Barking to the Choir

“God leans into us so that we will let go of the image of God as unreasonable parent, exacting teacher, or ruthless coach. God is not who we think God is. Our search for God is not a scavenger hunt; God is everywhere and in everything. Our sense of God always beckons us to grow, to reimagine something wildly more breathtaking than where our imagination generally takes us.”

Boyle articulates some of the misconceptions about God he feels are very common. He feels many people are accustomed to conceiving of God as a displeased authority figure who offers only criticism until his children get back in line. But in Boyle’s philosophy, this image of God is far too limiting. Boyle believes instead in a God found in everything—including the seemingly insignificant as well as that which is beyond human imagination. Boyle spends much of this text pursuing this point—asking his reader to stretch their conception of God beyond the image of a displeased authority figure and into an alternate conception of a God intimately interested in every single person as well as the contours and complexities of life. 

“Surely God must be disappointed that hunger exists in the world when we have the means to feed everyone. God has to be saddened by the number of guns in the United States and people’s willingness to use them on each other. God undoubtedly is dismayed that the Catholic Church continues to exclude women from ordained ministry and limit gays and the divorced and remarried Catholics from the fullest of welcomes. One can only imagine God’s response to the Church’s global child abuse scandal. But in all this, and in many other things, disappointment is not the foot God puts forward. There is instead only a redoubling of God’s loving us into kinship with each other. If we truly allow that tenderness to reach us, then peace, justice, and equality will be its by-product.”

Much of the text centers around Boyle’s insights gleaned from the intimate bonds he shares with the men and women who form the Homeboy Industries community. In this text, Boyle rarely directly confronts a pressing political or social issue, preferring instead to ground his writing in the emotional, psychological, social, and spiritual aspects of individuals. But here, Boyle baldly notes several social and political issues. This bolsters his credibility in a key way: He is letting the reader know he is not at all ignorant to the pressing social and political issues of the day; however, he refuses to formalize his text and his thoughts as categorically “conservative” or “liberal.” While the viewpoints expressed here fall more on the liberal side of the political spectrum, Boyle does not wish to become mired in such political distinctions. Instead, he presses for a fuller understanding of God only attainable by being in intimate and tender relation to others—not by regurgitating any dictums, whether religious or political. 

“Whenever Gato, a large, burly gang member, is telling a story and approaching the climax, he wants to say ‘And lo and behold!’ but says instead ‘And holy befold.’ I never correct him, because his version is better than the original—indeed, it is the sacred, the holy, unfolding right before our eyes.”

In this passage, Boyle takes another malapropism spoken by a homie and heralds it as the progenitor of unexpected wisdom and insight. Instead of dismissing or correcting Gato, Boyle here leans into the malapropism, mining it for a new and surprising nugget of wisdom. In so doing, Boyle linguistically demonstrates the power of his idiosyncratic and capacious compassion. Boyle’s refusal to dismiss his homies based on face-value mistakes—and his push to discover beauty and wisdom in these mistakes—is representative of the love he feels for them as well as the inherent and unassailable worth he sees in them. 

“As human beings, we find it difficult to recognize the holy as God does. Nothing is outside the realm of sanctity, for the world is infused with God’s presence. God has trouble understanding the distinction we make between the sacred and what we believe to be the profane. But that’s what human beings do: we confine the divine.”

Boyle continues to challenge his readers’ preconceptions about what is and is not holy. He seems accustomed to audiences, both religious and not, holding rigid and impoverished images of a God who makes narrow and judgmental distinctions, and then withholds love based on those distinctions. For Boyle, this tendency is a human failing—and one humans project onto a God beyond such limited and limiting machinations. For Boyle, God is present in the subtleties and even in the things many people would dismiss as godless or immoral. Boyle spends much of this text attempting to pull the wool from his readers’ eyes so they may come into a fuller and deeper understanding of a God who is not limited by human failure, or by textbook obsessions with right and wrong. 

“I’m distracted by three teenage girls. Their fingers are lightly gripping the chain-link fence facing the parking lot and the front door of the bakery, and they are giggling uncontrollably. I can hear the blaring sound of cumbia music. Then I see the source of their amusement. Big old Danny, one of our bakers, is dancing a raucous cumbia with tiny Carlitos, another baker, both from rival gangs, arm in arm, in their white bakery uniforms, covered in flour, swirling each other to these girls’ endless delight.”

