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270 ˜ A Work of Hospitality, 1982–2002
covered body and clothes. The Open Door was shut. Accustomed to hearing
“No,” too ready, perhaps, to receive rejection, Willie returned to the city streets,
itching and aching from the previous day’s labor.
Work is a basic hunger of the human heart. Without good work we cannot
be good people. God has created us to express a basic dimension of our “imago
Dei” through works that lead to nurture, healing, justice, and worshipful play.
Unemployment, underemployment, and works that produce injury and harm
are social sins, and societies that thrust their members into bad work are visited
from time to time by the God of justice.
Willie did more than run with the ball in high school. He worked. He was
a dishwasher, busperson, and waiter at the Davis House Restaurant throughout
his high school days. His mother, too, knew the travail of labor considered by
the majority in our society to be unworthy of coverage under the minimumwage
laws in the 1950s and 1960s. She was a domestic for a white family before
being employed by a local motel in Athens.
Willie did run the ball into college and entered Savannah State College in
1966 on a football grant. He began as an art major but later changed to mathematics.
A knee injury ended his football playing, but after graduation he was fit
for the draft. The Vietnam War was raging.
Something changed for Willie London, or, if not changed, at least became
evident during the terrible war years. He saw no battle firsthand, but he began
to slide away from himself at times. By 1973 the bottle and not the football had
Willie running. He was running hard and perhaps desperately toward a goal line
that did not exist.
The downward spiral in an upwardly mobile society is excruciating. A Black
man wandering with an alcohol-soluble anchor is a lost man in this white-controlled
society. In 1975, three years after leaving the Army, Willie was shipped to
the VA Hospital for help with nerves and addiction. Then Willie moved back to
Athens for jobs on the assembly line and bouts with unemployment, homelessness,
and alcohol. Finally, in 1979, he was sent by the courts to a halfway house
for alcoholics, prisoners, and others coming out of Georgia’s institutions.
Out of the halfway house, Willie was running again like a young man with
the goal line in view. He was ready to “go for it” and had a sense of purpose and
direction. Thirty-two years old in 1980, Willie was now ready to move ahead.
But he could find work nowhere. He put in application after application, but
everywhere he turned he heard the familiar and death-dealing “No” which had
broken him in earlier life. So Willie did what thousands and thousands of poor
men and women must do: he reenlisted in the military. This time it was the
Navy.
“Blessed are the peacemakers,” said the homeless Jesus one day up on a
mountaintop. “You shall be called daughters and sons of God,” this gentle