Christ I love you
not because you descended from a star
but because you revealed to me
that man has blood
tears
anguish
keys
tools
to open the doors closed to light
Yes! You taught me that man is God …
a poor God crucified like you
and the one who is on your left on Golgotha
the bad thief
is God too!
These images from the Bible of home, homecoming and homelessness are complex rather than ambivalent, giving complementary value to those with homes and those without. The incarnation of Jesus illustrates a radical inversion of the concept that it is God who provides us with a home, as human beings learn what it means to be home to God, and so paradoxically, also come home to God. Similarly, the Church’s attitudes to poor and homeless people are complex, but have tended in the direction of providing much-needed practical help (shelter, food and so on) rather than being welcoming and inclusive to the insights of the marginalised within the Church itself. The theological parallel is a preference for systematic deductive theology over against an inductive, liberatory method which places poor people at its centre. This preference is also apparent in a reluctance to question theologically and politically the structural reasons for poverty and homelessness.1 By contrast, the reading of the Bible adopted here focuses on Jesus’ ideological challenge to the inequalities of his own culture. The disjunction between theory and practice described earlier is matched therefore by another disjunction: ecclesial practice has not followed biblical example. This is different from Nancy Eiesland’s analysis of biblical images as largely inimical to disabled people, but her desire to re-craft religious symbols is matched here by my suggestion that the old story needs to be told anew. This theology of homelessness opens up the possibility of a creative dialogue between the noisy Church and the silent poor.
Homeless people in this account have spoken of breakdowns of health and relationships, both as a cause and result of why they are without homes. Experiences from childhood and adolescence, and the discovery of sexuality have fed into these reasons, with crime, self-harm, substance abuse and mortality also apparent. A wide range of emotions coloured these experiences, including the deadening of feeling as a means of survival and as the result of drug-taking. Amid the darkness of fear, pain, anger, isolation and chaos, a faltering light of independence and love points to the return to a more orderly life. God is absent and present, and sometimes bizarrely so as in the case of the contextual Bible readers. The Bible is occasionally less of a sacred text and more of a lucky dip horoscope. The Church is treated warily and fondly, and also ignored. People have their own creeds and beliefs which they follow, with some tenuous links to a more traditional Christian faith. Their laughter sounds in the blackness as well as in the light of envisaging a new home.
The desire to read these stories alongside Christian theology, without incorporating them wholesale or blunting their sharpness, encourages a new reading of the old story. However, just as Eiesland was at pains not to create a new symbolic order, so it is open to question just how original this new telling of the old story may be. On the one hand, Barth says that even if God speaks ‘through Russian communism or a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub or a dead dog’ there is hardly a warrant for the Church to proclaim this;2 on the other, there is almost childish pleasure in Zipes’ examples of changed endings in folk tales. The rather meek maiden in the story of Rumpelstiltskin by the Brothers Grimm becomes in the late twentieth century a strident feminist: ‘“You’re crazy!” the miller’s daughter yelled. “I’ll never marry this horrible king. I’d never give my child away”.’3 Rayan’s theology of the dalit people contains a reworking of Matthew 23, the woes Jesus invokes against the Pharisees:
Woe to us who have ignored, even distorted Christ’s disclosure of the Fatherhood of God, and elaborately buried his vision of the family of God on earth. Woe to us who have solemnly introduced inequalities and master-slave relations where Christ had established a fellowship of brothers and sisters and co-learners, co-workers and comrades … Woe to us who close our eyes to the light and weave in the dark theories of pure and impure bloods and births while ignoring the obvious and vital, the values of justice and mercy and equality and freedom and friendship and faithfulness to one another.4
The endings of the parables of Jesus, as Herzog has shown, confound the astonished disciples, while Auerbach has argued that Christian literature itself challenges and overturns the norms of a high classical style. Theology’s point of departure is important, but never to begin with those on the margins risks further exclusion; some balance has been attempted here with contextual Bible study and reference to Nolan’s reading of the South Africa polity through a biblical lens.
