Humans are the Only Animals on Earth That Are Homeless
Understanding the Teachings of Jesus through the lens of Joseph Cardijn, Thomas Merton, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Humans are the Only Animals on Earth That Are Homeless
Understanding the Teachings of Jesus through the lens of Joseph Cardijn, Thomas Merton, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Paradox of Human Homelessness
I want to begin with a striking observation that may seem simple, yet carries profound theological weight: humans are the only animals on earth that are homeless.
Think about this for a moment. Every bird has its nest, every fox its den, every whale its migration route written into its very DNA. Animals possess an innate belonging to their ecological niche. A salmon knows where to return. A sea turtle finds the beach where it was born. Even the smallest creatures have a place that is unmistakably theirs.
But humanity? We alone experience actual homelessness—not merely the lack of physical shelter, though that is tragically real, and in our world today, physical homelessness is growing, and those who call themselves “Christians” all too often ignore and dismiss—then there is a spiritual homelessness. We are searching for something we cannot quite name, a belonging we have lost, a home we dimly remember but cannot find.
Jesus himself spoke to this condition: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). In this one statement, Christ identifies with our fundamental human condition while simultaneously revealing an essential aspect of the spiritual journey.
Let’s explore this homelessness through three remarkable 20th-century Christians who understood Jesus’s teachings in deeply practical, yet profoundly spiritual ways: Joseph Cardijn, the Belgian priest who founded the Young Christian Workers movement; Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and contemplative writer; and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who resisted Nazism and gave his life for his convictions.
Each of these men lived Jesus’s teachings in distinct ways, yet each addressed the same fundamental homelessness that afflicts humanity. Together, they offer us a comprehensive vision of what it means to find our true home.
Joseph Cardijn - Homelessness in Society
The Industrial Wasteland
Joseph Cardijn (1882-1967) grew up in working-class Belgium during the brutal early days of industrialization. His father was a coal miner, and young Joseph witnessed firsthand the dehumanization of workers in the factories and mines. He saw people treated as interchangeable parts in an economic machine, stripped of dignity, reduced to units of labor.
This was homelessness in its most concrete form: workers alienated from their labor, from their communities, from any sense of purpose beyond survival. Families crowded into tenements. Children were sent to work at ages we now find unconscionable. The Church, in many places, seemed irrelevant to the daily suffering of ordinary people.
Cardijn became a priest with a burning question: How do we make the Gospel real for people whose daily existence is crushing them?
See, Judge, Act
Cardijn’s genius was his method, which became famous as “See, Judge, Act”—a simple three-step process that revolutionized Christian social action:
See: Observe reality as it truly is. Don’t theorize from a distance. Look at the actual conditions of people’s lives with clear eyes.
Judge: Evaluate what you see in light of the Gospel. What does Jesus’s teaching say about this situation? What is God’s will for human dignity?
Act: Take concrete steps to change the situation. Faith without works is dead.
This wasn’t abstract theology. Cardijn trained young workers to become leaders in their own right, to recognize their infinite worth as children of God, and to organize for change. The Young Christian Workers (YCW) movement spread worldwide, transforming millions of lives.
Finding Home Through Dignity
What Cardijn understood was that homelessness begins when people are denied their dignity. Look at all the homelessness we see in our cities, our rural communities, across the US, and in many countries. Do we see dignity in the human beings who are homeless? When workers are treated as mere instruments, when the economy reduces persons to economic units, when social structures tell people they are worthless—this is the essence of homelessness.
Think of all the “homelessness” being created in companies that are claiming they are adopting artificial intelligence, which is replacing those workers, and as we read the outrageous numbers of people who are being let go, do we see dignity in those individuals? Do we see Jesus reaching out his hand to them?
Cardijn’s reading of Jesus was profoundly incarnational: Christ came not to spiritualize away material suffering but to dignify human labor, human relationships, and human community. The Gospels are full of Jesus among the people—eating with tax collectors, healing the sick, touching the untouchable. Jesus made people feel they belonged, that they had a place, that they mattered.
Cardijn’s famous declaration captures this: “Each young worker is worth more than all the gold in the world.” This is Gospel economics, Gospel sociology, Gospel anthropology. Do we, as followers of Jesus, believe that you cannot be truly homeless if you know you are infinitely precious to God? Do we, as followers of Jesus, ever think about why we should never allow homelessness?