In this poignantly rendered scene, Boyle delights in a fleeting, quotidian moment undergirded by the gravity of Danny and Carlitos’ shared history as members of rival gangs. As Boyle depicts the two men sharing a moment of sweetness and joy, which is subsequently spread to the teenage girls who find delight in watching them dance, humanity and tenderness triumph over gang rivalries and other obstacles preventing human connection. These moments are Boyle’s bread and butter: kinship unfolding in the everyday, despite the limitations that would quash it. 

“There is one line that stopped me in my tracks: ‘And awe came upon everyone.’ it would seem that, quite possibly, the ultimate measure of health in any community might well reside in our ability to stand in awe at what folks have to carry rather than in judgment at how they carry it.”

This chapter of the book derives its name from this passage in the Book of Acts. In so doing, he defines what the word “awe” means to him. He takes the word beyond its colloquial meaning and directly applies it in relation to both his everyday life and his everyday spiritual calling in order to perform a subversion of sorts. By enlivening a piece of scripture likely familiar to a Christian audience, Boyle hopes to stir up and restructure his reader’s engagement with and understanding of Christianity and the Bible. For Boyle, the Bible is not a static text to be consulted in a theoretical or punitive manner. Instead, it is a jumping-off point for immediate, vital, and compassionate engagement with fellow humans. 

“The story is horrifying. But with that horror comes a compulsion to turn away in judgment, especially of the father, who was almost certainly mentally ill or had been exposed to a similar violence as a kid himself. in moving away from the father, we in turn move away from the son, whose eventual gang activity we will abhor, but who was surely shaped by such a moment and could have used our empathy the most to prevent the cycle from continuing. Kinship asks us to move from blame to understanding. Our practice of awe empties a room, and suddenly there is space for expansive compassion.”

Boyle reflects on a homie’s revelation of the deeply disturbing domestic violence he witnessed as a child. Boyle recites the story not so his reader will gawk at the homie’s story, or turn away in disgust, but so his reader can expand their sense of compassion and understand that gang members routinely dismissed and punished by society are actually human beings—deserving of compassion for the horrific and painful things they have experienced. Boyle’s persistent request his reader reevaluate the metrics used to measure and judge others, especially the impoverished and traumatized gang members with whom Homeboy Industries works, is a consistent thread throughout the book. 

“‘After that,’ he continues, with a resolve to stay within this story’s truth, ‘I did not talk for a month. For thirty days, I did not utter or speak a single word.’ Suddenly the entire audience found itself in a place of lavish forgiveness at what the sight of Manny led them to think when they first laid eyes on him. Awe trading places with judgment, swiftly and cleanly, ‘for fond love and for shame.’”

In this passage, a homie named Manny publicly speaks about Rafa, a teenaged neighbor Manny had when he was only six-years-old. Rafa protected Manny and took him under his wing, promising to become a doctor and come back and rescue Manny as if he were his own son. But Rafa was murdered by a gunshot to the head as he walked next to Manny through the street. The aftermath of that great trauma is displayed in this passage. As Manny articulates his story, Boyle watches the crowd receiving him. In the crowd, Boyle sees his previously delineated definition of awe in action. For Boyle, true awe occurs when people refuse to let their judgments prevent them from receiving others with the salvific compassion and understanding each person deserves. 

“In John’s gospel, Mary Magdalene is in a panic at the empty tomb on Easter morning. Weeping, she pleads with a man she thinks is the gardener, ‘They’ve taken my Lord, and I don’t know where they have lain him.’ But here’s the thing: Mary doesn’t know that the gardener is Jesus. His least recognizable form. And so too with the gang member, and the mother receiving welfare, and the heroin addict, and the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. To practice the sacrament of sacred presence is to be Jesus, and to see Jesus. It’s all right in front of us, here and now.”

Boyle directly ties a Bible story to a lesson to be learned and applied in everyday relationships and perspectives. As is his wont, Boyle is unsatisfied with addressing Bible stories as static parables. Instead, he seeks to apply the insights he gains from them in a practical and conversational way. In so doing, Boyle hopes to transform his reader’s perspective on both the Bible and his fellow man. Boyle upholds people’s interactions with one another as the perfect opportunity to encounter divinity through the practice of compassion and being present in the current moment for those around them. 

