Emmaus House, in New York City’s Harlem, is a community of formerly homeless people who serve the homeless. It was founded in the 1960s by Fr. David Kirk, a Melkite priest who became Orthodox a couple of years before his death in 2007. Fr. David was at the Catholic Worker before starting Emmaus House. He had thought of opening a house of hospitality in lower Manhattan, but Dorothy Day told him he should go to Harlem, and he did, with some friends who, like him, were inspired by Abbé Pierre, founder of the Emmaus movement in Europe. Kirk remained devoted to the memory of Dorothy Day and bought a burial plot not far from hers on Staten Island.

For some years Emmaus was active on several fronts, demonstrating on behalf of the poor, providing housing for people with AIDS, offering legal help to those unable to pay, conducting some vocational training. Over the past several years it has had to curtail its outreach. Fr. David’s failing health forced a drastic cut in Emmaus activities. Food and clothing are still distributed, and once a week the community’s van visits places where the homeless congregate, giving out soup, sandwiches, socks, and blankets.

I met David Kirk in the late ’60s, when he approached my father’s publishing company, Templegate, with a book proposal. He had gathered material from the Gospels and the fathers of the church, all focusing on our obligation to make peace and serve the poor. I was an editor at Templegate, and worked with David on what would become Quotations from Chairman Jesus, the title a riff on Mao’s little red book.

We were in touch for a while. He urged me to come to Harlem to work with him, but our family was young and I couldn’t see moving the kids to New York. Our contacts were infrequent until I moved to New York to attend seminary. We made vague plans to get together, but didn’t at first.

A few years ago my friends Albert and Julia Raboteau gathered some people around the idea of starting an Orthodox ministry in Harlem. Our first effort fell apart, and we found ourselves talking with Fr. David (I had not known of his move to Orthodoxy). He was determined to see Emmaus continue as an Orthodox ministry, and Albert and Julia and I met with him regularly.

When David died two years ago this May, we wondered if Emmaus could continue at all. Funds were very low—a perpetual problem—but thanks to some of the people Fr. David asked to help him during his illness, the work has continued, even in the absence of a full-time live-in spiritual director.

I am attached to an Orthodox parish on Long Island. The new pastor, Fr. Martin Kraus, has involved our parish in the life of Emmaus. Nicholas Reeves, our choir director, was responsible for a benefit performance of Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, which was well attended and raised some money. Fr. Martin recently took our youth group to Emmaus, where Darryl Wood, Emmaus’s community coordinator, gave the kids a tour of Harlem. They saw, among other things, the hotel where Martin Luther King Jr. stayed, and the place next to a rock in Marcus Garvey Park where Darryl slept when he was homeless. Then they returned to Emmaus, where there was a brief service in the chapel, dinner, and preparation for the night’s visit to the homeless. The kids helped make the soup and sandwiches, and went with members of the Emmaus community to hand out food and blankets to people who, on that bitterly cold night, really needed them.

That would have delighted Fr. David. He was born poor in the deep South, and got involved early in the civil-rights movement. It was the religious commitment of so many of its members that moved him toward Christianity and later to the Catholic Worker. I visited with him in the hospital, and we talked about his activism and the 1960s, and about the time we had gone together to an antiwar Mass, staged as a protest at the Pentagon. He had not lost his fundamental radicalism but had grown away from some of the counterculture’s crazier features. When Francine du Plessix Grey profiled him for the New Yorker years ago (the essay became part of her book Divine Disobedience), David initially objected that she had made him and Emmaus House look pretty silly. Later he came to think that she had portrayed him, and the period, pretty accurately.

During my hospital visit I gave David Communion and anointed him for healing. The unction prayers are long, and I offered to use the shorter form. “Oh no,” he said. “Say all the prayers.”