Tattoos on the Heart, The Power of Boundless Compassion
By Father Gregory Boyle, Homeboy Industries
A spiritual memoir, a reflection on gang violence, the human heart, and what it takes to leave that life. The stories he tells are tragic and beautiful. He and I are alike in the view that human life is sacred. I chose this particular book looking for models of workplace development programs for those in homelessness. Homeboy Industries is the gold standard, but what I found was a kindred spirit.
Father Gregory Boyle began in Bolivia working with the poor as a Jesuit Priest. He also worked alongside brick making prisoners on an island off Mazatlan--bricks during the day and chaplain by night in the Alcatraz of Mexico. He had a sense that the poor had some “privileged delivery system for giving him access to the gospel,” which he loves. In the 80s he got his first parish at Dolores Mission in the Pico-Aliso area of Los Angeles--the poorest district and gang capital of the world, a place with a lethal absence of hope that had 1000 deaths a year due to gang violence. The women of the church had a radical hospitality about them and began inviting in all these gang affiliated outsiders, kids mostly, without dads, desperate for acceptance.
Father Gregory, known as G by the homies, came into the neighborhood in high spirits and used to ride his bike around the barrios and approach groups of gangs to introduce himself. He’d get guns pulled on him, threatened. He wouldn’t get far relationally until he started visiting homies that were wounded in the hospital or in jail. That’s when he started earning the right to be heard.
Homies that wanted out of the gang banging scene would start showing up at the church asking for help. One guy had a “F*** the World” tattoo across his forehead and was complaining that he couldn’t get a job, and couldn’t figure out why. G saw the need to get practical. He found a doctor that could remove the tattoo. But he saw the need for homies to be up to work that makes their mom’s and kids proud, and workplaces that would give them a chance. There was a building across the street and he started a bakery that started employing them. Enemies from rival gangs began having to work together. They found attachment, that found community, they found it really hard to demonize somebody when you know somebody. They started their own tattoo removal program (now removing the most tattoos in the world: 4000 a year). They started a silkscreen company, a maintenance company, cafes (they have the most popular coffee shop at LAX; Homegirl cafe). The plumbing company didn’t work out. Who knew that people wouldn’t want gang bangers in their homes doing plumbing. Endless chances would be given, for they would be fired anywhere else. The jobs became confidence builders and stepping stones to higher paying opportunities elsewhere. The aim was to see in the homies what they couldn’t see in themselves, until they could.
G says he goes after the homies because he sees in them a people created in the image of God, and of immeasurable value. G has become a wounded healer in kinship with them and their suffering. A shepherd of people without dads, without hope, and then a provider of hope and family and a true sense of dignity. He quotes that, “The principal suffering of the poor is not that they can’t pay their rent on time or that they’re three dollars short of a package of pampers, it’s shame and disgrace. A toxic shame--a global sense of failure of the whole self.” To undo this takes kinship over a long time, and then opportunities to discover their true likable selves and be up to things that they can feel good about: Work, fatherhood, friendship. Jesus was so popular because he was willing to be friends with the outcast. He ate with them, he stayed with them. He was not a man for others, but a man with others. He didn’t seek the rights of lepers, he touched lepers before he cured them. Likewise, G’s strategy is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place--with the outcast and those regulated to the margins.
Almost universally, in the soul of every homie is a hole that’s in the shape of their dad. G’s big work is helping homies with relational reattachment. It comes by being a loving caring adult who pays attention. It’s the opposite of the conditional love of the gang where one false move and you find yourself outside, where slights are remembered, and errors in judgement held against you forever. It’s rather a community of unconditional love, that shows grace and truth no matter what, and is in it for the long haul.
There’s a certain sense of “downward mobility” about his writings, where standing with the poor becomes a visible act of protest. He gets the death threats from both the hard left and hard right to prove it. He says no amount of screaming at the people in charge to change things can actually change them. Bad systems don’t get erased simply by insisting the powers that be erase them. The powers that be are moved to kinship when they observe it for themselves, when their sympathetic imagination gets exercised, from having a sense of what it would it be like to be their shoes. Personally, I would like every government leader to do ride alongs with our Street Connect outreach crew--to see the faces of the people camping next to our creeks, to hear their stories. That’ll shift how you make policy. As G says, when “You stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear,” it shifts your posture. Understand the trauma they come from, friends.
In an interview, when asked what’s the most important advice he could give, G says, “
“It’s about gang members, not gangs (and this parallels homelessness too). It’s about infusing hope to kids who are stuck in despair. It’s about healing the traumatized and damaged so that kids can transform their pain and cease to transmit it. It’s about delivering mental health services in a timely and appropriate manner to the troubled young among us. Above all, it’s about reverence for the complexity of this issue and a singular insistence that human beings are involved. There are no demons here. Just young people, whose burdens are more than they can bear and who are having difficulty imagining a future for themselves. All hands on deck--if you are the proud owner of a pulse--you can be beneficial here.”
Awards:
Book: PEN Center USA Literary Award
California Peace Prize
Lifetime Achievement Award from MALDEF