The Social Dimension of Home
Cardijn teaches us that finding our home requires building just social structures.
We cannot retreat into private spirituality while systems grind people down. Jesus’s teaching about the Kingdom of God is inherently social—it’s about how we live together, how we treat the least among us, how we structure our everyday life.
The Beatitudes aren’t just personal virtues; they’re a social manifesto. “Blessed are the poor in spirit”—those who have been made poor by unjust structures. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”—for justice in social relations.
The Kingdom Jesus preaches is one where everyone has a place at the table.
Cardijn would say: You cannot find your true home while your neighbor is homeless. Our belonging is bound up with one another. This is why the early Christians shared everything in common, why Jesus insisted that how we treat the hungry, the stranger, the prisoner is how we treat him.
Thomas Merton - Homelessness in the Soul
The Successful Wanderer
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) came to homelessness from the opposite direction. Born to artistic parents, educated at Cambridge and Columbia, he was the very picture of a sophisticated modern intellectual. He had everything the world said should make him feel at home: education, talent, friends, opportunities.
Yet Merton was profoundly lost. His early autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain, describes a restless searching through philosophies, relationships, ideologies—always looking for something that could satisfy the ache inside. He was homeless in the midst of plenty, which is perhaps the most modern form of homelessness.
His conversion to Catholicism and entry into the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky in 1941 was a radical turning inward, a recognition that the homelessness he experienced was spiritual at its core.
The False Self and the True Self
Merton’s great insight, drawn from Christian mystical tradition and his deep reading of the Gospel, was the distinction between the false self and the true self.
The false self is the person we construct to fit into the world, to fit in with a world that blames those who suffer, those who are homeless, who are not carrying their own weight, or who are not “normal” like the rest of us, to gain approval, to feel secure. It’s the accumulation of roles, achievements, possessions, and personas that make us who we are. The false self is always striving, always anxious, because it’s built on sand. It’s fundamentally homeless because it’s not real.
The true self is who we are in God—our authentic being before we start performing, defending, or acquiring. It’s the person God calls by name, knows intimately, and loves infinitely. The true self is already home because it rests in God.
Merton writes: “We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real...and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists.” ~ Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness before beginning his ministry. He withdrew to pray, often leaving the crowds behind. He told his disciples to go into their inner room and pray in secret. This tradition of withdrawal, of desert spirituality, is essential to understanding the Gospel.
Merton lived this literally at Gethsemani, and later in his hermitage. But he taught that the monastery is not an escape from the world—it’s a training ground for seeing reality clearly. In silence and solitude, we confront who we really are. We face the noise in our own heads, the false securities we’ve built, the ways we’ve made ourselves homeless by seeking our identity in things that cannot last.
The contemplative life isn’t about becoming otherworldly; it’s about becoming truly present to this world as it is, and to God who is present in it. Prayer isn’t escapism; it’s the hard work of stripping away illusions.
Finding Home in the Present Moment
One of Merton’s most powerful teachings is about presence. We make ourselves homeless by living in regret about the past or anxiety about the future. We’re always somewhere else in our minds—planning, worrying, remembering, fantasizing.
But God is only in the present moment. Jesus taught, “Do not worry about tomorrow” (Matthew 6:34). God’s name is “I AM”—not “I was” or “I will be” but present tense, always now.
To come home is to be here, now, awake, attentive to the world around us, the suffering of the people of God, and the marginalized in society. Merton practiced this through contemplative prayer, through his attention to the natural world around his hermitage, and through his writing, which was always grounded in immediate experience.
Solitude and Solidarity
Here’s where Merton becomes truly radical: true solitude doesn’t separate us from others—it connects us more deeply. When we find our true self in God, we discover that we’re united with all humanity at the deepest level. The false self divides us, makes us competitive, defensive, and separate. The true self recognizes the Universal Christ in everyone.
Merton’s later years saw him become increasingly engaged with social justice, with peace activism, and with interfaith dialogue. His contemplation drove him toward the world, not away from it. He wrote extensively against war, racism, and nuclear weapons. His silence made his voice more powerful, not less.
