Love in action.

Within the mile-and-a-half stretch between the White House and the U.S. Capitol--Caesar at one end, pharaohs at the other--is the Homeless Belt. Rachel's House, Sarah's House Mt. Carmel House, Zacchaeus community kitchen, the Community for Creative Non-violence, a pair of Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, and Luther Place women's shelter are among the scenes of mercy and rescue where thousands of the destitute and displaced receive care every day.

Both to get a reportorial fix on the American economy--a view from the bottom up, not the top down--and to be moochingly energized by contact with the shelter providers who open their hearts and doors to the poor, I've been a visitor to each of these places over the years. They are society's intensive-care units for the diseases of poverty.

The two that I've visited the most, taking large groups of my high-school and law-school students with me, are Luther Place and Llewellyn Scott Catholic Worker house. Since the 1970s, both have been run by people who practice a radical Christianity that sees welcoming the stranger as the central exercise of faith. Neighborhood gentrifiers have told both shelters to get lost, along with the lost souls in their care.

John Steinbruck is the pastor of Luther Place Memorial Church at 1226 Vermont Ave., NW, and Michael Kirwan heads Llewellyn Scott Catholic Worker at 1305 T Street, NW. There is a connection between their work and their faith. Without a belief in God and without a conviction that Christ is present in the homeless, neither Steinbruck nor Kirwan could have kept going all these years. The work is too emotionally draining, too politically dead-end, and often too physically wearying for the customary compensations--a paycheck, a 401(K) for retirement--to be pump-ups enabling them to face another day, week, or year of it. Government contracts and foundation grants are feeble enticements.

I'd argue that in any city in any part of the country, it's mostly, and perhaps only, people who are religiously motivated--and by a faith that emphasizes service and self-sacrifice and minimizes doctrines and pulpiteering--who are sharing their lives with the outcast poor. They do so not as dabblers who appear at soup kitchens on Thanksgiving and Christmas to elbow into the serving line for their annual moment of soup-ladling and then depart until next year's stint of feel-good charity. Instead, they engage in a lifetime commitment to what Dostoevsky, in his last and most lasting novel, The Brothers Karamazov, called "active love."

Father Zossima, who voices the gospel according to Dostoevsky, offers his spiritual advice to a troubled woman of too much pride and wealth: "Strive to love your neighbors actively and indefatigably. And the nearer you come to achieving this love, the more convinced you will become of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul." When the woman confesses that she dreams of giving away her money to the poor and serving them as a nurse, Zossima replies, "Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams."

Steinbruck began dealing with harshness and dread when in 1969 he was chosen by the Luther Place search committee to be the new pastor of the parish. The elders issued a command: Fill up the church with people.

Did he ever--with people of no homes or addresses or jobs. Steinbruck, whose theological allegiances are with Albert Schweitzer and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, can thunder with the best of them about the cruelties of governmental policies that push people into the streets. He scolds church leaders for preaching the gospel of play-it-safe religion.

"Churches, frankly, are not the constituency of Jesus," he says. "They are a reflection of middle-class, upper-class, comfortable, well-established Americans who think they have their security in all of their investments and portfolios. They are fools. Churches don't want to deal with the homeless. Hell, when you go to churches over in Northern Virginia--it's like the Pentagon of worship. Jesus of Nazareth would not get past the front line of ushers at the eleven o'clock Sunday service. He'd never get into a seminary. He would not pass the Myers-Briggs. He had problems with authority!"

Now in his mid-sixties, Steinbruck has more than a quarter-century of direct service to homeless people as the mark of his faith. And he now has Eden House, an eight-story apartment building with fifty-one units (two or three bedrooms each) for low-income families. It is for the working poor, those who are one paycheck away from the streets. The building was blessed and dedicated in mid-December, when the city's politicians, and a few members of Congress, came together with the 350-member flock to expand Steinbruck's ministry of hospitality.

Eden House exists only because Steinbruck persuaded a Michigan Congressman who chaired a House appropriations subcommittee to put a $5 million special line-item into a housing bill. Then the pastor mastered the paperwork of the National Low Income Housing Tax Credits to secure $5.4 million toward Eden House. He went to foundations and started a capital campaign with the church.

Without that gripping of the money-machine gears--an art that only a few shelter providers ever learn, much less practice well--Eden House would never have risen. On the front lawn of the church is a graveyard, a four-by-eight-foot plot that holds the urned ashes of eight homeless people whose bodies went unclaimed in the city morgue. It is the closest cemetery to the White House. The White House flag flutters eight blocks away from the granite tombstone bearing the names of the buried. A local elected official has declared the graveyard illegal. Steinbruck has no plans to obey the law, whatever it might be.

Five minutes to the north is Michael Kirwan's Catholic Worker house. In the tradition of Dorothy Day, the pacifist-anarchist who died in 1980, Kirwan lives in voluntary poverty with the men and women who share his three-story house. In 1978, Kirwan, then in his mid-twenties, was a graduate student at George Washington University. Homelessness was not yet a national issue. One winter evening, he took a beggar into his dorm for a night. The man stayed thirty days.

In time, he found a room for several more street people. When university officials ruled that his dorm was not a shelter, Kirwan refused to leave. "For the first time in my life," he says, "I took a stand. I told them I wouldn't leave until all of us had a place to go. The university took me to court. The judge was sympathetic and told me that what I was doing was a good thing but that I couldn't do it in university housing. He told me, though, that he would give me three months to find another place to live and we could all stay together."

Thousands have passed through Kirwan's houses since then. He attends Mass every day, regularly prays the Rosary while walking around the Pentagon, and refers often to the life and writings of Dorothy Day, who was a family friend.

Kirwan's grandfather was Representative Michael Kirwan, a member of Congress from 1935 to 1970 and a labor Democrat from Youngstown, Ohio. In 1934, he was a penniless handyman thrown off a freight train in Youngstown. An open seat for Congress was announced. When ten people offered to run, a town meeting was called. Each hopeful was asked to give a speech on why he wanted to go to Congress. After the first nine candidates gabbed endlessly about their love of humankind, Michael Kirwan, poor and out of work, gave the shortest speech of the night: "I want to go to Congress because I need a job."

Hearing the first honest words of the evening, the crowd went wild. They elected Michael Kirwan, and he was forever known in his district as "Honest Mike." His grandson relishes the twist: Here he is, two generations later, taking care of people as poor as his grandfather when thrown off a hobo's train.

There's another twist, too. In official Washington, some of the most recognizable faces are those of politicians. In the unofficial Washington of the shelters and soup kitchens and the streets in between few people are as well known as Michael Kirwan. I spent the morning with him not long ago. At every turn, the lame and halt called out his name. He would stop to talk with each one, and then, walking on, tell me their stories. There is a stubborn confidence to Kirwan, one that has him convinced that his love of Christ can't be expressed in any way except by serving society's unloved and unseen. I can't imagine him enduring this long without a biblically based spirituality.

William James wrote: "The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for religious ideals."

He must have had people like John Steinbruck and Michael Kirwan in mind.

Colman McCarthy is a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board.