There is no clear cut answer to where the boundaries of this story lie, but one approach is to look again at metaphor and symbol. A metaphor starts its life as appearing inappropriate and unconventional, becomes alive with a dual and tensive meaning, and dies dangerously when it becomes literalised.5 Symbols ‘grow organically in the soil of the unconscious and they die when they can no longer find sustenance there’.6 The God of surprises encourages risk taking with the nourishment of the unconventional if the Christian story is to be enlivened once more. Maria Clara Bingemer from a feminist perspective uses the image of the woman at Bethany pouring ointment on the feet of Jesus to show women’s theology competing in a male dominated world. She urges readers to have ‘the courage to pour out the perfume at someone else’s party’ as they develop new theological insights.7 Eiesland warns that there will be criticism for creating a chaos of different theological models, but offers the defence that ‘The body of God is becoming alive, vivified by an insurrection of subjugated knowledges’.8
The implied references here to the body which is incarnate and the Spirit which is alive focus back on the concept of Trinity for a final outline of a theology of homelessness. It is the Father who welcomes the Son’s return, it is the Son who makes his home in an uneasy humanity, and the Spirit who renews the life of the Church in the image of the poor. Gerard Loughlin explicitly links the doctrine of the Trinity with the concept of telling God’s story. The stories of Father, Son and Holy Spirit are linked to three ways in which God’s story is passed on. The story of God and the Hebrews, the story of God and God’s Christ, and the story of God and the Church recounted by the community of the faithful ‘are the reason for any talk of Trinity at all. It is the experience of God with God’s people, as Father, Son and Spirit that impels the Trinitarian naming’. The process of telling the story of God is a dynamic one which imitates the restless ordering of the Trinity itself in its life of new creation. The story of Israel retold by Jesus becomes a new story, a second story, which in its turn is retold by the Church to form a third story. The Church’s passion is to tell these other two stories together, which alone brings them to life. If ‘the Church is the community that is called to stage the Trinity’ then each storytelling is a singular performance which continues the event of God.9 In his book on the environment, community and ecology, Tim Gorringe anchors his theology in the persons of the Trinity:
In relation to the built environment we can say that God the Creator is the one who brings order out of chaos … God the Reconciler is the one who ‘breaks down the walls of partition’ … God the Redeemer is the author of all dreams and visions …10
To adapt the names for the Trinitarian God is not to turn away from God: on the contrary, it is to name God as the true subject of the different stories Christians tell, perform and make in their imagining of God. The re-enchantment of these ultimate symbols of Christian faith is therefore radical without being revolutionary.
However, to conclude a theology of homelessness with a description of the Trinity, even one which is favourably reworked, looks uncomfortably like a return to the systematic method just criticised. Some earlier remarks give part justification. Samuel Rayan talks about a latent theology of marginalised people which requires the theologian to make it public. Segundo remarks that not all images of God are helpful ones: Gerard Hughes’ Uncle George, and the rather limited range of ideas about God expressed in these interviews.11 The introduction of Contextual Bible Study and Nolan’s God in South Africa make a case for starting with established text rather than individual story, yet on balance, most emphasis here has been on the detailed stories of particular individuals. The experience of hearing and analysing these stories of homeless people has been the motivation for re-examining what both the Bible and the Church say. It is the sense that often there is little reciprocity between the official institution and the difficult lives of real people, that the pieces of the jigsaw are ill-matched, that prompts directly these suggestions about re-envisioning the Trinity. Equally, there is the irony expressed several times here that excluded as they are, it is in fact the poor who in practice evangelise those who have contributed (directly and indirectly) to their poverty. The God of Abraham, Isaac, Moses and Jesus demands that this inequality be redressed by offering as a gift another accessible way into the Trinitarian God.
