Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

by Gregory Boyle

truth is, my own tiny-spirited, puny self accommodates the status quo all the time. We adapt, we conform, and we reconfigure everything so that the status quo feels welcome and at home. When I lived in Bolivia, over thirty years ago, I contracted a bug—a “bichu,” as they called it . . . that wanted to live in me. It did not want to upset the apple cart, so this bug didn’t send me to the bathroom with violent, “both ends” activity. It wanted to live at peace with me. My only symptom was that I lost forty pounds (I’m thinking of returning to Bolivia). The status quo doesn’t want things to get upset. But hidden in this détente is division, polarity, and the striking of the high moral distance that separates us. How do we awaken from the dream of separateness, from an abiding sense that the chasm that exists between us cannot be reconciled? For it would seem that the gulf in our present age could not be wider between “Us” and “Them.” How do we tame this status quo that lulls us into blindly accepting the things that divide us and keep us from our own holy longing for the mutuality of kinship—a sure and certain sense that we belong to each other?