| May 17, 2009 | To Be Without a Home Reverend Harold Munn |
Thank you so much for the honour of inviting me to be with you today.
Vicky is 25 years old. When she was 17 she got in trouble with the police, and since then her behaviour has resulted in nearly 250 confrontations with the police – that's an average of having an incident resulting in police action every ten days, year in and year out for the past eight years. These aren't all minor infractions – they arise from significant criminal activity including robbery, possession of stolen property, break and enter, possession of a weapon, possession of break and enter instruments, theft from motor vehicles, assaults, assaulting police, obstructing police officers, theft, breach of various court orders and calls to the police by people wanting her off their property. She's a pretty hopeless case. And getting worse.
Yes, it got worse. In nine months recently, she was in trouble with the police on average every three days. She was stealing from cars and breaking her probation orders, and being reported for suspicious activity. Every three days for nine months.
If you've been downtown in your community, you've probably seen Vicky. You know the one. You didn't know her name, but by her appearance you probably already guessed something about her life-style. Maybe, like me, you've had your car broken into, perhaps by Vicky. Maybe, like me, you've called the police on her because she was hanging around, acting suspiciously and making everyone feel very uncomfortable. Now you know at lot more about her, and how she's affected the lives of an enormous number of people for the worse. She's one of those people that cause the chaos and fear in downtowns, who make it impossible to go outside safely at night. Vicky is the nightmare of everyone who has teen-age kids.
In April a year ago, an ACT team made contact with Vicky. Assertive Community Treatment teams (ACT teams) are teams of four or five professionals working on the streets, each member specializing in different aspect of the services homeless people need to get into a stable way of life. Typically a team would have a street nurse, an addictions counsellor, a housing placement officer, perhaps a psychiatrist, and an employment officer. Previously, if a homeless person needed to get help they would have to make multiple appointments, two weeks ahead in multiple government buildings. An absolutely impossible task if you sleep on a sidewalk. ACT teams have changed all that – the team goes out on the street as a group and interacts with homeless people where they are.
The ACT team persuaded Vicky to move off the street into basic housing. Immediately her behaviour improved. During the entire month of April police were called only three times because of her. And it got better. In July last year there was only one call to the police because of Vicky. And it got even better than that. In the past ten months Vicky had only one contact with the police. And guess what that was? Her only contact with police in the past ten months was when Vicky called the police to complain about someone else's suspicious activity!
Vicky is 25. You've probably seen her in the downtown. She's that young woman who looks not very well-off, but alert, cleanly dressed and reliable. The sort of person you'd feel fine about hiring to do your gardening. Vicky has been given her life back, and the rest of us have been given our security back. Because there are skilled and deeply caring professionals working on the streets as a team, and because it's government policy to hire ACT teams.
While it is a true story in every detail, I haven't been entirely truthful about one fact. Vicky isn't her real name. Her official designation is Case #39. And because we respect her with the respect we would want for ourselves, that isn't even her real case number. She has the right to her privacy, and not to have prying eyes treating her as a case. She is a real person and deserves our enormous respect for the immense changes she made in her life when she had housing, support and respect.
Because we are a community of faith, we need to make the contribution of spirituality to the world. And we need to understand homelessness in the context of spirituality.
There are three ways in which homelessness is a spiritual issue.
First, there is the way we feel at home in the universe. When I was a small boy I was enthralled by Science Fiction novels – but disturbed by the fact that the universe seemed a most unfriendly place – space could kill you if your space suit sprang a leak. But now, with a more scientific understanding, we realise that it took the universe 13 billion years to be ready for us – in a sense, through evolutionary processes, the universe has emerged us, and we have a sense that we are very much at home here. Our modern concern with whether there may be intelligent species on other solar systems is a way in which we long to think that intelligence, and love, are present throughout the universe. The more extra-terrestrial beings we find, the more we are all at home in a universe which seems to sprout intelligence. We long to find those other beings because then we won't be a freak accident in a pitiless universe – we will truly be at home here. And in our concern about climate change we realise that this planetary home is valuable beyond imagining. Being at home in the universe is the basic spiritual experience.
