in the Republic of Ireland, now the second wealthiest country in the world, the message you are being given, 24/7, is that you are just not of sufficient worth for anyone to bother providing the resources or doing anything about your homelessness.

So my reply is, “Jesus came to tell us that God is our parent and therefore each human being is a child of God and has the dignity of being the child of God.” The dignity of every human being as a child of God, then, is an integral part of the revelation of Jesus, the Word of God.

Being a priest for me is to preach the Word of God. If we say with our lips that everyone has the dignity of being a child of God, then we have to try and ensure that that dignity is affirmed in reality. Otherwise our words are meaningless, indeed hypocritical. Dignity then defines the relationship between our faith and our work for justice.

Hence, while in our work with homeless young people we do indeed give people a bed, food, and clothes, what we are really trying to do is to give them the message that they are just as important, just as valuable, as any other person. We are trying to give them back their sense of their own self-respect, their dignity. If we are not giving them that message, we may as well pack up and go home, because the rest isn’t worth it. Affirming their dignity in our work and relationships with homeless people and seeking to have that dignity affirmed in the political, social and economic decisions that are made by our society and on its behalf, is to preach the Word of God.

People sometimes ask whether we talk to them about God or teach them to pray or to go to Mass. And the answer is “No”. One young homeless man, who used drugs, once said to me, “The very idea that there might be a God, depresses me.” I am used to young people telling me that they don’t believe in God. But this was going one step further. I came to realise what he meant – he believed that he was unlovable, that he was of no value, not worth caring about. That was the message he was getting again and again from the way society treated him. And he had internalised it; he believed it was true. So he says to himself, “If there is a God, God could not possibly love me, or value me, or bother caring about me.” And he says to himself, “It’s bad enough going through life believing you are no good, but to go through eternity believing you are no good – that is too much!” So for him the good news, the gospel, was that there was no God!

He taught me that you can’t believe in a God who loves you – the only God that exists – if you do not love yourself. God, for him, was a judge, who would only condemn him. And he did not want to believe in such a God. Nor would I want him to believe in such a God because the God who condemns does not exist. Wasn’t that what Jesus was trying to say? He came to the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the sinners and the lost, who believed that God would condemn them, and he told them of a God who loved them – not so much by the words he spoke but above all by his actions, by the way in which he treated them with love, respect and dignity. His actions gave witness to the God, whom his words revealed.

By giving dignity to young homeless people, by treating them with love, respect and dignity, we are revealing to them the God who is love. We are giving them the possibility of believing in a God who loves them. They do ask about the God I believe in, because they know that God is the motivation in my life, and they are curious about a God who leads me to treat them in that way.

So before we can talk to them about the God who is, we have to demolish the false ideas and images they have of God, the God who judges, who condemns – a God shaped in the image of the society they live in. Those false images were built up over many years; they can only be broken down over many years, through their experience of being loved, respected and valued by the disciples acting in God’s name.

PETER MCVERRY is a Jesuit priest whose campaigning for and involvement with troubled young people has made him one of the most outspoken Catholic voices in Ireland today. His book The Meaning is in the Shadows, in which he reflects on his experiences of working with those pushed to the margins of society, is published by Veritas Publications (2003).

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