As Leonardo Boff points out, ‘Christian faith has no image of God the Father’;12 yet in a reading of both Old and New Testament stories, the Father of Abraham and the patriarchs, and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is characterised by fatherhood towards people without homes. From the Hebrew slaves of the Exodus, to the exiled people of Israel, to the Jews who surrounded Jesus, to the Prodigal who dreams of home, all see God as the compassionate Father who provides ‘recognition and acceptance of the truth about ourselves and our ultimate environment (home)’.13 Yet if this compassion is characteristic of the Father, it must still be said that God the Father remains for ever a mystery. The concept of homecoming is one face of this mystery, for while there is a sense of home or homelessness, and some descriptors associated with both of these, yet the essence is still elusive. I offer two examples of this: from the writings of Oliver Sacks the neurologist, and from the novel Staying On. Sacks studies the recovery of patients from sleeping sickness and wants the reader to look beyond the diseased body to the diseased person:
all of us have a basic intuitive feeling that once we were whole and well; at ease, at home, at peace in the world; totally united with the grounds of our being; and then we lost this primal happy, innocent state and fell into our present sickness and suffering. We had something of infinite beauty and preciousness – and we lost it; we spend our lives searching for what we have lost; and one day perhaps we will suddenly find it. And this will be the miracle, the millennium … This sense of what is lost, and what must be found, is essentially a metaphysical one. If we arrest the patient in his metaphysical search, and ask him what it is that he wishes or seeks, he will not give us a tabulated list of items, but will say, simply, My happiness, My lost health, My former condition, A sense of reality, Feeling fully alive and so on. He does not long for this or that; he longs for a general change in the complexion of things, for everything to be all right once again, unblemished, the way it was.14
From a different perspective, Lucy Smalley is pictured seated on the ‘thunderbox’ adjacent to her bedroom in their bungalow in Pankot, India, mourning the death of her husband Tusker. They have stayed on in India after Independence. These are the final lines of the book:
but now until the end, I shall be alone, whatever I am doing, here as I feared, amid the alien corn, waking, sleeping, alone for ever and ever and I cannot bear it but mustn’t cry and must must get over it but don’t for the moment see how, so with my eyes shut, Tusker, I hold out my hand, and beg you Tusker, beg, beg you to take it and take me with you. How can you not, Tusker? Oh, Tusker, Tusker, Tusker, how can you make me stay here by myself, while you yourself go home?15
Both Sacks’ patients and the fictional Lucy desire to return home, to how it was, even when the past was only barely satisfactory or thousands of miles away as in Lucy’s case. There is some similarity here with one of Jon May’s descriptions of the nomadic lifestyle of homeless people: ‘Don’s movements might therefore be understood as articulating what we can call a ‘spectral geography’ as he continually returns to places that were once meaningful but which now contain only the ghosts of previous relationships’.16 The image of the innocence of the lost Eden remains deeply ingrained in the human psyche, and in Trinitarian terms is transferred to God the Father. It is the compassion of the Father to provide in Jesus a different way back home, for ‘no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him’ (Matt. 11: 27); not the old paradise refound, but the new Adam.
The birth of Jesus, the Word of God, subverts the expectations of both priests and kings. No longer is home to be made with God, but God makes home with us, Emmanuel. But the cycle goes around again as the stable and the exile in Egypt foreshadow the exclusion and homelessness which Jesus was to experience throughout his life. The cross is the paradox whereby he suffers most distance from home and yet brings homeless humanity back to the Father. The homelessness of God is not diminished by this journey for Jesus takes birth again and again with human beings who continue to crucify him, and are thereby able to return to the Father. Like the air raids of 1940:
Still falls the Rain –
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss –
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the cross.17
It is not only this cosmic cycle which shocks, Jesus is the Word who radicalises the word too. He unlocks the famine of hearing the word of the Lord (Amos 8: 11) by telling stories of everyday life, lulling the hearer into a false sense of security by sheer familiarity, and then overturning the tables of our expectation by showing what the Kingdom of God is really like. Barbara Hardy on the Sermon on the Mount explains that:
The strange but illustrative treatment of the salt, the light, and the pearls is only appreciated when it is easily and implicitly referred to our memory of the normal way of treating salt, light and pearls. The memory of accumulated ordinary experience joins with the narrator’s brilliantly bizarre invention to create the whole narrative in which salt, light, pearls and many other images are activated to instruct a humble and desperate audience in the ways of blessed righteousness and godliness.18
This return to the speech patterns and objects of daily life is the basis for the new religious literacy for which Anne Morisy calls. Speaking and living the vernacular implies a familiarity and a fearlessness with the ways in which ordinary people live, listening and observing respectfully especially if the environment is a strange one. It also means an openness to encourage and value the non-verbal communication to which Laurie Green refers, and which is central to Jenkins’ analysis of the Kingswood Whit Walk. It is also the return to home territory which Myers encourages the theologian to make. When non-verbal religious communication becomes more structured, it turns into the ‘apt liturgy’ mentioned earlier; that is, liturgy which is better connected to the reality of the lives it seeks to touch.
