We Must Have Resolve

During our 25th anniversary commemoration throughout 2014, we will occasionally use the blog to reprint stories, articles, and talks from our past.  Today, we share with you an excerpt from Sister Mary Scullion’s speech at the ceremony for the 1992 Philadelphia Award, which she won.  The occasion marked one of the first major events of large public exposure of the work of Project HOME, and you may recognize some of the themes Sister Mary introduced in that speech — themes that have guided us in the many years since.

The lives and deaths of our homeless sisters and brothers are a powerful prophetic voice in our midst.  Their lives and deaths are a statement of hope:  Hope that all who hear may be angered, that all might enter into the experience of suffering and condemn, reflect upon the sources of misery and judge, and then act to crush the structures that are crushing our sisters and brothers, our children, our souls.

We are tempted, when we see a homeless person on the streets, to say piously, “There but for the grace of God go I,” and continue on our way.  But it is much more true when we see such  persons to say rather, “There go I.”  I am involved in humankind.  And so are we all.  If there is homelessness in our society, it is we who have homelessness in our midst.   We are all diminished.  Recall Dr. Martin Luther King’s words:  “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny.  Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Homelessness is a sign that forces us to ask the hard question:  Is our supposedly advanced civiliza­tion bringing us to a wonderworld or to a wasteland?  Do we think that the convention center alone will save our city?  We must go much broader and deeper than that.  We  must be people who see beyond what we can touch, weigh, measure and count.  We must be people who believe – believe in the essential dignity of every person.

Dostoevsky wrote :  “The world will be saved by beauty.” But will it? We have tremendous beauty in Philadelphia:  Our cultural and artistic museums, renown architecture, and our educational institu­tions. We have a valuable historical and religious tradition, Green Philadelphia, Fairmount Park and a rich diversity of people.  Can we be healed by these pockets of light and beauty? Can they bring us to our center . . . bring us beyond ourselves . . . bring us to   knowledge, peace . . . bring us to God?

Human spirits  have been snuffed out in this century as in no century before it.  If the spirit within us withers, so too will all the world we build around it.  Will this generation be remembered as the stoned generation, a sign of despair, a clear discernible symptom of an advanced disease within? We must take the first steps on that long journey to where the wasteland ends and human wholeness and fulfillment begin.  We must start by saying:  “We will not be excluded from neighborhoods.  We will not be locked up in institutions.  We will not be swept away.”

Others who have gone before us triumphed over similar devastation.  The idols of greed, material­ism, and militarism that have robbed our children of an education and have left so many of our sisters and brothers homeless; are precisely the same idols that destroyed the City of Jerusalem 2,500 years ago.

We are call today as the Jewish community was called then to build a new city out of the shell of the old.  The prophet Isaiah told the Jewish people who had been through so much to act on their roots of faith and rebuild Jerusalem.  Isaiah promised:  “And I your God will guide you continually, and sat­isfy your desires with good things and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters shall not fail.  And your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations.  You shall be called the repairer of the breach, the re­storer of the streets to dwell in.”

We have a powerful, prophetic voice in our midst.  Homelessness is a solvable problem.  We must have the resolve.  It is our responsibility as Philadelphians to repair the breach and to restore our city for people to dwell in.