All great edifices depend for solid footing on great stones buried deep below the ordinary sight lines. In the house of compassion David Kirk was such a stone — a man few of us have ever heard of, much less known. He’s worth a moment of contemplation, perhaps a space in your pantheon of those you call you on….
The Rev. David Kirk, an Eastern Orthodox priest who spent most of his adult life working with New York City’s disenfranchised, died on May 23 at Emmaus House, the communal residence for the homeless that he founded in Harlem more than 40 years ago.
… he was buried near his longtime mentor, the Roman Catholic social reformer Dorothy Day, at Resurrection Cemetery in Staten Island.
Father Kirk, for decades a presence in the civil rights and antiwar movements, established Emmaus House in the mid-1960s on East 116th Street. It was conceived not as a shelter but as a community for the city’s homeless men and women and was modeled on the Emmaus movement, begun in France after World War II to aid the poor.