The radical storyteller also leads his hearers on an unfamiliar and eccentric journey through the city, enabling them to look through the eyes of the homeless people who inhabit it and map it differently. The homeless city looks alien in this perspective as the prime retail space of shopping therapy becomes threatening, as the regulated paths of the homeless journey become more recognisable, and as once rejected spots become infused with elements of home. This storyteller does not refuse the images attributed to him however bizarre: bogeyman, cannibal, fairground attraction. He asks simply that they promote human flourishing and better relations with the God he enfleshes.
Jesus, the homeless God, empowers too. The incarnation of the Word does not leave humanity where it is, God does not become seduced by the comforts and temptations of God’s new human home, but rather desires to transform the reality of the human person and the whole of humanity, ‘until we all attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature humanity, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ’ (Eph. 4: 13). The out-working of this desire in the life of Jesus is to tell stories of transformation to the women and men in the society around him. Jesus’ project is to build an inclusive community for those who are united by their suffering and exclusion within which there is the possibility of hope and healing. He reverses the rights of the powerful, so that it is the poor who inherit the Kingdom, receive satisfaction and go off laughing: the story of marginality becomes the story of entitlement.19
The impetus for such empowerment comes through the working of the Holy Spirit who can ‘make all things new’ (Rev. 21: 5). The call from the more radical interpreters of the gospel like Nolan and Leech is not for incremental change, but for a much sharper re-orientation of the Church towards the poor, even at the expense of its own unity. Poor and homeless people become the centre and the measure of the activities of the Church, for like individual Christians, the whole institution is enabled to tell a new story if it is first able to hear the stories of the marginalised. But its hearing, as Buber asserts, is so often impaired. The wax in many Christian ears is the centuries-old accretion of comfort and affluence, which the Church of England reports correctly identify as being at the heart of its own structures. The Holy Spirit which blows where it wills needs to carry on its breath the lives of homeless people if it is to unblock the hearing of a bourgeois Church. Hans Anderson’s story of The Emperor’s New Clothes at the start of this book recalls the entrenched interests which prevent reality being named, even when the main protagonist is himself aware of the threadbare nature of the story. It takes the innocence of one on the edge, a little child, to speak out loud what all have suspected but been too frightened to articulate.
The Spirit also punctures our ethical certainties, placing under scrutiny again the inevitability of late capitalism and all its associated powers and dominions. It allows a comparison between the moral hazard of not assisting distressed tenants and homeowners, and the moral deficit between how rich and poor are treated in the marketplace.
There are signs of hope that this is happening, even in some parts of Britain. As Boff says:
When the poor become conscious of their oppression, come together, organize their forces, throw over the taboos that held them in subjection, unmask the standards by which they were stigmatised, prophetically denounce those who kept them in chains … when they are filled with creative imagination and plan utopias of the reconciled world in which all will have enough to eat and be able to profit from the bounty of nature, then we can say: the Spirit is at work there, being the catalyst in a conflictive situation.20
The Spirit also breathes life into the two central images of Christianity. The birth of Jesus in a stable and the death of Jesus on a cross can be cleaned of their unhelpful patina and made to resonate again with their strange narrative. I hope it is possible to remove from the birth scene the away-in-a-manger imagery and memories of shepherd children in tea-towel headdresses, and to find again the surprise, the danger, the exclusion and the poverty of that birth. The many and well-publicised crises of refugees in the news media also find echo in the story of the flight into Egypt. The merit of the cross is that is it hard to sentimentalise it in the same way. Nevertheless the pietism which speaks of ‘Jesus who died on the cross to save me from my sins’ individualises the gospel to such an extent that any social and political impact is lost. Herzog gives the lie to this personalised view when he comments:
If Jesus was a teacher of heavenly truths dispensed through literary gems called parables, it is difficult to understand how he could have been executed as a political subversive and crucified between two social bandits.21
The cross as a place of utter loneliness, complete isolation even from God, where the experiences of human poverty and homelessness are starkly drawn together into a single event, still has the powerful possibility of drawing together Christians of different life experiences. The homeless God is also therefore the crucified God. This is no new symbol, but an attempt to allow an old Christian symbol to be fashioned in a way which provides mutual access to the worlds of both those with homes and those without. The re-crafting of these two symbols is some of the ground work which enables the second sign of hope to be revealed. This is summarised in the words of John Vincent who urges the change ‘from being a story-reader into a story-maker’.22 When this is applied to homeless people, this process affirms the movement from the passivity of being recipients of charity to the activity of being agents in the growth of a Church to and with the most marginal. It recognises that homeless people have something of value to say which both theological and sociological research has often overlooked.23
