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Hospitality to the Homeless ˜ 55
when we owned slaves, and evening would set, and darkness would come, people
would leave the cotton fields, or the corn patch, or come out of the barn or
the kitchen in the big house after the children had been put to bed; we had some
care about what happened to those people because we wanted them to work the
next day. They had food, cabins, clothes, and rest. We wanted their market value
of $500 to $2,300 in the flesh. But in this country we have no such interest anymore.
We don’t give a damn if, after eight hours of work at $4.25 an hour, workers
spend all that money on crack cocaine, because we don’t care whether it’s the
same person doing the work tomorrow that did it yesterday. It doesn’t matter to
us because there are so many people hungry and homeless, begging for work.
There is a demonic force in the slavery of the twentieth century that, through
economic self-interest, did not exist in the nineteenth century. Prisons, public
and private, are a part of this slave system as well.
Second, in the world in which we live, there is a moral mystery. How in the
world, with our gospel, with our founding documents, with the movements in
democratic institutions and the resources for human compassion, how is it that
some time in the 1970s there emerged a new phenomenon in the urban areas of
the United States of America, called homelessness And how is it that by 1990,
homelessness has been institutionalized and accepted by the middle class We
simply expect it. Why do we not scream when we see boys and girls, men and
women, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons outside at night It’s a mystery.
With our poets and novelists, our singers and preachers, our lovely parks, how
has homelessness been institutionalized in the United States
Now let us enter, from that world of the well, into the world of the poor,
the homeless. Let us go out onto the streets, where people struggle. Let us learn
the most important spiritual disciplines and political tools of listening to the cry
of the poor.
It is midnight in an urban setting like Atlanta. There are people lying on the
streets, trying to sleep. Between them and the concrete is a piece of cardboard.
How wonderful it is, sometime after eight o’clock at night, when the dumpsters
have been emptied and you are still able to find a piece of cardboard that is six
feet long and a couple of feet wide! Cardboard is precious at midnight on the
streets because it is insulation. Have you ever slept on concrete Even in the
summertime it sucks the heat right out of your body. Praise God for cardboard!
What a wonderful experience at two o’clock in the morning to find a neglected
piece of cardboard. The business community instructs those who collect
the garbage, “Don’t leave any cardboard around. You know it brings those damn
derelicts down here. When you empty that garbage you make sure there is no
cardboard!” You find a piece of cardboard, and it’s two o’clock, and you take
your cardboard to some place where you will not be seen, and you lie down.
Maybe in a parking lot. You sneak into a covered parking lot, and by two o’clock
the security guard is nodding her head, and you can move past, as though you