Tell Them Who I Am by Elliot Liebow

Author:Elliot Liebow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 1993-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Grace was one of the few women with whom God communicated directly. Once again, it was after dinner and several of us were seated around the table. Abigail (who sometimes said she was Jewish, sometimes half Jewish, sometimes Christian), was comparing Bar Mitzvah with confirmation. Elsie quoted something from what she said was First Corinthians about a boy becoming a man. Someone else said something about people who hear voices. Cora said that “from a therapeutic perspective,” hearing voices meant that the person was struggling with a very difficult decision around some kind of separation, usually from someone very near and dear. But it could also be a job or something else.

“It all depends,” said Grace. She said she heard voices, too, but so did Joan of Arc and Saint Francis and lots of other sane and effective people. “God doesn’t speak in a human voice, though,” she said. “He doesn’t speak in words and you don’t hear it in your ears. You hear it inside your head.”

For many women, belief in God invested homelessness with meaning. Since everything in this world happens only because God wills it, the women were homeless because God wanted them to be, and He must have his reasons, even if the reasons were to remain forever hidden. * This kind of thinking did not, as many supposed, lead to a fatalistic or passive acceptance of homelessness. It certainly did no such thing for Grace.

Grace knew that she was homeless because God wanted her to be, but she was bewildered as to why He should want this for her. She knew it was not for punishment. Through prayer, meditation, and periodic fasting, she struggled to divine God’s purpose in making her homeless. Suddenly, after three months of living in the shelter, it came to her. God wanted her to start her own Home for Emotionally Abused Adults. He wanted her to experience homelessness firsthand so she could model her home on personal experience rather than on existing shelters, which are insensitive to the real needs of people. Thus, for Grace, her belief in God gave not only meaning to her homeless life, but purpose as well. *

Crucially, belief in God made it possible for many of the women to adopt a religious rather than a scientific or commonsense basis for calculating the probabilities of their escape from homelessness. The outside observer, basing judgment on an objective assessment of the difficulties and likely opportunities, might estimate that this woman has one chance in 100 of getting her own place to live, that woman one chance in 50, and that one, one in 1,000. The homeless woman, in contrast, knows that God loves her and knows that she wants a place of her own. With God on her side, she sets her own estimate for getting out of homelessness at, say, one chance in five, or one in two, or even at dead certainty. Thus, by substituting a calculus of faith for one based on reason and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.