“‘I’m at a pitchfork in my life,’ a program candidate tells me. (Good thing I speak homie, so I know what he means.) ‘I’ve decided to be determined.’”

Boyle once again delineates one of his homie’s malapropisms with tenderness and humor—even going so far as to say he “speaks homie,” and can therefore decode the linguistic flubs often occurring within his community. By doing this, Boyle infuses his text with charm and authenticity.

“If love is the answer, community is the context, and tenderness is the methodology. Otherwise, love stays in the head, or, worse, hovers above it. Or it stays in the heart, which is never enough. For unless love becomes tenderness—the connective tissue of love—it never becomes transformational. The tender doesn’t happen tomorrow...only now.”

Boyle parses one of the most important topics in the book: tenderness. For Boyle, tenderness cultivated and enacted in peoples’ everyday relationships and bonds to each other is the transformational vehicle of love. Here, Boyle stays true to the guiding principles of this text by never leaving his religious insight in the theoretical realm. Instead, with great immediacy somehow still mixed with gentleness, he directs his readers to the places where they can apply Biblical insights: directly in their communities and relationships. He also gently chides his reader that this is something that can be practiced immediately and without deferral to another day. 

“This is a chapter on humility. Not the kind that requires ‘self-defecating,’ a beating up of oneself until one’s esteem is leveled beyond recognition. Rather, it is the humility that can lead to a peaceful surrender and a pervasive sense of gratitude. It is the natural terrain of connection with another, and how we are to arrive at a place of cherishing in kinship. It is, as they say in business, not a ‘downsizing’ but a ‘right-sizing’.”

Boyle engages with another homie malapropism here—“self-defecating” instead of “self-deprecating.” Boyle playfully teases out the implications created by the homie’s mistake in order to offer a nugget of insight. For Boyle, humility is not a dirtying or degrading of oneself, but purposefully choosing to enter relationships with other human beings with a “pervasive sense of gratitude” ultimately leading to kinship bonds based in compassion and understanding. 

“Surely a measure of our kinship will always rest in the certainty that no life holds more value than another. I was once part of a protest trying to stop the execution of the next inmate on San Quentin’s death row, a man who had killed a police officer. At a counter-demonstration the following day, LA County sheriff Lee Baca addressed the previous day’s protest. ‘Do they mean to tell us,’ he asked, ‘that the life of a man who killed a cop is worth more than the life he took?’ Well, no. Not more, but the same. To think otherwise is to mire ourselves in the opposite of kinship, in a world where not everyone belongs.”

Boyle explains, in detail, what the word “kinship” means to him. The concept grounding kinship is the enduring principle that no one life or person is worth more than another. Boyle subtly combats systemic inequality in this passage, as he leans into his illustration by providing a quotation from LA County sheriff Lee Baca. In normative political discourse, the lives of sheriffs are routinely placed above those of civilians—so much so that police officials will go out of their way to twist protest in favor of saving a life as an assault to themselves. Boyle gently untangles this leap in logic, affirming instead the protest in which he took part did not assert the inmate’s life was worth more than the life he took, but was simply equivalent to it. This insistence upon heralding the worth of all—even and especially those systemically discarded by society at large—is the basis for Boyle’s idea of kinship. 

“‘So,’ he glowers and nods, ‘you’re the famous Father Greg. G-Dog.’ This last name is surrounded by aggressive air quotes. ‘I know aaaaallllllllll about you,’ he says, his head bouncing up and down like he now has all the evidence he needs to convict me before a jury of my peers. ‘Your reputation exceeds you.’ I let him down gently, suggesting he is not the first person who thinks this, including myself.”

In this humorous passage, Boyle highlights another homie malapropism. This malapropism is particularly apropos, as the chapter is structured around the idea of humility, and the homie’s malapropism inadvertently communicates Boyle’s reputation is bigger than what the man merits. Although Boyle knows the homie does not mean to denigrate him at all, Boyle leans into the malapropism with his signature self-deprecating humor. In so doing, he continues to implicitly assert even mistakes are full of potential for insight, understanding, and joy. 

“The root meanings of the word ‘embarrassment’ are ‘blockage’, ‘obstacle’, and ‘impediment’ to thought or action. We can feel blocked from the eventual liberation of ‘humbling ourselves’ by clinging to the sting of embarrassment and by lamenting our red-faced horror of being singled out. We can feel impeded from the transformation that comes from having a different lens from which to view things.”