This is the Gospel paradox: you must lose your life to find it. You must die to the false self to discover your true home. Jesus’s teaching constantly points to this: the last shall be first, the greatest must be servant, whoever seeks to save their life will lose it.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Homelessness in History: When Home Becomes Hell
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) faced homelessness in its most terrible form: when your homeland becomes hostile to everything you believe, when the place that should provide a sense of belonging becomes a force of evil. Think of what many are experiencing in our world today that mirrors what Bonhoeffer experienced.
Bonhoeffer was a brilliant German theologian and Lutheran pastor from a prominent family. He had every reason to feel at home in German culture and church life. But when the Nazis came to power in 1933, everything changed. The German Church essentially capitulated to Nazi ideology. The German Church became a vessel of Christian Nationalism. The land of Luther became the land of Hitler.
Bonhoeffer was confronted with a devastating question: What does it mean to follow Jesus when your entire society has gone mad?
Costly Grace
Bonhoeffer articulated his answer in his book The Cost of Discipleship, where he distinguished between cheap grace and costly grace.
Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without repentance, baptism without discipline, communion without confession, absolution without contrition. It’s grace as a doctrine, a principle, an intellectual position. Cheap grace allows us to remain comfortable, to fit in with our society, to avoid the conflict that true discipleship brings. It is cheap grace that helps and gives permission to people to turn a blind eye to the poor, the homeless, and the outcast in society.
Costly grace is the Gospel that must be sought again and again, the gift that must be asked for, the door that must be knocked upon. It cost God the life of His Son, and it costs us our lives. It’s grace because it gives us the only true life. It’s costly because it calls us to follow Jesus, and Jesus leads to the cross.
This wasn’t abstract theology for Bonhoeffer. As the Nazi regime intensified its persecution of Jews, its totalitarian control, its preparation for war, Bonhoeffer had to decide: Would he accept cheap grace and remain safe, or embrace costly grace and resist? Today, we are facing the same question.
Leaving Home to Find It
In 1939, Bonhoeffer had escaped to safety in America. Friends had arranged teaching positions for him in New York. He was safe. But after just 26 days, he returned to Germany. He later wrote that it was a mistake to have left, that he had to live through this difficult period with his people if he was to have any right to help rebuild Germany after the war. As Jesus would say, we need to smell like our sheep.
This is a profound understanding of homelessness: sometimes finding your true home means leaving safety, returning to danger, being where God calls you, even when it’s the last place you want to be.
Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem, knowing what awaited him there. He could have stayed in Galilee, could have avoided confrontation, but his mission required him to go to the place of death.
Life Together
In the midst of this dark period, Bonhoeffer ran an underground seminary at Finkenwalde, training pastors for the Confessing Church that resisted Nazi control. His book Life Together describes the Christian community he built there.
For Bonhoeffer, finding home required genuine Christian community—not romantic idealism, or people worshiping the “Prosperity Gospel”, but real people living together under the Word of God. He wrote: “The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.”
This is crucial: we often make ourselves homeless by demanding that reality conform to our ideals. We want a perfect church, perfect friends, and a perfect family. When reality inevitably disappoints, we become bitter, isolated, perpetually searching for something that doesn’t exist.
Bonhoeffer teaches us that home is found in actual, messy, complex relationships with real people. Christian community happens when we confess our sins to one another, bear one another’s burdens, speak truth in love, and forgive repeatedly. This is what Jesus modeled with his disciples—he didn’t choose perfect people, he formed a community of very “imperfect” people and loved them to the end.
The Ultimate Homelessness: Martyrdom
Bonhoeffer became involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler. When it failed, he was arrested. He spent his final months in prison, writing letters that would become some of the most influential Christian texts of the 20th century.
On April 9, 1945—just weeks before the war ended—Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging at Flossenbürg. His last recorded words were: “This is the end—for me, the beginning of life.”
Here is the ultimate Christian paradox about homelessness: we are most at home when we’re willing to give up everything, even life itself, for the sake of Christ and others. Jesus taught this explicitly: “Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39).
Bonhoeffer’s witness shows us that following Jesus may require becoming homeless in every earthly sense—losing country, safety, family, freedom, life—yet finding eternal home in the process.