The last word in both Loughlin’s account of God’s story and Eiesland’s vision of a disabled God is to focus on the Eucharist. Loughlin’s on-going motif from Revelation of John eating the book (‘bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth’ Rev. 10: 8–10) becomes Eucharistic as the Word made flesh is consumed along with the divine logos of scripture.24 Eiesland shows how the Eucharist is a site for both inclusion and exclusion of disabled people, and finishes with a specially written Eucharistic Prayer.25 Duncan Forrester reminds us of the centrality of eating and drinking in the ministry of Jesus, and the offence that he caused by sitting at table with those who were ritually impure and excluded. Jesus told stories of great feasts where street people were invited because others refused to come, of a banquet where a younger son was welcomed and an elder brother sulked; he fed the multitude when those who had come a distance to hear him were hungry and it was late. The Last Supper was therefore not an isolated incident in an otherwise food-free narrative, but the culmination of the challenge of Jesus to codes of purity and pollution. The way in which Christians have responded to Jesus’ call for anamnesis have hardly reflected the open table which their leader promoted, with controversy over who could sit with whom part of Church history from the earliest days until the present. Yet the challenge goes beyond the Church to confront the inequalities of contemporary society too. Forrester writes:
Eating and drinking and the way they are arranged have a very central place in Christian faith and life, as in most other religious systems. The practice and the theology of the eucharist cannot be separated from its ethical content, and that is very centrally egalitarian. When Christians gather to celebrate the Lord’s Supper they not only present a challenge to racism, class and caste in the church, but very centrally to the inequalities of the world.26
For worship in this context to be authentic, whether Eucharistic or not, it might better reflect the theology outlined here. The Trinitarian God of homeless people finds concrete expression not simply in rituals of participation, but in the ordering of liturgical space and action which are inclusive rather than threatening. The Letter of James is quite specific:
My brethren, show no partiality as you hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. For if a man with gold rings and in fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, ‘Have a seat here, please’, while you say to the poor man, ‘Stand there’ or ‘Sit at my feet’, have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brethren. Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonoured the poor man. (James 2: 1–6)
So Liturgies of the Word include conspicuously the stories told in the Bible which value the absence of home as denoting the special presence of God, and allow room for those who have experienced homelessness to respond to these narratives in verbal and non-verbal (symbolic) ways. The stories of Jesus which underline the generosity of God to the poor and marginalised and the reversal of contemporary values in the Kingdom become prominent for all parts of the congregation. However, for those who are not vulnerable and dispossessed, it is the call of Jesus for discipleship and repentance which matters. Myers contrasts his social location in the middle-class as one of entitlement with his Christian discipleship which ‘represents my social dis-location’.27 For Liturgies of the Sacrament, an emphasis on the transitory nature of the Last Supper replicating the hasty provision of the Exodus Passover (Ex. 12: 11) shifts the perspective of the Eucharist from a comfortable meal with friends to a preparation for a journey. Those with no home to receive friends and little food to distribute are implicitly excluded from a ritual which can easily mimic a middle-class lunch party. On the other hand, the concept of offertory in which the ordinary things of the earth (bread and wine) are made holy, at the same time as those who offer them are blessed, gives access to a simpler ceremony in which the excluded can take an equal part.
Worship which visibly fails to overturn the exclusion of homeless people is reduced to the status of worship of the status quo or of the present idol of the market. It is not the worship of the God whose story Jesus tells and which Christians attempt to perform in the community of faith. So an annual Service for Homelessness Sunday which included no homeless people among its main participants becomes another traditionally patronising act of charity.28 In this way liturgy itself can become a site of struggle.
Liturgies of the Word and liturgies of the sacrament can be envisaged as food for the journey, nourishment for the creation of stories of hope and transformation. Viaticum is therefore required not only by those who face their final journey to God, but by all those who build new narratives of inclusion, and who have the courage to resist the temptation to build booths on the mountain of their transfiguration, and to follow instead the itinerant storyteller, Jesus the homeless God.