Boyle continues the text’s pattern of colloquial etymology. Just as it is a central conceit for Boyle to recite homie malapropisms and then mine them for unexpected and rich insight, he also presents conversational etymological illustrations meant to surprise and challenge the reader with fresh insight. By doing this, Boyle gently and playfully challenges that which the reader might take for granted. He asks the reader to peek just beneath the surface of something they think they know (i.e. the definition of a word) in order to find a spiritual insight hiding in plain sight.

“At Homeboy Industries, I tell our senior staff that part of our task is to ‘line the hallway,’ to make that distance stretching between the old and new versions of one’s self a comforting one. We encourage and cajole with a constant tenderness as the tentative soul takes steps toward the fullness of becoming. The hallway can be long and the lure to return to an old, tired, but known and safe version can be compelling. And those who line the hallway haven’t arrived fully either. Our mutual accompaniment with each other along the way pulls us all over the finish line. It’s about the ‘rehab of the soul’, as one of our senior staff puts it. We all line the hallway on this good journey with only gentleness in our rucksack and our own brokenness within reach.”

Boyle spins an extended metaphor. In this metaphor, a hallway is compared to the path a homie takes during his time with Homeboy Industries—a path leading them away from their former life and into a new one. Boyle shares he uses this metaphor to train and center his senior staff at Homeboy Industries; he also points out that, although it is these staffers’ job to assist the homies, neither Boyle nor the staffers themselves see themselves as already fully-formed and therefore authority figures over the homies. In Boyle’s egalitarian vision, no one is perfect—not the mentors nor the mentees. Boyle finds peace and joy in this. For him, Christian ministry is not predicated upon someone more perfect leading others into perfection, but upon human beings—both equally imperfect and equally deserving of love and compassion—coming together in order to find God within generous and loving kinship with one another. 

“‘They loved us,’ Leo begins, ‘and when we finished they gave us a stand-up probation.’ The office erupts into laughter and Leo turns to me, confused. ‘Standing ovation’, I tell him. I expect him to be embarrassed by his mistake, but the laughter doesn’t seem to rattle him. He’s in a place where getting it perfectly right is not the coin of the realm. Worth beyond perfection, shot in the foot long ago.”

Boyle presents another homie malapropism. But instead of letting the mistake stand and then mining it for its hidden insight, as he does in other parts of the text, he spins Leo’s lack of embarrassment about his mistake as beauty and strength. For Boyle, Leo’s lack of embarrassment about his mistake represents the way Leo is more advanced than other people. Far from being preoccupied with virtue and rightness, and instead in possession of a humility and wise conviction of his own worth as a human being, Leo is unbothered by his mistake. This illustrates Boyle’s larger statement that true kinship is founded in the humility, compassion, and self-compassion Leo displays as an imperfect human being. 

“Every homie I know who has killed somebody—everyone—has carried a load one hundred times heavier than I have had to carry, weighed down by torture, violence, abuse, neglect, abandonment, or mental illness. Most of us have never borne that weight. We are free not to like that truth, but we are not free to deny it.”

Boyle directly confronts critics who might say he harbors, aids, and abets murderers. Boyle has no qualms about admitting he works with admitted and convicted murderers. But he refuses to see them in a dehumanized light reductive to their entire being. Instead, he sees these people as full humans saddled with more crushing pain and trauma than most people have ever had to endure. He baldly points out this fact here, asking his critics to take a step back from their dehumanizing and ultimately hypocritical stance and to see the people they would summarily dismiss and discard as “murderers” as instead full human beings deserving of compassion. 

“Was this a close encounter of the ‘evil’ kind? I used to say that it was. Now I am certain I was just speaking with a carrier of great pain. Desmond Tutu was right when he said there are no evil people, just evil acts; no monsters, just monstrous acts. A probation officer used to say, when certain homies would come up in conversation, ‘No use trying to help that guy. He’s pure evil.’ Such comments merely compelled me to re-double my efforts. Slapping the dismissive label of ‘evil’ on a person has never seemed very sophisticated or reverent of human complexity.”