Synthesis - The Geography of the Soul: Three Dimensions, One Home
What these three remarkable men show us is that human homelessness operates on three levels, and Jesus’s teachings address all three:
Cardijn shows us social homelessness: We are homeless when society denies our dignity, when economic systems treat us as things, and when we lack community and just relationships. Jesus’s answer is the Kingdom of God—a new social order where everyone belongs, everyone matters, and everyone has a place at the table.
Merton shows us spiritual homelessness: We are homeless when we don’t know who we truly are, when we’re trapped in the false self, when we’re separated from God. Jesus’s answer is metanoia, transformation, dying to the old self, and being born again into our true identity as children of God.
Bonhoeffer shows us historical homelessness: We are homeless when we’re alienated from our time, when our society has betrayed its values, when following Christ puts us in conflict with our culture. Jesus’s answer is costly discipleship—taking up our cross and following him, even to death.
Yet these aren’t really three different forms of homelessness; they’re three dimensions of the same fundamental condition. We cannot be fully at home in ourselves while ignoring social injustice (as Merton learned through his engagement with civil rights and peace movements). We cannot build just societies without the inner transformation that overcomes greed and violence (Cardijn’s movement was always spiritual as well as social). We cannot endure a historical crisis without both inner resources and communal support (Bonhoeffer needed both his prayer life and his Christian community).
The Incarnation: God’s Homelessness
At the heart of all this is the Incarnation—God becoming human in Jesus Christ. What does this mean for our understanding of homelessness?
God leaves the ultimate home—heaven, eternity —to become homeless with us. Jesus was born because humans have become homeless and are not seeking the Kingdom of Heaven. He becomes a refugee when Herod tries to kill him. He grew up in Nazareth, a nowhere town (”Can anything good come from Nazareth?”). He has no place to lay his head. He dies outside the city walls, the place of outcasts and criminals.
God enters into our homelessness completely. This is the scandal of Christian faith: God doesn’t call us home from a distance but comes to be homeless with us, to show us the way home from inside our condition.
The Cross and Resurrection: Death and Homecoming
Jesus’s path home leads through the cross. There’s no way around this. Every form of false security, every way we try to make ourselves feel at home through our own efforts, must die. The false self must be crucified. Our attachment to security, status, comfort, even life itself—all must be surrendered.
But the cross is not the end. The Resurrection reveals that when we die with Christ, we rise with him. We find that what we thought was death is actually birth. The homelessness we feared is actually freedom. We are no longer grasping at belonging because we already belong to God.
Paul writes: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). This is the most radical statement of finding home: we discover that our true home is Christ himself, living in us and we in him.
The Church: Home for the Homeless
The Church, at its best, is a community of the homeless—people who recognize they don’t fully belong to this world, who are “strangers and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11), yet who find their home together in Christ.
This is why the early Christians called each other “brother” and “sister” ~ they were forming a new family, a household of faith that transcended blood, ethnicity, class, and nationality. This is what Bonhoeffer experienced at Finkenwalde, what Cardijn built in the YCW, what Merton discovered extended beyond monastery walls to encompass all humanity.
But the Church fails when it becomes a source of false security, telling us we can be at home in this world’s terms if we adopt the correct beliefs and behaviors. The Church is meant to be a pilgrim people, always moving toward the Kingdom that is both now and not yet, both here and still coming.
OK, I know this was long, so here is the Conclusion: Living as Pilgrims
The Journey Home
So, where does this leave us? If humans are indeed the only homeless animals, what do we do about it?
The answer these three teachers give us is not to deny our homelessness or pretend it away, but to embrace it as the very condition that can lead us home. Our homelessness is not a bug in the system; it’s a feature. It’s what makes us capable of seeking God, questioning, growing, and transforming.
Animals are at home instinctively, but they cannot choose their home or transcend it. We are homeless spiritually, but this very homelessness opens us to the infinite, to God, to our true home, which is beyond anything this world can offer. To reach out to those who are physically homeless, and it is a call for us to work to end homelessness.
The life, as these men lived it, is a journey with three essential movements:
Awakening to Homelessness (Seeing): Recognizing that we are not at home—not in unjust social structures, not in the false self, not in a world that crucifies Christ again and again. This is what Cardijn’s “See” demanded, what Merton discovered in his restless searching, what Bonhoeffer faced when Germany embraced evil.