Then there is a personal spiritual experience of homelessness. Every one of us has had an experience of deep loneliness. When I was a small child I was sent away to live with another family so I could have better schooling. It was a very lonely experience, and in my grief I prayed to God that God would transport me, just for a minute, back to my home hundreds of miles away. God never did. But now I understand the grief that homeless people have when they have no home, and how much they desire just a moment of happiness, perhaps through drugs, to escape from that pervasive grief of having nowhere that they are at home. But all of us experience homelessness – perhaps we have no home at a job that has been closed, or a relationship that has ended, or a hope that is dashed. It's a universal experience, to know homelessness.
Finally, Jesus says in one text, “Blessed are the poor.” A translation I like puts this as “Congratulations you homeless!” It sounds hard-hearted. But there is a hidden gift in knowing you are homeless – you know that you are dependent. The truth is that we are dependent on the universe which emerges us, we are dependent on our friends and family to have a social place, we are dependent on our wider society for all the skills we acquire. It's a curse to think that we invented all this – nobody invented the world, nobody planned to be born, nobody invented air or language or love. To imagine that we aren't dependent, that we are independent is a recipe for absolute loneliness. To be inter-dependent is the mature and fulfilling path. So, congratulations if you know you are homeless – only those who know they are dependent on others for their home can ever be fully alive.
Homelessness is an important spiritual experience. We all have it. That experience means that when we deal with homeless people on the street we are dealing with people who have the same experiences we have.
There are about 1,500 homeless people in the region. Women, children, teens, first nations. So why are there so many homeless people now? When I was a kid, growing up in Victoria there weren't people sleeping in doorways downtown. What happened? Several things have changed since those days. Major mental institutions were closed in the 1990's and weren't replaced with community residences. Those with mental health problems ended up on the streets. Literally. Almost half the homeless people, in downtown Victoria - they are most visible, but they are present in all the municipalities - have mental health issues. We've put the mentally ill out on the streets. Then, 50 years ago, families didn't move as much as today. Today families are less able to cope with moving across the country for a job and still look after a mentally or emotionally challenged member. Some people do, and do that well, but many people with severe difficulties no longer live with their own families, and they end up on the streets. In the 1990's the federal government allowed the provinces to use the federal transfer payments any way the provinces wanted – up to that time those monies were required to be used for the social safety net, but not any more. And every single province used the funds for other purposes – and social service funding dramatically decreased. Virtually no social housing has been built in the last 20 years, even though the population has increased. The federal government itself cut virtually all subsidized housing funding. And I think that globalization has something to do with the pervasive presence of drugs. Ships and planes land in Victoria far more frequently than 50 years ago. When I was a child the mechanics of getting drugs here from Afghanistan were formidable, but today daily flights are commonplace. For people on the street, the opportunity to escape their pain is always present, and before long addiction makes their pain far worse.
So what's to be done? To stop homelessness, the answer is simple – provide homes! It really is that simple. A simple room and washroom, with your own key, instantly begins to restore your dignity. People who are the worst gutter alcoholics, when given a room, and access to unlimited alcohol, immediately start to drink less. Why? Because the constant tension of wondering where you will sleep, if you'll be beaten in the night, if everything you own will be stolen, if you'll be insulted by passers-by – all that ends up in an intense need to escape – either by drugs or alcohol. But when you have even the smallest room that you can call your own, you feel safe, like a real person, and the need for the drugged escape decreases dramatically.
When a person is homeless, like Vicky, they require an enormous amount of professional attention – police, paramedics, emergency room nurses, lawyers, judges, jail staff, parole officers – the list of people involved with homelessness goes on and on. Each homeless person costs us $50,000 each year just in those kinds of services. And that's an average. For Vicky, the annual cost could be in the order of $200,000 or $300,000 every year. That's the cost of keeping her homeless. But the average cost when a person is in a simple room they can call their own, even including the cost of regular social service visits, is half the average – the cost goes down to about $25,000. In other words we will save $25,000 for every homeless person we put into housing.