Boyle parses the aftermath of a hateful and racist call he received at Homeboy Industries. He admits he was inclined to reduce the caller to simply an evil person, and dismiss him on those grounds. However, he quickly corrects himself, seeing if he were to do so, he would be employing the same spiritually- and intellectually-impoverished attitude as the probation officers who summarily discard and dismiss gang members as “evil” and less than human—beneath regard. He challenges himself to apply his own philosophy in a way that doesn’t feel immediately comfortable—in precisely the same manner he is asking his reader to upend and examine their preconceptions.  

“Loving as the ground of your being. Al Bundy always knew how to locate the freedom to choose, habitually, the most loving thing. His effort was never really about perfecting himself or becoming a ‘good’ person. It was about making his already-good love more perfect and real. Beyond the designations we have for each other—felon, loser, bad guy—we are all just doing our best to find ourselves connected to each other. Still, we must try and ‘lean in past the labels,’ as Buddhist teaching instructs.”

Boyle speaks about an inmate nicknamed Al Bundy—someone he greatly respects and regards as a teacher. To Boyle, Al Bundy’s abundant love and compassion serves as a paragon of Christian virtue. For Boyle, Al Bundy’s approach is laudable and advanced because Al Bundy firstly regards his own self and his own love as worthy. It is this conviction of every human being’s worth—over and above the limiting legal and social categorizations humans place on each other—that is and should be the guiding light of all human relationships.

“Who knows what happened when Trayvon was gunned down at a picnic a few months later? Too many guns. Too much despondent darkness. If only we could ‘stay focused, people.’ In a packed funeral home in Inglewood, I told the mourners that Tray had a flight to catch.”

Boyle remembers a homie named Trayvon, whose signature line was “Stay focused, people,” and who delighted in the opportunity to tell a group of girls at a speaking engagement he had a plane to catch, as this made him feel important. Trayvon was killed at a picnic not long after taking the trip with Boyle. Boyle’s concisely poignant remembrance affirms the humanity and worth of Trayvon—and his place as a beloved member of his community. This passage implicitly enacts much of what Boyle lays out in more concrete terms. Through his lovingly selected details, Boyle enacts the compassion he writes about. He regards and honors Trayvon’s full and unique humanity.

“As we continue to laugh, I watched as Bear closed his eyes and returned to sleep, the unmistakable trace of a smile on his lips as he did so. Now I think to myself, Mutha-fucka. He was fearless for them. He saw the grip of terror holding these guys, and he reached in and untangled the knot as deftly and selflessly as I’d ever seen. His generosity dissolved all fear and let love fill the void. Let’s build a cathedral on this spot.”

In this passage, the beloved and revered Bear finds himself grievously injured and ministered to by two other homies. As Bear awakens from his sleep in a hospital bed, he senses the anguish of his friends and makes a joke to lighten their burden. One of them responds with a good-natured ribbing by calling Bear a “mutha-fucka.” Within this interaction, Boyle witnesses a surfeit of love and kinship. He sees Bear enacting the fearlessness Boyle has spoken about within the text—a fearlessness adopted for the benefit of others. And through this depiction of a tender moment, Boyle shows how this fearlessness inspires and sates the fearful. For Boyle, this is the deep and true nature of kinship—the ability to act fearlessly for the benefit of beloved others.

“A homie, daydreaming in my office, says, ‘Hey, G, let’s go to Rome.’ I say sure, I’d love to. ‘Imagine, G,’ he says with a smile. ‘Pope Francis up in that balcony thing…’ He stands and extends his arms, affecting something of a papal accent. ‘Homeboy Industries smells like sheep.’ I’m stunned that he knows this reference—Francis imploring his ‘shepherds’ to get out of their offices so they can ‘smell like sheep.’ And there is no strain for the homie to grasp either smell or sheep. He knows what’s ‘original’ in the program is the insurmountable concern for those on the edges, who have wandered or been excluded. He knows the smell of that.”

In this vignette, a homie surprises Boyle with his knowledge of papal lore. Boyle takes this surprise and does not use it to degrade or cast aspersions upon the homie’s intelligence. Instead, he asserts that, not only does this homie know a somewhat esoteric phrase but, more importantly, this homie intimately knows a context to which that phrase beautifully applies. That context is his own life and struggle. By bringing the lofty proclamations of the pope right down to earth, Boyle enacts one of the central themes of his work. He concludes sacred insight and knowledge is not reserved for lofty figures in authority, but it can be held (and indeed is held) and practiced by “the least among us.”