Seeking True Home (Judging/Discerning): Evaluating everything in light of the Gospel. What is the true home Jesus offers? It’s not comfort, security, or success. It’s the Kingdom of God—a way of life based on love, justice, truth, and self-giving. It’s finding our true self in God. It’s life together in an authentic community.
Walking the Way (Acting): Actually following Jesus, which means taking up the cross. It means working for justice like Cardijn, going deep into contemplative practice like Merton, and risking everything for truth like Bonhoeffer. There is no arriving home without walking home.
Practical Implications
What does this mean practically for us?
In our social lives, we must strive for a world where everyone has a home — physical shelter, dignity, meaningful work, just relationships, and a sense of belonging. We cannot accept systems that cause homelessness. This requires political engagement, economic justice, and solidarity with the poor and marginalized.
In our inner lives, we must do the hard work of contemplation, of silence, of stripping away the false self. This means regular prayer, honest self-examination, and letting go of our need for approval and control. It means learning to be present, to be here now, to be real.
In our everyday life, we must build genuine Christian community—messy, demanding, real relationships where we confess, forgive, bear burdens, speak truth, and love concretely. Not the idealized community of our dreams, but the actual community of imperfect people trying to follow Jesus together.
In our time, we must be willing to stand against the currents of our age when they contradict the Gospel. This will make us homeless in some ways—we won’t quite fit, we’ll be countercultural, we might face opposition. But this is the cost of discipleship.
The Already and the Not Yet
Finally, we must live in the tension Jesus himself taught: the Kingdom is already here, and the Kingdom is not yet fully come. We are already home in Christ, and we are still journeying home. This is not a contradiction; it’s the nature of Christian existence.
We taste our true home in moments of genuine community, in experiences of God’s presence, in acts of justice and love. These are foretastes of the feast to come. But we still groan with all creation, waiting for redemption to be complete (Romans 8:22-23).
The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of the great heroes of faith who “admitted that they were foreigners and strangers on earth... They were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them” (Hebrews 11:13-16).
This is our calling: to be homeless enough to seek our true home, yet at home enough in God to live with joy, purpose, and courage right now.
OK, My Final Word
Cardijn, Merton, and Bonhoeffer all died believing they were home. Cardijn lived to see his movement flourish, providing a sense of home and dignity to millions of workers. Merton died in Bangkok at an interfaith conference, having found that his house in Christ was large enough to embrace all seekers of truth. Bonhoeffer died a martyr, sure that his death was “the beginning of life.”
Each found home not by grasping at security, but by letting go. Not by defending their place in the world, but by following Jesus wherever he led. Not by arriving at a destination, but by walking the way.
Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). He didn’t say, “I will show you the way home.” He said, “I am the way.” Christ himself is our home—not a place we’re trying to reach, but a person in whom we already live and move and have our being.
And so we walk. We work for justice. We pray without ceasing. We love our neighbors. We bear our crosses. We die to the false self. We build community. We resist evil. We remain faithful.
And in doing all this, even in our homelessness, we discover that we are already home.
May we have the courage to embrace our homelessness as the gift that draws us to God. May we follow Jesus with the social passion of Cardijn, the contemplative depth of Merton, and the courageous witness of Bonhoeffer. And may we discover, as they did, that in losing our lives we find them, and that the homeless Christ has prepared a home for us that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come can ever take away.
Can I hear an Amen?
Questions for Discussion with your small groups:
In what ways do you experience homelessness—socially, spiritually, or historically?
Which of these three teachers speaks most powerfully to your current situation?
What would it mean to embrace costly grace in your context?
How can we build communities that provide a true home while remaining pilgrims?
What false homes are you clinging to that might need to die?
How does Jesus’ own experience of homelessness shape our understanding of faith and discipleship today?
How can Cardijn’s “See, Judge, Act” framework be used to address the housing crisis in your own context?
What does Merton’s language of “the homeless God” invite us to rethink about security, possessions, and the meaning of belonging?
In what ways might Bonhoeffer’s insights reframe our responsibility to those who are homeless in our communities?
Where do you see the “homecoming” most needed—in your own heart, church, neighborhood, or society?