Tattoos on the Heart

By Gregory Boyle

Theme quote of the book:  “Lencho’s voice matters.  To that end, we choose to become “enlightened witnesses” – people who through their kindness, tenderness, and focused attentive love return folks to themselves.  It’s returning not measuring up.”

Fringe lives matter.  I could end here, but I prefer to use it as a head line, or better yet a tag line for a call to social justice through non-profit NPO works.  To be certain, this is not a call to government reforms as a prime directive.  It’s a call to an awakening that the voices on the margins need to be heard, not on the streets or on headline news; but in your hearts.  These voices have souls feeling their worth and refusing to forget that we all belong. These are souls that are searching for a sense of kinship.   If there exists in the reader’s heart a compassionate string, Gregory Boyle will tug on it.  That tug will be so profound that it will ring the bells in your activist mind to respond in some way. 

If you allow the seed of compassion to germinate and sprout through the rest of the thoughts that rattle through your mind, you may be compelled to respond in an outward way.  It may be simply being strong enough to openly advocate that these fringe souls are brothers of ours. There is a kinship that requires a response.  And in that kinship you help them if for no other reason than he or she is your brother.  Quid-pro-quo transcends to pro bono.  Out of unconditional love as Father G calls it the “no matter whatness” you listen to their story, their voice, their need, without judgment and find a compulsion to reach out to them in some way.

So who is Father G, Greg Boyle?  He is a Jesuit Priest and prime mover of Homeboy Industries in inner city Los Angeles.  His mission is to help Hispanic gang members out of their downward spiral of crime, drugs, and gangbang drive by shootings, on to the ladder that they can, under their own free will, climb up  to a society where they have a just-footing with a sense of self worth.   It’s important to note that Father G created the space, the foundation for the gang members to begin their climb.  He did this by allowing them into his sense of kinship, recognizing them as equal.  This helping hand is offered to the victims and the perpetrators equally.  They are really all gang members on both sides of one coin, equally spent.  Father G advocates that helping hands need to come from (give from) kinship.  There is no shame or guilt to be found in the desperate social ground that these gang members find themselves in.  It’s a social setting for which these gang members know nothing else. 

What are Father G’s tools?  First is funding from the Catholic Church.  Second is compassion to come down from the cross and ‘empty himself’ out to his, in this context, peers.  He implements these tools by creating a way forward through what he founded, Homeboy Industries.  Gang members, who for many reasons described in the book, took that first step out of prison through Homeboy Industries.  They had to decide they want a better life.  They had to choose work, gainful employment, over gang banging. He set the foundation and left the door open for that decision to not only be made but also realized.  Finally, the stories about this transition are rich in drama and humor.  The humor comes out in Father G’s internalizing and then interpreting gang lingo in to a language more commonly understood in a productive society, where social acceptance is normal.  In humor there is always humility.  The stories told are too often fraught with the humility that exists in the social settings of Latino barrios of Los Angeles.  Where you cry, you also laugh.

What will the reader get from this book?  First a sense of compassion that is in my opinion laying dormant in our western, competitively driven society.  You will awaken to a stronger sense of inclusiveness, and the sense of its merits.  There is a story in the book whereby Father G is putting on the sales pitch for the owner of an auto repair garage in the neighborhood to hire a homie who aspires to rise from gangbanging to be an automobile mechanic.   The homie wanted to be someone, to have an identity in society.  To belong. The closing line of Father G’s sales pitch is to the garage owner was   “if you hire him, he will fix cars for you as opposed to robbing you.”  The owner hired him.  The story comes with a lot of humor but however ends with a tragic ending.  Once again as way too often occurs the young aspiring auto mechanic is GUNNED down in a drive by gangbanging.  This reader, myself, took a second look at gun control from a social change perspective.  How do we get the guns out of the gang’s hands?  Father G’s answer was to not take them away, but to rather give them a reason to lay them down.  In his book he speaks loudly to the slow hand of God and the strong need for companionate patience.

In the review, I realized that I used the “?”  punctuation symbol a few times.  You will come away from this book asking yourself, what can I do?  This question should not be limited to Hispanic Gangs.  Look around you, or better yet go out and consciously search for it.  Look for who is on the fringe and look in to their eyes and listen for the silent cry for…belonging.  When you genuinely hear it, you’ll know what to do.

Quotes from the book:

Page 43:  shame is at the root of all addictions.  This would be certainly true with the gang addiction …  the call is to allow the painful shame of others to have a purchase on our lives.  Not to fix the pain but to feel it.

Page 46:  The absence of self love is shame, “just as cold is the absence  of warmth, Disgrace obscuring the sun.   …Guilt, of course is feeling bad about one’s accounts, but shame is feeling bad about one’s  self.

Page 52:  the principle suffering of the poor is shame and disgrace.  IT is toxic shame…global sense of failure of the whole self.

Page 55:  Who doesn’t want to be called by name known?  The knowing and “naming” seem to get at our “inner sense of disfigurement.

