Street Sabbatical: Life Lessons for a Contemplative Beggar

Did you know there are homeless who live in houses as well as on the streets? During a six month sabbatical, Paul Mast developed a spirituality of homelessness that fits both groups. It is founded on the spiritual conviction, that the label “homelessness” fits anyone whose haunting struggle with a personal/emotional/relational issue triggers an interior displacement. This experience kicks some people out of a physical home and others out of a spiritual center, while searching to build a new interior house to come home too. His journey took him to eight cities where he encountered the homeless on streets, in shelters, and in houses. Street Sabbatical is a reverent and touching account of those encounters. The journey began and ended in Washington, D.C. In between, he vectored to San Francisco, Dallas, New Delhi, Munich, Milwaukee, Wilmington, and Honolulu. The streets and shelters of those cities is where this wandering spiritual pilgrim learned life lessons that uncovered new meaning for him as a priest, spiritual director, retreat/workshop presenter, and author.

Paul now defines himself as a contemplative beggar. His gift for storytelling will wiggle its way into the soul of every reader and rest there long enough to change behaviors and attitudes about being homeless and the life-long endeavor to undergo “extreme spiritual interior makeovers” until at last we find our home “in Thee.” His book will challenge you to help reverse the cultural stigmas of the homeless by engaging them through the lens of human dignity and compassion.

Log on to his new website

BanTheLabelHomeless.com

to see how you can help.

Paul Mast was born in Dover (Kent County) Delaware in 1946 and raised in Clayton. It was his version of Mayberry – an idyllic place where bullying was not part of his small town culture. He attended public elementary and Catholic high school where the seeds of a priestly vocation were nurtured. He was ordained for the Diocese of Wilmington in May 1972. In 1980 he completed an M.A. degree in Religious Education from Fordham University. He completed a post-graduate degree from the Catholic University of America in 1986 and a doctorate at The University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, IL in 1993. In 2000 he completed a Certificate in Spiritual Direction at Neumann University in Aston, PA. Two years later his skills were stretched to new limits as a spiritual director with victims and parents of the clergy sex abuse scandal. It was his own version of the “Dark Night of the Soul,” a spiritual metaphor of interior growth, beautifully captured as a canticle by the 16th century Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross. From 2008-2010, he wrote and published four articles in major Catholic periodicals reflecting on his experience as a spiritual director with abuse victims. These formed the backdrop for writing his first novel, Fatal Absolution. Released in 2013 by Brighton Publishing it is a murder mystery set in Long Island and Ireland based on the scandal. Looking back he needed to write that book first. Getting free of his own scars from the scandal helped him to feel more at home interiorly. Only then could he set his heart on a path from which Street Sabbatical was born. It is his testament to how the power of compassion with the homeless changes hearts. They helped him to find his true inner home with the God whose divine DNA is always to be compassionate toward us. With the completion of this book he is turning his attention to promoting his spirituality of homelessness. Log onto the website:

BanTheLabelHomeless.com and see how you can help to reverse the stigma of that label.

His personal website is: www.gospelsoftretreats.org