Little Ripples of Love that Echo into Eternity

Sisters Maureen Boggins, Liz Dodd, and Margaret Byrne pause from tending the garden.

by Liz Dodd, CSJP

I was showing a young guest from Eritrea around our home recently. Referred to us by a local homelessness charity, she had fled the family member upon whose visa she relied, becoming street homeless and, without any recognised status, effectively destitute. As we stood in our hall - the bright space whose tall windows most recall its history as a church - she said: “This house talks the same way you do.” I thought she meant incessantly. She meant it made her feel safe.

This guest - a teenager - returned to our house of hospitality in Carlton, Nottingham, again and again, rebounding against the complex and segregated means of support left open for a young homeless refugee in Nottingham. There are few, because the city is in crisis. Like many local councils in England, Nottingham City Council has been starved of funds by central government, suffered the fallout of poor financial decisions, and struggled to meet the rising demand for social care in the city. Last year it declared itself bankrupt, and government commissioners stepped in to create a budget that slashed funding for charities and adult social care.

What this means in practice is that when a guest is referred to us for emergency accommodation, usually on the night they are made homeless, there is nowhere for them to move on to. Some are children, some are fleeing domestic abuse, many are refugees; there is rarely space for them in a hostel, refuge or shared accommodation. Disquietingly, we have the potential to make matters worse: known, now, to the council as a safe place to stay, extended time with us can ruin a guest’s chance of being treated as a priority need. Why can’t they just stay with the nuns?

So, the charity that refers guests to us is ruthless where we can’t be. A teenager with learning difficulties left us in tears for the Winter Night Shelter, a temporary dormitory that moves around the city. A girl fleeing abuse comes back occasionally to root through the luggage she left, too much to carry as she is moved between different hotel rooms every night, each further from her college. No one wants to leave: it is heartbreaking to let them. To what extent, I rage to God sometimes, are we helping anyone?

Healing, I am beginning to realise, does not mean solving problems. It is deeper, and it is outside our control. When we began our ministry in Carlton, success was easy to define: settled status for an asylee, space in a shared house, occasionally - wonderfully - a furnished home. WhatsApp-ed photographs of babies who’d been the size of blueberries when they were under our roof; notes and phone calls and endless thankyous. All we had to do was hold space, do laundry, defrost oven pizzas, wrangle over curfews, and wait for the happy ending.

How do we measure success when there is no happy ending? We don’t: we create, I think, an environment where healing can take place; we work to dismantle the systems that keep people homeless; we trust God with the rest.

And we have to surrender space, to change, in order to create it. Where better to start than with food: we have a longer-term guest, an asylee, who cooks magnificent Kurdish meals for us all. When we break bread - usually round and unleavened - with her, we say “alhamdulillah” as our grace. A girl from Yemen taught me how to make samosas one evening while we listened to Taylor Swift. It took five hours, and we made 100, because that is how you make samosas in Yemen. I love it when we have guests from Ethiopia; when, done being polite about sliced bread, they come home with stacks of sour injera and lay it in the middle of the table for us to tear and share, because that is how you eat in Ethiopia.

We make room for schedules and social lives. One anxious young guest ate almost nothing until one weeknight, around 10 p.m., she descended to the kitchen and cooked herself a whole roast dinner. Strange foodstuffs appear in the fridge; the freezer is populated by things only teenagers would eat. We hook up games consoles to the TV; our Netflix history is so diverse that its predictive algorithm has given up. When a guest with severe mental health appeared every morning to hang out while I did yoga, I thought I’d met a boundary, until she said, quietly, that one of the few happy memories she had of home was watching her mum do the same.

We surrender time. A blessing of community living is its varied chronotypes. A night owl, I am content to enforce the evening curfew, to be a listening presence late at night over a snack. I am not there - but Margaret and Maureen are - when guests who’ve stayed out ring the doorbell at 7 a.m., or need breakfast before college. It’s as simple as asking questions when “I’m ok” doesn’t sound ok, as making a trip to the store together; it’s cleaning bathrooms and washing sheets when you want to put your feet up.

What happens within that surrendered space is extravagant. One girl who, when she arrived, shook so badly she couldn’t carry her bag, left behind a note saying she’d never felt as loved as she had with us. A tough, resilient woman recognised Maureen downtown, wanted to say we’d kept her off the street, but couldn’t finish that sentence. I hear these stories and think: all we did was set up her Xbox? Didn’t we row, constantly, about curfew?

Last year we provided 170 nights of emergency accommodation and welcomed two asylees as longterm guests. I wish I could list the number of homes secured, of visas granted, but I can’t: all we have to show is negative space. But over those 170 nights, healing has taken place, and I know that from the whispered goodbyes, the scribbled notes and tearful hugs, those little ripples of love ricochet into eternity.

Carlton House.

This article appeared in the Autumn 2024 issue of Living Peace.