"Peace be both to thee, and peace be to thine house, and peace be unto all that thou hast."
—1 Samuel 25:6
"And Allāh had made your homes a place of rest for you."
—Qur'ān 16:80
"Our age is seen as the most homeless of all."[[1]]
—Maurice Friedman
"Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed."[[2]]
—Simone Weil
Throughout the modern world, we come across deeply disturbing images of millions of unhoused people in every major city. We see tents lined up along concrete sidewalks against towering soulless buildings, bodies lying on flimsy pieces of cardboard ruthlessly exposed to the elements, with some encampments extending up to fifty city blocks. We observe involuntary migration or displacement on a staggering scale, as a result of regional conflict, violence, genocide, or natural disasters. In many ways, we have become anesthetized to seeing such images and hearing about the devastating plight, if not sheer dehumanization, of people in these circumstances. What are we to make of this dire situation, and what are its implications for humanity?
In this essay we revisit what it means to have a “home” to gain insight into the growing epidemic of homelessness. Home is more than just a physical dwelling. For many spiritual traditions, it is an extension of our places of worship—sacred abodes for prayer and contemplation. In our itinerant world, staying in motels, shelters, makeshift encampments, or automobiles or on couches for long durations has forced us to rethink conventional notions of home: yet another sign of our present-day uprootedness, which is inseparable from the spiritual crisis that plagues the modern world.
…if we do not grasp the spiritual roots of the problem, it can never be solved.
Physical homelessness is both a symbol and an effect of the spiritual homelessness from which the postmodern world is suffering. This is not to minimize the grave nature of physical homelessness that is so prevalent today. But if we do not grasp the spiritual roots of the problem, it can never be solved. The loss of a sense of the sacred has unleashed a pernicious nihilism, accompanied by a corresponding degradation of dignity resulting from a spiritual abyss that can never be filled by the profane world. This disorder has inflicted an unhealable wound on the contemporary psyche.
A key element of our collective psyche today is the phenomenon of alienation and its corollary, displacement, both literally and in terms of our isolated identities. Mental health professionals attempt to assess, diagnose, and treat illnesses of the mind without acknowledging the suffering caused by the ubiquitous secularism of our desacralized world. Without understanding the historical developments that led to the rise of modernity—the Renaissance, along with the Scientific Revolution that gave rise to the Age of Enlightenment—it is difficult to understand how this trajectory radically undermined traditional notions of a healthy and integrated self. Mental health treatments in our day are still based on the fragmented and scientistic foundations of the Enlightenment project, and thus they fail to address—at their root—the multifarious calamities facing humanity during our current age of acute existential crisis.
Chronic homelessness is, arguably, the result of the social experiment of deinstitutionalization. The removal of people with severe mental illness from asylums and the closing down of many mental hospitals (which began in 1955) is known as deinstitutionalization. The paradox of this policy is that many of the mentally ill, who had been confined—against their will—in wretched conditions were later sent to prisons. The incarceration statistics clearly show the over-representation of such individuals in the penitentiary system. The transition of mental health treatment from psychiatric hospitals to community-based centers has been disastrous owing to poor infrastructure and inadequate funding. While deinstitutionalization appeared to be liberating people from the unjust practice of inhumane confinement, it effectively abandoned the mentally ill to a dismal and uncertain future.
Spirituality—as informed by the world’s religions—must be seriously considered as a means of recovery from mental health problems, such as trauma, alcoholism, and substance abuse, and it can serve as a protective factor against the adversities experienced with homelessness.[[3]]
Prior to modernism, the world’s traditional cultures viewed human beings as both geomorphic (of the earth) and theomorphic (of the Spirit). There is a transcendent and immanent reality that connects us to the whole of existence. Sacred psychology is able to discern the tripartite constitution of human beings and that of the cosmos—of which we are but a mirror—consisting of Spirit, soul, and body; or the spiritual, psychic, and corporeal states. In the same way that the human heart is a habitation for the Divine presence, the physical home is a mirror of our metaphysical home. This is to say that human beings have both a temporal residence in this world and an eternal abode. There is a powerful connection between the created order and the Divine. It is worth recalling that the word ecology derives from the Greek word oikos (meaning “home” or “dwelling”).[[4]] The ecological ethic requires us to appreciate our home. It entails stewardship and tending, based on our interconnectedness and concomitant responsibilities towards creation as a whole. Our true home, in other words, is the Sacred.
[[1]]: Maurice Friedman, “Introduction,” to Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (New York, NY: Macmillan Company, 1965), pp. xix–xx.
[[2]]: Simone Weil, “Uprootedness,” inThe Need for Roots, trans. Arthur Wills (London, UK: Routledge, 2007), p. 47.
[[3]]: See Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, “The Metaphysics of Trauma,” Transcendent Philosophy: An International Journal for Comparative Philosophy and Mysticism, Vol. 23 (December 2022), pp. 23–53; Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, “Addiction and the Quest for Wholeness,” Spirituality Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring 2022), pp. 28–41; Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, “Suicide: A Spiritual Perspective,” Transcendent Philosophy: An International Journal for Comparative Philosophy and Mysticism, Vol. 24 (December 2023), pp. 71–103.
[[4]]: Samuel Bendeck Sotillos,“The Eclipse of the Soul and the Rise of the Ecological Crisis,” Spirituality Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Fall 2022), pp.34–55.
