“Our Urban Plunge was modeled on the theme of pilgrimage: a sacred journey to a holy place in search of social healing or transformation. The homeless, if they would even talk to us, were to be the powerful ones, the wise teachers on our journey.
Leaving the walls of home, church, and university behind, we stepped into a powerful liminal space between two worlds: the world of the housed and the world of the unhoused.
There are liminal places where the worlds of spirit and matter meet and more easily converse with each other. These are the holy sites people have recognized for millennia as holding a special potency that helps awaken the latent healing and transformative power in the seeker.
But as I learned out on the streets, there are also liminal moments, times in our lives that render the strange familiar and the familiar strange. This reversal of ground is a defining characteristic of the in-breaking of the sacred through the walls of our ordinary waking consciousness.”
Here’s the full essay.