Campus Homelessness
“I will not leave you orphaned.”
--A promise from the Holy One to us
This week we are examining the subject of homelessness in our society. We are looking at this subject through a number of different lenses. Today I want to let Dr. Henri Nouwen, one of my pastoral care mentors who spent a large part of his pastoral career in the university setting, talk about a homelessness we seldom recognize.
“While teaching university students who came from many different states and countries, I was struck how lonely they were. For many years they live in small rooms, surrounded by strangers, far away from their familiar surroundings. There is little privacy and even less community in their lives. Mostly they have no contact with children or elderly people. Seldom do they belong to a welcoming neighborhood or a supportive faith community, and only very few know families where they can drop in anytime and feel at home. I have come to consider this situation in which thousands of young adults live as ‘normal’ but when I examine it a little closer it is not hard to understand why so many feel rootless and even lost.” (Lifesigns, p. 28)
For years we tailgated at Purdue on football weekends, we made it a point to invite as many college kids as we could to our “football festivities” on the golf course. We even received a thank you from one of the families who lives a couple hundred miles away expressing appreciation that we had included their son in our family.
Homelessness appears in more ways than we might imagine!
--Ben Keckler
11.03.10
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