So how did St. John's get involved? It's important to know that the homeless people initiated the process – it's not that St. John's is particularly loving. You remember last fall when a homeless person appealed to the Supreme Court of B.C., and the court ruled that when there are no facilities, a homeless person has the right to camp in public places. Such as, horrors, Beacon Hill park! That ruling came down on a Thursday afternoon. On the Friday morning my phone rang – someone from the ministry of housing had been asked by the minister to find a place for homeless people to stay, immediately. St. John's has a large basement room we don't use at night and the Cool Aid society sets up 40 mats. People come in off the street at 10.00 p.m., find a free mat, lie down, lights go off at 10.15 and everyone is sound asleep. Until they are woken at 6.30 in the morning, and have to be out on the street by 7.00 a.m. But facilities like Our Place don't open until 9.00 a.m., so they are literally on the street for two hours, regardless of rain or temperature. Our Place closes at 4.00 p.m., so they are again on the street until our shelter opens at 10.00. Why is Our Place closed 16 hours a day, and 24 hours a day on weekends? Because the provincial government doesn't want to spend more money on salaries.
It's the homeless who have taught us. One evening when I went down to the basement room, people were lining up for their one slice of pizza before going to lie down on a mat. As I entered, in my official clothes, the lady at the front of the line said, “Hey, is the minister coming for his Last Supper?” Everyone laughed. The next man in line said, “Maybe there's anchovies on the pizza and he is going to do a miracle with two small fish and feed everyone!” The laughter continued, and they made me feel right at home. They taught me about acceptance, humour, and what it means to be a part of a community.
It's the homeless who have taught us to care about them. They sleep on our grounds, up against the walls of our church, and taught us not to treat them as garbage. And we responded by providing space, by publicizing their situation and by treating them with dignity.
Strange how dignity works. Put a homeless person in a room (it's called “Housing first with support”), and they instantly get their dignity back. Just like Vicki did. But the funny thing is, everyone else gets his or her dignity back, too. When homeless people have homes, they aren't sleeping in doorways of businesses, they aren't using doorways for bathrooms, and when they get dignity, so do the business owners. And so do the tourists. Dignity spreads to everyone. That something the homeless have taught us. We are all one community together.
What can an ordinary person do? Volunteer at Our Place – they have a professional volunteer organizer. Volunteer at St. John's food bank – we are the only food bank with a menu from which people can choose their food. Go on an overnight tour of the downtown with Rev. Al Tysick. Talk to your friends about the fact that we will save money, and business will improve, and emergency room wait times will decrease if everyone has even the simplest home. Think about renting a secondary suite in your home to someone who isn't homeless, but is in need – the place they move out of might be the first home a homeless person has ever had – and you made it possible. Go to a meeting, or check out the web site of “Faith in Action” - a multi-faith organization which focuses on government policy issues and organizes “stands” in which people like us stand in silence to draw attention to the need for homelessness to end.
So when we think about what you can do, be careful you don't start with guilt, shame or charity. Vicky would say that guilt is a luxury that only well-to-do people can afford, and that it can be a way of deliberately diverting our energy to something else so we don't have to make any changes. And the last thing she wants is pity or charity. It's her own energy and her own inner dignity that brought her into an ordered and useful life. So when we get serious about addressing homelessness, start from the spiritual basis that we are all homeless. Start from the basis that we who have homes share a central experience with those who don't. And then we can learn from them about hope and persistence and humour, and when we know we are equals, then we can contribute our special skills which may be the knowledge of how to use the levers of power, of how to open other people's eyes, of how to set our eyes on a society in which everyone has dignity. To enact those changes will bring us dignity because we will become the fully mature and responsible people we really are. And then we will be the kind of society that God, or deep reality, or the universe, or the core of reality or the Mystery -whatever you want to call it – has emerged us to be. And then we will all be completely at home in the universe.
I thank you for your care and time and attention to those who are homeless, and on their behalf, express our appreciation for your care.
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First Unitarian Church of Victoria 5575 West Saanich Road Victoria, B.C. V9E 2G1 |
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