"Philip had lived on the streets since he was five, abused, exploited, and now dying…. I took care of him personally, washing him, dressing him, and telling him of the great adventure with God up ahead.

"He slept at the foot of my bed on a little mattress. "I’m afraid I’ll die alone," he said. He did die, and we buried him like a king."

On May 22, 2007 Fr. David Kirk, founder of Emmaus House Harlem and a beloved Madonna House associate priest, died alone in his sleep. But Fr. David often told me he was not afraid to die alone.

Due to kidney failure and other complications, Fr. David had been in dire health for a long time. In fact, by 2002 it was obvious that he could not live much longer. Mercifully the Lord came to him in his sleep, and we do not need to fantasize that moment between them:

Come and inherit the kingdom, David…I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me to drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me… I tell you solemnly, in so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers (and sisters) of mine, you did it to me (Mt 25:34–36, 40).

Of his own life David wrote in a form letter which he sent to many of us back in the mid-90s.

"My conversion to Jesus Christ and to the Catholic Church, in 1953, came in the midst of violence and race riots at the University of Alabama…. After my baptism and confirmation, I studied Scripture with Fr. (later Archbishop) Joseph Raya (then a pastor in Birmingham, Alabama), and Matthew 25 and Luke 4 struck me like lightning.

"I was lonely for brothers who shared the same radical vision of the Gospel. I was about to accept a teaching job, get married, and buy a car. But the Gospel stuck like a grape in my throat.

"In one day, I left my family; I left everything and caught a train to New York. I got off the train with $10 in my pocket and there happened to be a Catholic Worker selling papers at the station. He took me home to Dorothy (Day). There I served in the Bowery (skid row) for two years while completing my MA in Social Thought at Columbia University.

"In 1960 I left Dorothy and the Catholic Worker to study for the priesthood in Rome. Dorothy came to Rome and together we met Patriarch Maximos (of the Melkite Rite) and explained her work and the context of my future ministry.

The Patriarch sponsored me for studies for the patriarchal clergy for the United States with the condition that I work, not in a parish, but in a ministry for the poor. ‘You are studying and you are being ordained a priest for the poor,’ he said.

"I was ordained in Jerusalem on the Feast of the Transfiguration 1964—also Hiroshima Day. I chose this feast because it stated how humanity could either be destroyed or transformed….

"My first liturgy was on the Mount of Olives in the Chapel of Christ Weeping Over the City—a proper place to begin my life for the poor, a life weeping by the Harlem River.

"I served my pastoral year in Birmingham, Alabama while working on Martin Luther King Jr.’s team in Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery…."

Then in 1965 Fr. David began Emmaus House, a small house of hospitality in Harlem, the large African-American section of New York City.

In 1978 Emmaus House joined the Emmaus International Movement founded by Abbé Pierre, the "Rag-Picker" priest in Paris.

Today Emmaus House in Harlem is a community of sixty homeless men and women, living and working together, helping themselves while caring for those still on the streets, and fighting for change in an unjust society. They live together as a family, sharing work and meals as they rebuild their lives.

I first remember Fr. David in 1960 at The Institute for Non-violence at Notre Dame University, when he was still a layman. Though I do not know exactly when he began to visit Madonna House, I remember him here in the late 70s. He became an associate priest of Madonna House in August 1985.

In his last letter to me he wrote, "I think about Madonna House all the time and depend so much on the spirit of Catherine and the prayers of my brothers and sisters there."

When he and I would talk by phone and I would ask him how he was, he often quoted me a couple of lines from one of Bob Dylan’s songs,

"Lone Ranger and Tonto comin’ down the line,
fixin’ everybody’s trouble, everybody’s ’cept mine.
Guess I’m doin’ fine."

Over the years it surprised me to discover how vast Fr. David’s sense of music, literature, poetry, and drama was. And he was like a kid in a candy store if ever he got a chance to go to Madison Square Garden for "Bob Dylan Live." (Incidentally, Bob Dylan often donated money to Emmaus House.)

Yes, Fr. David Kirk was indeed a very special man. It is fitting that his heroic life ended as it did there in Harlem among those whom he loved and with all sorts of loose ends and unresolved things—not the least of which was his overwhelming agony over the future of Emmaus House Harlem.

But Fr. David was never unresolved about or overwhelmed by his love and identification with the poor in Christ. It was his life.