Many words have flowed from a reflection on why a chance encounter with Simon, a recovering narcotics user, should speak so distinctly of God. The desire to pursue this unexpected sense of holiness led to a theology of story. This was not simply a theoretical account of how and why poor people are the privileged storytellers of God, nor a comparison of different sociological studies of everyday life. A theology of story provides a sympathetic means to access ordinary lives, which respects both their triviality and their giftedness in the context of the Christian Trinity. Additionally, the lives of writer and reader are not allowed to stand completely apart from lives which are more microscopically examined. The critical tools employed here in particular respect of homeless people have uncovered certain mismatches between the stories recounted and what theory has proposed. In particular, while liberation theology speaks of privileged storytellers, the privilege still seems more weighted towards those who hear: poor people themselves are largely unaware.
Theologians with personal engagement and orientated towards praxis cannot be content to identify shortcomings without any attempt to provide remedies. This has encouraged a more profound examination of scripture and the Church, revealing a complex picture around the themes of home, homecoming and homelessness. The message of scripture which values the absence of home as part of Christian roots is only partly transferred to the practice of the Church. Churches and church-based organisations have been important partners in the relief of poverty, but the voices of poor people, in both suffering and recovery, have rarely been heard. With this in mind, the outline of a theology of homelessness which emerges from and honours the stories heard here is one way of asserting a proper appreciation of these life histories. The inclusion of remarks about appropriate liturgy is merely to scratch the surface of an application of such a theology of homelessness. Making theology real is more than simply recommending liturgical practice, but as a symbol for what the Church believes liturgy remains significant. It is in this context that negative images of homeless people can be balanced by a recognition of their strengths, and perhaps promote enough theological literacy to bring to light the hidden symbols of homeless Christianity.
1 See for example The Church Urban Fund’s 2011 report Tackling Homelessness Together: A Study of Nine Faith-Based Housing Projects. The summary includes very little that asks structural or ideological questions. Available at: http://www.cuf.org.uk/research/tackling-homelessness-together (accessed 28 May 2012).
2 Barth, Dogmatics, I.1, p. 60.
3 Zipes, Magic Spell, p. 180.
4 Rayan, Dalits and Women, pp. 135–6.
5 McFague, Metaphorical Theology, p. 41.
6 T.R. Wright, Literature, p. 140.
7 Cited in Andrew Bradstock, ‘Liberation Theology after the Failure of Revolution’, p. 103.
8 Eiesland, Disabled God, p. 105.
9 Loughlin, God’s Story, pp. 190–97.
10 Gorringe, Built Environment, p. 5. See also T.J. Gorringe, The Common Good and the Global Emergency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
11 ‘God was a family relative, much admired by Mum and Dad, who described himself as very loving, a great friend of the family, very powerful and interested in all of us. Eventually we are taken to visit “Good Old Uncle George”. He lives in a formidable mansion, is bearded, gruff and threatening. We cannot share our parents professed admiration for this jewel in the family. At the end of the visit, Uncle George turns to address us. “Now listen, dear,” he begins, looking very severe, “I want to see you here once a week, and if you fail to come, let me just show you what will happen to you.” He then leads us down to the mansion’s basement …’. Gerard W. Hughes, God of Surprises (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1988), p. 34.
12 Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1988), p. 165.
13 Navone, Story, p. 60.
14 Oliver Sacks, Awakenings (London: Picador, 1991), p. 29.
15 Paul Scott, Staying On (London: Granada, 1978), p. 255.
16 Jon May, ‘Of Nomads and Vagrants: Single Homelessness and Narratives of Home as Place’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 (2000): 753.
17 Edith Sitwell, ‘Still Falls the Rain’, in P. Levi (ed.), Penguin Book of English Christian Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 293.
18 Barbara Hardy, Tellers and Listeners (London: Athlone Press, 1975), p. 5.
19 Davey, ‘Being Church as Political Praxis’, pp. 66–7.
20 Boff, Trinity and Society, p. 208.
21 Herzog, Parables, p. 9.
22 John Vincent, Mark at Work (London: Bible Reading Fellowship, 1986), p. 18.
23 Boydell, ‘Narratives of Identity’, p. 36.
24 Loughlin, God’s Story, pp. 244–5.
25 Eiesland, Disabled God, pp. 118–19.
26 Forrester, Human Worth, p. 211.
27 Myers, Stone, p. 18.
28 In fairness it should be added that one service of this kind included words from homeless people. The same church, it was reported to me, hosted a very positive funeral liturgy for the death of a homeless person, where friends were allowed to speak of their friendship and sadness.