By Rita McInerney

“No one may claim the name Christian and be comfortable in the face of the hunger, homelessness, insecurity, and in justice found in this country and in the world.” -- Third draft of the American bishops’ pastoral, “Economic Justice for All”

An omen of approaching winter cast a chill over Atlanta this week as a group was coming together in downtown Woodruff Park to show concern for the ever-increasing number of men, women and children who have no home address.

The rally and all-night vigil by Atlanta Advocates for the Homeless turned attention once again to the thousands of people in Atlanta existing within the boundaries of the streets, night shelters and soup kitchens.

Many of these homeless people are known to Ed Loring, Presbyterian minister whose ministry to the street people is based at the Open Door, a Catholic Worker house of hospitality on Ponce de Leon Avenue. He is the man other advocates call most knowledgeable about the stark tragedy of the homeless in Atlanta. And is predicting the number could reach 10,000 this winter.

Of great pain to him is the attitude surfacing all over the city that the presence of the poor and the homeless is bad for the neighborhood. The reality of the Open Door is an area being gentrified (a planners’ term for upgrading a neighborhood economically) is distasteful to some of this neighbors who would prefer that the refuge be someplace else.

The Open Door’s presence is a prominent and sobering one in the 900 block of East Ponce. The large tan brick building of 56 rooms is a mecca several mornings each week for homeless men and a few women who have spent the night in abandoned buildings, catholes and on the cold ground. They crowd the doorway, line the walk and sit on the steps and low walls surrounding several blue crosses that have been set in the grass memorializing the victims of death squads in Central America.

Soon the doors will open and they will be able to shower the dirt and stench off their aching bodies. Clean clothes will be exchanged for the filthy castoffs they wear. And then there will be food.

“Why is it in our society that to be working for profits puts you against the poor?” Loring asks. Today, he finds, people are afraid that helping the homeless will hurt their businesses and property values.

But to him, a man who goes where the homeless have to stand and wait, the labor pools, parks, soup kitchens and streets, and to City Hall and council chambers in search of justice for them, there is no gray area. “From where I sit I do not see how anyone can be a Christian in the U.S. and not make a preferential option for the poor,” he says with a passion rooted in the biblical message yet as current as the bishops’ message on the U.S. economy.

Like the Old Testament prophets, he says he believes “If you don’t care for the poor, the structure the way of life will crumble.”

Ed Loring says the administration of Mayor Andrew Young is supportive of city shelters and churches opening their doors to the homeless. When it translates to City Council action the support fades, he says, citing the council’s recent vote against a Help House family shelter in the East Lake area.

He goes on to mention a futile attempt by Bill Bolling, a leader of the Task Force on the Homeless, to have a representative for the street people on the task force considering drastic proposals to clear downtown of street people. Some cities, Loring claims, tax the developers of luxury hotels and use such levies for low-income housing.

The total focus of Loring’s life is helping the homeless rejects of society. He lives at the Open Door with his wife, Murphy Davis, like him a Presbyterian minister, who works as an advocate for Death Row prisoners and their families, and women prisoners, along with serving the homeless.

They opened the first church shelter in the city on Nov. 1, 1979, at Clifton Presbyterian Church where Ed Loring was then serving as pastor. One year later they were joined by Rob and Carolyn Johnson. On Christmas Day, 1981, the four partners welcomed 100 homeless men and women to a festive meal at the Ponce de Leon house, formerly owned by the Atlanta Union Mission, and Open Door was born.

Their daughter, Hannah Loring-Davis, soon to be seven and a student at Our Lady of Lourdes School, was born 10 days before they opened the shelter at Clifton. “We really have found our place. It’s a wonderful way to raise a child,” Loring says now.

The family shares their life with broken men and women. Some of the guests stay a week, others a lifetime. Right now there are 11 men and two women living at the Open Door. Like other houses of hospitality inspired by Dorothy Day, the staff and resident volunteers relate to the guests on a personal level. Loring says that while everyone’s needs are different, everyone needs love and each guest has a pastoral friend among the resident volunteers who commit themselves for a minimum stay of six months.

Many of the guests, he says, are so broken, so passive after the “hell” of being oppressed, of being told at every turn “you’re worthless, you’re no good,” that it’s too late to find the strength to start over, even with the love and security offered at the Open Door. Others, he says, have put their resources back together. Three people off the street have died while living there.

Ministry at the Open Door includes a seven-days-a-week soup kitchen, breakfast taken five days a week to as many as 200 street people at Butler Street C.M.E. Church, showers and a change of clothes three mornings a week, the chance to use the telephone five days a week. There is Bible study on alternate Wednesday evenings and worship on Sunday evenings.

Ed Loring’s life is finely tuned to God and the Gospel. “Every time I get burned out is every time I am unfaithful to my life of prayer and worship," he confesses. He believes the foundation of activism must be rooted in Christian faith, sabbath rest, reflection, silence and solitude. Early morning time with his Bible is important and he replenished his strength and interior peace from the writings of Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. On rare occasions, on their day off, he and Murphy go to a movie.

The problem of the homeless, he insists, is “rooted in our economic and cultural system. The minimum wage of $3.35 per house is far too low in contrast to the cost of living.” He believes there would be a happier, more just society if the minimum wage was higher. He sees the U.S., “the richest country in human history,” as having resources to permit a $10 minimum wage. “There is more than enough for everybody in our society. Yet we are the first society in human history where the majority of the poor are children,” and 20 percent of the population is living below the poverty level. It is not a question of a lack of food or housing, but of a lack of political will, he says.

Loring is well acquainted with the difficulties blocking the homeless trying to break out of the cycle of despair and powerlessness. He offers the example of a young male trying to get off the streets. He finds a job as a dishwasher and the frustration comes when he is told his first paycheck is two weeks away. He shows up on the second day without having been able to take a shower. This displeases his boss, who fires him. He is back on the street.

There are not enough jobs available to sustain life for people without resources, Loring says. And of the judgmental people who call street people lazy, who say they don’t want to work, he says they “know nothing of the journey, the desire for work and dignity that fills these young men and women.”

“Unemployment,” he says, “is disobedience to the Ten Commandments, is breaking God’s laws. The powerful turn it upside down and say ‘these people don’t want to work.’ This is a myth that fills the minds of our upper class society.”

He would be glad to take anyone of such mind out to the early morning labor pools and show them “people begging for any kind of labor… It is the 1986 version of the 1846 slave market. The weakest, most powerless are those who die, walk the street, sit in jails and prisons. In the past six years I have come to believe hell will be simply in the abyss with nothing to do."

Street people taste hell in the torment and desolation of having nothing to do with their days, he says with intense feeling: people desperately seeking an answer to “What do you do when you don’t have anything to do?” with normal needs for attention, gentleness and love. When these basic human needs go unfilled, the homeless turn to alcohol, aberrant behavior, hassling people in the street, Loring concedes. These are behaviors that get attention for people “conscious that no one considers them of worth, who have nowhere to go where they are welcome.”

These are the people he is trying to help, wisely not trying to redeem everyone but remaining small because smallness, like a mustard seed, is a sign of the kingdom of God, he wrote in a colloquy on justice published by Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Oberlin Graduate School of Theology in 1983.

In his ministry he follows advice from Thomas Merton to activists: “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his/her work for peace. It destroys his/her own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his/her work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

The activist’s life, Loring says, “must be rooted in spiritual discipline.” The terrible consequence of work with the poor if not spiritually based can be hatred for the poor, he says. “It has to do with our relationship with God. In the pressure of the activist life the first thing you give up is prayer. One reason I advocate community life together is so we may be alone.”