Don,

A formerly homeless man in New York is quoted in today’s Times: “After you spend a certain amount of time in the streets, as difficult as your circumstances are, they become a routine. You want to avoid disruption of the familiar – even if it’s sleeping in an alley.”

Perhaps this explains my recent inability to post to the Dialogue – my routine has been disrupted. The house had to be put back together after the hardwood floors were installed, several hundred photos needed to be posted to the Documentation Project, attendance was required at a wholly unproductive and artificial meeting about William Land Park, etc. As ho hum as it may look to others, my routine provides the daily structure for my accomplishments, such as they may be.

I have been thinking about your comments relative to religion and myth. It has been my experience that one man’s religion is another man’s myth – who is to know for sure? Like you, I was a true believer during our monastic years, but as I grew up and was exposed to more “worldly” experience, most of it wore off. Frankly, most of what I had believed – dogma, infallibility of the church, birth control, catechism, etc. – seemed irrelevant to the human condition of people, especially poor people I came to know. I suppose the final straw was laid when I came to know people who were living on the street – what possible application could church dogma play to relieve their indigence and societal alienation? None that I knew of.

In today’s Times, my homeless mentor goes on to say: “My winding up homeless was really a slow suicide. I resigned myself to just deteriorating in the streets. If you don’t feel that life is worth living, that life has meaning, that there are goals worth striving for – that’s much more devastating than going through a chilly evening or getting caught in a rainstorm.”

Take care,

LeRoy