Stories from the Street

A Theology of Homelessness

David Nixon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409437468
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317049838
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

Stories from the Street is a theological exploration of interviews with men and women who had experienced homelessness at some stage in their lives. Framed within a theology of story and a theology of liberation, Nixon suggests that story is not only a vehicle for creating human transformation but it is one of God's chosen means of effecting change. Short biographies of twelve characters are examined under themes including: crises in health and relationships, self-harm and suicide, anger and pain, God and the Bible. Expanding the existing literature of contextual theology, this book provides an alternative focus to a church-shaped mission by advocating with, and for, a very marginal group; suggesting that their experiences have much to teach the church. Churches are perceived as being active in terms of pastoral work, but reluctant to ask more profound questions about why homelessness exists at all. A theology of homelessness suggests not just a God of the homeless, but a homeless God, who shares stories and provides hope. Engaging with contemporary political and cultural debates about poverty, housing and public spending, Nixon presents a unique theological exploration of homeless people, suffering, hope and the human condition.

PART I
Methods and Mapping

Who could have believed what we have heard? To whom has the power of the Lord been revealed? He grew up before the Lord like a young plant whose roots are in parched ground; he had no beauty, no majesty to catch our eyes, no grace to attract us.

Isaiah 53: 1, 2

Chapter 1

New Clothes for an Old Story? (1)

‘But the Emperor has nothing on at all!’ said a little child.
‘Listen to the voice of innocence!’ exclaimed her father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another.
‘But he has nothing on at all!’ at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was vexed, for he felt that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now. And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.

Hans Christian Anderson1

This encounter is the first story among many stories contained in this book – principally the stories of homeless people who, with a mixture of courage, determination, hesitation and hope, have recounted their lives to me. They have exposed their weakness and vulnerability and, with a few modifications, have allowed their stories to become public. This is also the story of this writer and his responses to hearing the stories of others. Some of this story is set down here as well. By placing these stories out there, in the public domain, they become fixed as new stories, resonating and conflicting with other stories, part of the ebb and flow of our desire to make sense of the world through narrative. I now invite you, the reader, to reflect on your story as you read and react to the stories told here, and so perhaps form another story which honours the reception of this material.

Part I of this book, therefore, sets out to construct a theology of story, including the methodological and practical implications of collecting lifestories of homeless people. Chapter 1 introduces some general themes concerning narrative before focusing on the claim of liberation theologians that the poor are especially privileged as storytellers for God, and on the nature of story as a holy conversation. Chapter 2 concentrates on the place of God in the story: the loving relationship between God and humanity played out in the narrative of holy scripture in which we participate as covenantal partners. Chapter 3 looks at the collection of stories of everyday life and how a qualitative method is best suited to their analysis. There is an overview of important themes and of the ethical implications of this research, including the position of the writer/researcher. A second project of Contextual Bible Reading with homeless people is also described.

Part II (Chapter 4) opens with a return to the significance of context, and situates these stories within various frames. A brief history of housing and homelessness takes the reader up to some of the changes intended by the Conservative–Liberal Coalition Government; an international perspective is provided by situating these comments within the social and economic crisis of 2008 and onwards, which originated in the American housing market. Theologies of place and space, and theologies of equality give further contextual lenses through which to hear, read and interpret what homeless people have recounted. Chapters 5 to 8 analyse these stories of homeless people from various perspectives: short biographies of each interviewee (and biographical details of this writer); common biographical themes under the headings of Causes of Crisis and Results of Crisis; responses centred around emotions and feelings; responses about spirituality and religious experiences. Chapter 9 is an account of how homeless people read and interpreted particular biblical passages, with certain striking results.

Part III offers conclusions by returning to the starting point, and asks in Chapter 10 whether the preceding analysis of the stories of homeless people supports the methodologies described earlier. Chapter 11 examines in more detail Church policy and practice towards homeless people, and what Christian scriptures have said in this regard. Chapter 12 seeks to reconcile these various elements by outlining a theological approach which gives value to the stories which homeless people tell. The central symbol of the Trinity is envisioned not simply as a God of homelessness but as a homeless God who shares the storied experience of the marginalised, while also providing hope of transformation. A theology of story therefore is the crucial access point which uncovers the paucity of our theological and ecclesial response to homelessness, as well as pointing towards a richer and more inclusive future.

Telling stories of the self is dangerous – from an academic point of view, experience tends to be mistrusted and religious experience the more so; there is some personal risk too.2 However, Jürgen Moltmann uses experience to locate his personal theological existence and to answer the question ‘Where do we think theologically?’ In Experiences in Theology, he describes his reluctant use of the pronoun ‘I’ in his theological writing, recognising that ‘readers of a book want to know not only what the author has to say, but also how he or she arrived at it, and why they put it as they do’.3 He admits that having studied academic theology, he is now interested in ‘the theology of the people’ where men and women struggle to bring up families, worry about their children and remember their dead. He begins almost every chapter of the book with a personal introduction: ‘My personal access to black theology’, ‘The beginnings of my personal sensitivity to feminist theology’, and so on. Perhaps surprisingly, there is a similar piece of spiritual autobiography in Barth’s Church Dogmatics, where he reflects on the hymns which he sang as a child:

… as these songs were sung in the everyday language we were then beginning to hear and speak, and as we joined in singing, we took our mother’s hand, as it were, and went to the stall in Bethlehem, and to the streets of Jerusalem, where, greeted by children of a similar age, the Saviour made His entry, and to the dark hill of Golgotha, as the sun rose to the garden of Joseph.4

In explicating a theological route map I want first to place this pastoral encounter with Simon (and others like him) into the broad theoretical framework of practical theology. The themes I develop are based on an understanding of this encounter as an event of narrative or story, which whether consciously or not, is always theological. My first purpose is therefore to produce a theology of story which comes out of this pastoral experience, and which opens up further possibilities in the exploration of specific stories of homeless people. My ultimate aim is towards a theology of homelessness, which includes analysis of these homeless stories in dialogue with Christian scriptures, Church tradition and other theologies, with the stories of this writer and this reader also under scrutiny, but secondary to the main data.

Practical theology includes a number of key characteristics which thread their way through this book: individual and communal experience of the contemporary world in dialogue with traditional texts; a postmodern approach which ‘retrieves from the margins the repressed and hidden “Others” of Western modernity’; the assumption of a ‘criterion of love’, by which theology and the theologian are themselves transformed by a spirituality which involves participation of heart and mind.5

I have used the word story or narrative as a descriptive term for recording what happened in a chance meeting with Simon, the drug-user, with the clarification that in the recording of it we are now in fact dealing with two stories – his and mine. A more complex analysis of the encounter soon sees two other constituents, so that the process begins to look like this: a storyteller tells her story to a listener or a reader and at this point the story itself takes on some independent life. Some or all of these elements may be in conversation with the Bible, as the normative text of Christianity, and with Christian theology. Some parts of the story are communicated by words, others by body language, silence and so on.

There are a variety of roles or agents here. The first is the role of the storyteller: liberation theology underscores why special attention should be paid to the stories told by poor people. The second area focuses on the story itself, so I explain how a conversation may be described as holy or sacred, give some ground rules for the reading of texts, and then look beyond the individual to the community nature of stories. The third area is the place of God and scripture in the telling of stories. In Chapter 2 God’s Story I take a broad narrative view of the Bible to include the insights of Karl Barth and other theologians, and then concentrate on the stories told by Jesus. The role of listener/reader threads its way throughout this book, especially in references to the reciprocal relationship with text. The significance of this writer’s role is recognised by a snapshot of his own life history.

Finally, let me now turn to some introductory remarks about story, and why stories are always theological. ‘Narrative as a primary act of mind’ is the title of an essay by Barbara Hardy in a collection about children’s literature. Her argument is that narrative is not an aesthetic invention of artists but a primary act of mind transferred from life to art. In other words, we function at a fundamental level as human beings through the medium of story:

For we dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticise, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative. In order really to live, we make up stories about ourselves and others, about the personal as well as the social past and future.6

It is not simply children who move between the world of the fairy story and ‘real’ life but all human beings who inhabit both the world of fantasy and the one of raw events. It is by means of narrative that we impose some order on the unceasing flow of happenings.

From a theological perspective a similar point about the foundational quality of narrative is made by Bernard Lonergan:

Without stories, there is no knowledge of the world, of ourselves, of others, and of God. Our narrative consciousness is our power for comprehending ourselves in our coherence with the world and other selves; it expresses our existential reality as storytelling and storylistening animals, acting and reacting within our particular world context, overcoming the incoherence of the unexamined life. One man’s story is another man’s point of departure. We live on stories; we shape our lives through stories, mastering the complexity of our experience through the dynamic of our structured knowing …7

What is a Story? also suggests that it is story which gives form to life, but stresses the presence of emotion – what Cupitt calls ‘the production of desire’. Human beings construct lifestories in both these aspects, borrowing magpie-like from any other fiction we can get hold of, often in competition with the stories of others around us.8 Stories always remain theological because they promise that life can be meaningful; they contain a message or moral imperative; they are value-inducing; and they help in maintaining individual identity.9 More bleakly, Cupitt describes storytelling as equivalent to Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights: simply ‘putting off death by telling tales...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Prologue Encounter
• PART I Methods and Mapping
• Chapter 1 New Clothes for an Old Story? (1)
• Chapter 2 New Clothes for an Old Story? (2)
• Chapter 3 Collecting Stories
• PART II Results
• Chapter 4 Homeless Narratives in Context
• Chapter 5 Life Histories of Homeless People
• Chapter 6 Themes from Homeless Lives: Biography
• Chapter 7 Themes from Homeless Lives: Emotions
• Chapter 8 Themes from Homeless Lives: Spirituality
• Chapter 9 Themes from Homeless Lives: Reading the Bible Together
• PART III Conclusions
• Chapter 10 Towards a Theology of Homelessness: The Story We're In
• Chapter 11 Towards a Theology of Homelessness: A New Telling of the Story
• Chapter 12 Stories of a Homeless God
• Epilogue Occupy
• Bibliography
• Index