Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

by Gregory Boyle

So I’m in my office at Homeboy Industries talking with Ramón, a gang member who works in our bakery. Lately, he has been veering into the lane of oncoming traffic. He’s late for work, sometimes missing it entirely, and his supervisors tell me he is in need of an emergency “attitude-ectomy.” I’m

running it down to him, giving him “kletcha”—schooling him, grabbing hold of the steering wheel to correct his course. He waves me off and says, self-assuredly, “Don’t sweat it, bald-headed . . . You’re barking to the choir.” Note to self: title of my next book. I immediately liked, of course, the combo-burger nature of his phraseology. The marriage of “barking up the wrong tree” to “preaching to the choir.” It works. It calls for a rethinking of our status quo, no longer satisfied with the way the world is lulled into operating and yearning for a new vision. It is on the lookout for ways to confound and deconstruct. What gets translated in Scripture from the Greek metanoia as “repent” means “to go beyond the mind we have.” And the “barking” is directed at the “Choir”—those folks who “repent” and truly long for a different construct, a radically altered way of proceeding and who seek “a better God than the one we have.” The gospel can expose the game in which “the Choir” can find itself often complacently stuck. The game that keeps us from the kinship for which we long—the endless judging, competing, comparing, and terror

that prevents us from turning the corner and bumping into that “something new.” That “something” is the entering of the kinship of God . . . here and now, no longer satisfied with the “pie in the sky when we die.” The Choir is everyone who longs and aches to widen their “loving look” at wha...

In the end, each chapter aspires to connect us to a larger view and to participate in a larger love.

I’ve learned from giving thousands of talks that you never appeal to the conscience of your audience but, rather, introduce them to their own goodness. I remember, in my earliest days, that I used to be so angry. In talks, in op-ed pieces, in radio interviews, I shook my fist a lot. My speeches would rail against indifference and how the young men and women I buried seemed to matter less in the world than other lives. I eventually learned that shaking one’s fist at something doesn’t change it. Only love gets fists to open. Only love leads to a conjuring of kinship within reach of the actual lives we live.

Thomas Wolfe, in You Can’t Go Home Again, writes, “To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth.” We have to “lose” and “leave”—“unless the grain of wheat dies . . .” The kinship of God won’t come unless we shake things up—to “lose the earth you know”—to bark up the wrong tree, and to propose something new.

When we opened Homegirl Café on East First Street eight years ago and the wildly colorful sign sat above the front door, a woman I didn’t know called me screaming, “Why would you name it such a thing? You have ruined our neighborhood.” Oscar Romero wrote: “A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed—what gospel is that?” It would seem not to take much these days, to provoke or unsettle.

God is a nudge. Not in the nagging, annoying sense, but in a gentle, leaning-into sense. It is indeed a challenge to abandon the long-held belief that God yearns to blame and punish us, ask us to measure up or express disappointment and disapproval at every turn. It is part of our hardwiring. But we can feel, nonetheless, God nudging us beyond our tired, atrophied complacence toward something more oceanic and spacious. We feel God’s desire for fullness to dwell in us. We are always being pushed and inched closer to the “God who is always greater,” as Saint Ignatius frames it. Or as a homie changing gears in his head from Spanish to English awkwardly but accurately blurts, “God is Big.”

We want to believe that we have a God, as Hafez asserts, who only knows four words. Every child has known God. Not the God of names, Not the God of don’ts, Not the God who ever does anything weird. But the God who only knows

Four words. And He keeps repeating them, saying: “Come dance w...

I was once saying mass at the San Fernando Juvenile Hall. With nearly three hundred detained minors—mostly gang members—a homie reads from Psalm 138. I’m seated, vested, eyes closed, choosing to listen to this kid’s proclamation, rather than follow along in the liturgical sheet that rests on my lap. He reads, with an overabundance of confidence, “The Lord . . . is EXHAUSTED.” What the hell? I open my eyes and hurriedly refer to my sheet. It says, “The Lord is exalted,” but I think “exhausted” is way better. I’m not sure I want to spend eternity with a God who wants to be exalted,

who longs to be recognized and made a big deal of. I would rather hope for a humble God who gets exhausted in delighting over and loving us. That is a better God than the one we have.

