While We Were Just Talking About It

Kip Tiernan, founder of the first homeless shelter for women, one of my all time heroes, died of cancer yesterday, she was 85.

Rosie's Place was what she was most known for but she was involved in so many other things. The Boston Globe, this morning, gives this list:

Boston Health Care for the Homeless, Boston Food Bank, Community Works, Aid to Incarcerated Mothers, Finex House, Food for Free, John Leary House, My Sister’s Place, Transition House, the Greater Boston Union of the Homeless, and Boston’s Emergency Shelter Commission.

Kip Tiernan was a living embodiment of how at odds with fashion being a worker for justice and equality is going to be. She was a successful member of Alcoholics Anonymous at a time that is unfashionable, an example of why it works for a number of the people who try it. She was an "angry daughter of Christ" who wore a cross around her neck while clearly taking up hers and following far better than most. Also from the Globe:

The cross she wore was more than a symbol.

“A rooted woman, Kip always wears that cross,’’ Globe op-ed columnist James Carroll wrote in 1996, “which marks her not for piety or for a religion of easy answers, but for being, in her words, ‘an angry daughter of Christ. . . . I find that the cross of Jesus is the radical condemnation of an unjust world. You have to stay with the one crucified or stand with the crucifiers.’ ’’

In that she drew inspiration from Dorothy Day, another unfashionable person who had more important things to do than the more well remembered and generally far less accomplished leftists she'd been associated with.

Kip Tiernan's work led her to be arrested in protests and to generally make the too comfortable uncomfortable. In every way she is an example of someone who did it while others, me included, just talked about it.