Before we left, he suddenly asked if we would pray with him, and so we sat in that crappy little room, hand in hand, Mary Sue and Robert seated on his bed and me in a chair facing them. We lit the place up. It was a positive visit. It is clear that he trusts the two of us.

Two-thirds of those who qualify for housing assistance in the United States cannot get it because it is not available.

If we are lost, I stressed, God will hunt us down—in love—like the good shepherd, to the last moment.

They are, first of all, God’s creatures, and therefore they deserve the love and awe intrinsic to all creatures. And second of all, they deserve the best kind of spiritual and psychological assistance available.

At one time in his life he wanted to be in a religious order, but his mental health prevented it; nevertheless, his prayer life was rich and edifying. I think some of his happiest moments were the days he spent at a local monastery.

Most literature on mental illness and homelessness indicates that more than half of the people on the streets are mentally ill with manifestations of the following, to name a few: affective disorders; schizophrenia, in all its many variations; recurrent depressive and manic-depressive disorders (bipolarism); post-traumatic stress disorder ;

Things give meaning to the lives of people who are deprived of authentic human contact. It is not necessarily a quirk of the poor: the millionaire builds an ostentatious house; the CEO wears a Rolex; the politician has a few people in his pocket; the dictator has his disposable private army; the preacher surrounds herself with unread theology

He makes sense of our life and our commitments in a world that thinks what we are doing is naivete at best and folly at worst. He has turned our world upside down.

The reason is that the illness creates such frequent disruptive mental processes that the person is unable to perform the normal tasks involved in maintaining a residence : minimal personal hygiene, care for the housing, management of money. Throw in a lack of certain social skills and there is further erosion of self-sufficiency, self-care,