We refine our sense, then, of God and what Ignatius calls the “Magis,” which refers to an affection for God. He also calls it “devotion,” which is a pervasive familiarity and union with God, a desire to want what God wants. We seek to live where God is and our understanding of that evolves and changes all the time. This is consequential for, as Jesus says, “Come to me and you’ll find rest.” We are not being offered sleep, but freedom. There is an openness—the spacious, expansive, inclusive heart to which we are invited. “Ándale.”

One of our therapists told me of arriving to work on a Monday with a box of Triscuits for one of her clients, Andres, who is always “hongry,” as he puts it. As a nine-year-old, he came home from school to find that his mother (whom I presume was mentally ill) had packed up her things and left her only son. For the next two years he was homeless and a Dumpster diver, sleeping on park benches until he was found by the “system.” After foster care, gang involvement, and detention, Andres wandered into our place and began our program.

“You brought these for me?” he asked in disbelief. The therapist told me later that he was stunned that she had “held” him all weekend. She nodded. “You mean . . . you think of me . . . when you’re not here?” She nodded again. “Wow. I never pictured that anyone would think of me when they’re not here.” Without optimal care-giving relationships and object constancy, the gang members who walk through our doors can feel real anguish and abandonment. There is a chronic fear of both intimacy and being left behind. “I will never forget you,” Isaiah has God say to us for this exact reason. And truth be told about our God: God thinks of us even when we don’t think God’s there.

Hafez gives us this image: “God and I have become like two giant fat people living in a tiny boat. We keep bumping into each other and laughing.” This feels like the pulse of God to me—to be loved like a rock, forever, unchanging, and as solid as can be. We need to let ourselves be bumped into and loved

that the laughing will be contagious.

During Advent, we are called to prepare the way . . . to “make straight the path” and make smooth what is rocky. Our hardwiring is such that we hear these invitations as a demand to “straighten up” or “get our act together.” But it’s not we who needs changing—it’s our crooked path that needs to be smoothed . . . so we can be reached by God’s tenderness. One of the many impediments to hearing the only message God longs to communicate to us is our marriage to the pain we carry and the lament that accompanies it.

With grace, we come to know that lament can’t get a foothold if gratitude gets there first.

Some things are random and other things are meant to be in our control. So God is with me when “shit happens” and God is rooting for me when I need to decide things. And I’m okay with that. I don’t need God to be in charge of my life. I only need God to be at

the center of it.

As elated as I was, I had no need to believe that God had orchestrated this woman’s arrival. God would have been centrally present even if I had to face down some very bereft homies. After all, nothing depends on how things turn out—only on how you see them when they happen. Emmanuel: the name that means God with us is not moving the dials and turning the switches but tenderly holding us through it all. Everyone gets those emails

usually sent from strangers. There is this particular one that made the rounds that recounts how all these people, heading to the World Trade Center on 9/11, were delayed arriving because of some small annoyance. Traffic jam due to an accident on the New Jersey Turnpike. A kid’s first day in kindergarten. My turn to get the donuts for the office. The alarm didn’t go off. The list is long. The writer concludes that though we are initially frustrated by such derailments, they remain proof that God is at work watching over us. Then we have to believe that God, on 9/11, watched over some and failed to watch over thousands of others. Which then paints us into a preposterous corner,

forcing...

say, “God has his reasons,” or, worse, “Heaven needed another angel.” I believe that God protects me from nothing but sustains me in e...

Often enough, we get in the habit of shaking our fists at God

and saying, WHAT do you WANT from me? We are programmed this way as humans. But I suppose it would be more accurate to ask God this: What do you want FOR me? For starters: life, happiness, and peace: My joy yours. Your joy complete. That’s it. Nothing less than that.

cushions. Hafez wrote: Slipping on my shoes, boiling water, toasting bread, buttering the sky, That should be enough contact With God in one day To make everyone “crazy.”

Oh, and did I mention passing gas? Every single moment of our lives asks us to be charmed, captivated, enticed, thrilled, and pleased. We don’t wait for such moments to fall out of the sky; we just put ourselves on high alert to catch these moments as they happen. After all, like certain bodily functions, discovering the holy in all things is indeed a process. It is also an impulse, like smiling, which does not await the arrival of joy but actually precedes and hastens it. Being alert to the sacred in our midst is a choice that gets more meaningful as we practice it. My friend Pema Chödrön counsels us to “always maintain a joyful mind.” Turns out, joy comes with a “maintenance contract.”

