Sometimes events coincide happily. At other times the coincidence rings strangely. This year Youth Homelessness Matters Day is celebrated the day before Easter Sunday: desolation confronts happiness, penury plenty, and deprivation plenitude.
When events clash most sharply, they may also illuminate one another most brightly. The Easter stories invite deep reflection on home and on homelessness, on finding a home and being made to feel at home.
The stories told about Jesus' rising begin with homelessness — with people grieving for Jesus. When we are in grief we are made homeless. Our loss turns our physical home into a mere house.
The connections between the house and the person whom we have loved no longer ground and reassure us. They torment us. We mistake friends for the council gardeners. We feel alone in a world without walls or roof, where the wind blows coldly and the rain pours in.
That is what grief does to adults. It is also what homelessness does to children. It robs their present of meaning, their future of hope and their relationships of constancy. Homelessness is no place for children.
The stories of Jesus' death explore homelessness. As it is for all of us his home was his body. It was lived in, fed, cared for, hospitable to friends and formidable to enemies. His body was the place where dreams were nurtured, life's projects planned and personality displayed. It was the monument by which he would be remembered.
The Romans did their best to ensure that it was forgotten. They did a demolition job on his body, making sure that everyone saw it marked with whips, thorns, nails, blood and dirt and put on display like a side of beef in a butcher shop. His memory was to be a home for no one.
His friends' homelessness was compounded by the disappearance of his body. It thwarted their desire to wash and lay out his body so that they could remember his life as their home. Their last contact with him was cut. They shared momentarily the terrible suffering of those whose children have been killed but whose bodies are not to be found. They have no closure, we say. But in reality they have no opening — the door of their home is padlocked.
"It is the responsibility of society to find children a home in which they can be safe to make connections, see possibilities, heal their wounds and allow others