Page 60:  Out of the wreck of our disfigured, mishappened selves, so darkened by shame and disgrace, indeed the Lord comes to us disguised as ourselves.  And we don’t grow in to this..we just learn to pay better attention.  The “no matter whatness”of God dissolves the toxicity of shame and fills us with tender mercy.  Favorable, finally and called by name…by the one your mom uses when she is not pissed off.

Page 64: “Hey G, are ya goin anywhere?”

“No mijo,” I say

He comes alive, :can I go with ya?”

The destination, apparently was less important…it’s the “going with” that counted.

Page 66:  I will admit that the degree of difficulty here is exceedingly high.  Kids I love killing kids I love

Page 67:  Here is what we seek:  a compassion that can only stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.

Page 70:  Jesus’ strategy is a simple one.  He eats with them.  Precisely to those paralyzed in this toxic shame Jesus says, “ I will eat with you.”  He goes where love has not yet arrived, and he gets his grub on.  Eating with outcasts rendered them acceptable.

Page 71:  the trues measure of compassion is not in our service to those on the margins, but the willingness to see ourselves in kinship.

Page 72:  The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place.

Page 77:  Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded.   It’s a covenant between equals.

Page 82:  Sometimes resilience arrives in the moment you discover your own unshakeable goodness. …”sometimes it’s necessary to re-teach a thing it’s loveliness.”

Page 89:  I want to know and Miguel has his answer at the ready. “You know I always suspected that there was something of goodness in me, but I couldn’t find it.  Until one day I discovered it here in my heart.  I found it …goodness.” And ever since that day, I have always know who I was… and now nothing can change me.

Page 94: Resilience is born by grounding yourself in your own loveliness, hitting notes you thought were way out of your range.

Page 108:  He says straight out “You are the light. “  It is the truth who you are, waiting only for you to discover it.  So for God’s sake don’t move.  No need to contort yourself to be  anything other than who you are.

Page 111:  “Mijo. It will end.” I say, “the minute …you decide.”

Page 114:  “That’s right,” I say, “Tonight you taught me that no amount of my wanting you to have a life is the same as you wanting to have one.  Now I can help you get a life…I just cannot give you the desire to want one.  So when you want a life call me.”

Page 115:  Sometimes you need to walk in the gang members door, in order to introduce him to a brand new door.  You grab what he finds valuable and bend it around something else, a new form of nobility.

Page 121:  “There is nothing once and for all” to any decision to change.  Each day brings a new embarking.  It’s always a recalibration and a reassessing of attitude and old, tired ways of proceeding, which are hard to shake for any of us.

Page 128:  Fortunately, none of us can save anybody.  But we all find ourselves in this dark, windowless room, fumbling for grace and flashlights.  You aim the light this time, and I’ll do it the next…the slow work of God.

Page 145:  Close both eyes, see with the other one.  Then, we are no longer saddled by the burden of our persistent judgments, our ceaseless withholding, our constant exclusion.  Our sphere has widened, and we find ourselves, quite unexpectedly, in a new, expansive location, in a place of endless acceptance and infinite love.

We have wondered into Gods own “jurisdiction.”

Page 162:  As we back in God’s attention, our eyes adjust to the light, and we begin to see as God does.  The, quite unexpectedly, we discover “the music with nothing playing.

…They they just decided to cross out those words and famously inserted instead, “they joy and hope”…”  No new data had rushed in on them, and the world hadn’t changed suddenly.  They just chose, in a heartbeat, to see the world differently.

Page 167:   Twenty years of this work has taught me that God is greater comfort with inverting categories than I do.  What is success and what is failure?  What is good and what is bad?  Setback or progress?  Great stock these days, especially in nonprofits (and who can blame them) is placed on outcomes.  People, funders in particular, want to know what you do “works. “

Page 172:  Sr. Elaine Roulette, the founder of My Mothers House in New your, was asked, “How do you work with the poor?”  She answered, “You don’t. You share your life with the poor.”  It’s as basic as crying together.  It is about “casting your lot” before it ever becomes about “changing their lot.”

Page 173: We don’t strategize our way out of slavery, we solidarize, if you will, our way towards its demise.

  

Page 177:  What is the failure of death when, after all, when it is measured against what rises in you when you catch the sight of this white bird?...that rises above you when you dream

Page 192: Lencho’s voice matters.  To that end, we choose to become “enlightened witnesses” – people who through their kindness, tenderness, and focused attentive love return folks to themselves.  It’s returning not measuring up.

Page 211:  Every homies death recalls all the previous ones, and they all arrive at once, in a rush.  I’m caught off guard as well, by the sudden realization that Chicos’ death is my eight in the past three weeks.

Page 212:  And so the voices at the margins get heard and the circle of compassion widens.  Souls feeling their worth, refusing to forget that we belong to each other.  No bullet can pierce this.  The vision still has its time, and yes it presses on to fulfillment.  It will not disappoint.  And yet, if it delays, we can surely wait for it.