C. S. Lewis wrote that “holiness . . . is irresistible.” It is our inkling, naturally, to suspect that doing tiny, decent things possesses a great power. It is a world-altering holiness in which our truest selves long to participate. I once walked into the restroom at Homeboy and noticed that two stalls were occupied. Suddenly someone spoke: while they were doing their business, one homie was doling out marital advice to the guy in the adjacent stall. “She just needs you to listen to her. Talk less. Open your ears more. Watch what happens, dog.” And with that being said . . . life’s great.

And awe came upon everyone. The fourteenth-century mystic Dame Julian of Norwich thought that the truest and most authentic spiritual life was one that produced awe, humility, and love. But awe gets lost in that triad. We are at our healthiest when we are most situated in awe, and at our least healthy when we engage in judgment. Judgment creates the distance that moves us away from each other. Judgment keeps us in the competitive game and is always self-aggrandizing. Standing at the margins with the broken reminds us not of our own superiority but of our own brokenness. Awe is the great leveler. The embrace of our own suffering helps us to land on a spiritual intimacy with ourselves and others. For if we don’t welcome our own wounds, we will be tempted to despise the wounded.

“Then my dad ran past me and out of the room,” Alex remembers. “Out of the house, and out of our lives, forever.” He cries now, much the same, I imagine, as his father had those many years ago. “And it’s all my fault.” What is most crushing sometimes is not the pain, exactly, but what stands right behind it—“Not what happens to us in childhood,” poet Jack Gilbert writes, “but what was inside what happened.” Jorge is truly shaken,

A homie named Saul nearly overdoses on heroin. His ten-year-old

old son Louie writes him a letter, delivering it to his hospital room. Today, Saul has the letter, exactly as written, handwriting and all, tattooed on his calf. “I suppose I could have just saved the letter,” he told me once. “But I wanted it on me so I could read it every day.” Dear Dad: I don’t have much to say but I want you to stop doing drugs. I don’t want you to die at a young age. I want you to be there when I have a child. It was a sad moment when my Mom told me what happened to you. Well, that’s all I wanted to say. PS: Please stop. Sincerely, Your 1st son. I love you.

A homie called me on the phone and broke down in tears, lamenting his terminally ill refrigerator. All the food in it had gone bad and he found himself at the very end of a very worn and tattered rope. When he showed up in my office some hours later for help, he apologized for having had, what he called, an “appliance meltdown.” Instead of saying this thing had been the “straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said, “And that’s what got the camel to fall.” It is a self-help maxim of the privileged to say, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” But the folks at the bottom have to. What the privileged consider “small stuff” are precisely the trips and traps that foil the folks at the bottom: no bank account; no car, or one that can reliably get you where you’re going; no health insurance; several dollars short of a package of Pampers (and when you have a poopy baby and no diapers, I’d say “sweating” would indeed be in order). It isn’t simply that being poor means having less money than the privileged; it’s that being poor means living in a continual state of acute crisis. This is what they have to lug around every day. The poor are always one straw away from calamity and catastrophe. Homies who have now chosen to “play by the rules” often find themselves stuck in what I call the “forced-choice economy,” having to choose between, say, feeding their kids or paying their rent. Doing without heat and electricity or putting gas in the car. There is a good chance that the camel will fall f...

A homie named Cruz spent his last dollars taking a Metrolink train sixty miles to Los Angeles from San Bernardino, where he had relocated his lady and newborn to avoid the dangers and desperation of his previous gang life. He had a part-time job but could not get his boss to give him more hours. Now he sits in my office, rattling off a list of the pressures and needs of his family. With no safety net in sight but me, he speaks of no food in the fridge, no lights, landlord looming, no bus fare. When he finishes this breathless account, Cruz stops, shaken and exhausted. He grows teary-eyed and says quietly, “I just keep waiting.” “For what, son?” I ask. “For the last to be first.” On the mountain tonight the full moon faces the full sun. Now could be the moment when we fall apart or we become whole. Our time seems to be up—I think I even hear it stopping. Then why have we kept up the singing for so long? Because that’s the sort of determined creature we are. Before us, our first task is to astonish, And then, harder by far, to be astonished. —Galway Kinnell