Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

by Gregory Boyle

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.

The Choir is everyone who longs and aches to widen their “loving look” at what’s right in front of them. What the Choir is searching for is the authentic. In a recent New Yorker profile of American Baptists, the congregation’s leadership resigned itself to the fact that “secular culture” would always be “hostile” to Christianity. I don’t believe this is true. Our culture is hostile only to the inauthentic living of the gospel. It sniffs out hypocrisy everywhere and knows when Christians aren’t taking seriously, what Jesus took seriously. It is, by and large, hostile to the right things. It actually longs to embrace the gospel of inclusion and nonviolence, of compassionate love and acceptance. Even atheists cherish such a prospect.

Human beings are settlers, but not in the pioneer sense. It is our human occupational hazard to settle for little. We settle for purity and piety when we are being invited to an exquisite holiness. We settle for the fear-driven when love longs to be our engine. We settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to this wildly inclusive, larger-than-any-life God. We allow our sense of God to atrophy. We settle for the illusion of separation when we are endlessly asked to enter into kinship with all. The Choir has settled for little . . . and the “barking,” like a protective sheepdog, wants to guide us back to the expansiveness of God’s own longing.

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.

“Barking” declares that the real world is not what it is cracked up to be. At Homeboy Industries, we don’t prepare for the real world—we challenge it. For the opposite of the “real world” is not the “unreal world” but the kinship of God. Therein lies our authenticity as people of faith and card-carrying members of the human race. In this authentic take, survival of the fittest is displaced by the survival of the “unfittest.” Cherry-picking makes way for “reverse cherry-picking.” What if we ceased to pledge our allegiance to the bottom line and stood, instead, with those who line the bottom? Us versus Them . . . or just Us? Good people/bad people . . . or just God’s people? Judgment or awe? Not some accepted/some rejected? . . . No . . . the rejected—the widow, orphan, stranger—are to be favored. Homeboy Industries (and this book) wants to bend the world to grace, and it doesn’t need to turn up the volume in order to accomplish that. It aspires to put a human face on the gang member. If this doesn’t happen then kinship is impeded. It is also meant to soften our conventional take on who this gang member is and ushers in an abiding belief that we belong to each other. It is anchored in the truth that all demonizing is untruth.

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. A theme that runs throughout the entire biblical narrative is that God enters our midst to upset the status quo—precisely to bark up the wrong tree.

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?

Few gang members are well educated, and yet their core intelligence and insights aren’t diminished by this lack.

Kinship is the game-changer. It is the Pearl of Great Price. It is the treasure buried in the field. Let’s sell everything to get it. Yet we think kinship is beyond our reach . . . más allá de esta vida. Yet Gospel Kinship always exposes the game, jostles the status quo in constant need of conversion, because the status quo is only interested in incessant judging, comparisons, measuring, scapegoating, and competition. And we, the Choir, are stuck in complacency.

Houdini felt that the purpose of magic was not just to amaze and amuse. It also sought to awaken hope that the impossible was indeed possible. Not bad. Why settle for less?

Beyond cure and healing, Jesus was always hopeful about widening the circle of compassion and dismantling the barriers that exclude. He stood with the sinner, the leper, and the ritually impure to usher in some new remarkable inclusion, the very kinship of God. Living the gospel, then, is less about “thinking outside the box” than about choosing to live in this ever-widening circle of inclusion.

God is a nudge. Not in the nagging, annoying sense, but in a gentle, leaning-into sense.

In spite of God’s magnitude, we have managed successfully to domesticate God. Beg. Roll over. We prefer God tamed and ready to do OUR bidding. We have trained God, if you will, to “do God’s business” outside. No doubt though, God wants to be found in the mess inside. We have settled for a “partial God,” as Richard Rohr puts it, when every minute of every moment we are asked to “move beyond the mind we have” and land increasingly on a renewed and expansive view of God. We are human beings, so we endlessly create God in our own image. We can’t help ourselves. But certainly we can catch ourselves.

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. We are nudged toward an increasingly wider view and image of God from our child consciousness to an adult consciousness. God leans into us so that we can find our way to this inner absorption of God. With any luck and some attention, we will keep landing on a better God, finally having grown comfortable in God’s tenderness. Our God is constantly saying, “Ándale” . . . “Go ahead.”

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.”

I have this red string tied around my wrist, a gift from the Dalai Lama. His Holiness blessed it by holding it in his hand, then up to his forehead, then blowing on it. The string has a knot in it—not where I’ve tied it to my wrist, but located in the center of the string somehow. Over the course of the day, the knot works its way to the side of my wrist, and I’m constantly moving the knot back to my wrist’s center. The knot represents the God who I long to be at the center of my life. It helps me remain restful in that center—unable to think of myself except in terms of God.

Some people say, “God is good, and God has a plan for you.” I believe that God is good but also that God is too busy loving me to have a plan for me. Like a caring parent, God receives our childlike painting of a tree—usually an unrecognizable mess—and delights in it. God doesn’t hand it back and say, “Come back when it looks more like a tree” or tell us how to improve it. God simply delights in us.

the truth about God is that God is too good to be true. And whenever human beings bump into something too good to be true, we decide it’s not true.

In a correspondence with a priest in Ireland, Jackie Kennedy wrote that she felt bitter toward God after the assassination of her husband. “How could God let this happen?” she asked. But God wasn’t in the Texas School Book Depository, aiding and abetting. God was—and is—in the heartbreak and in the insight born of sadness, and in the arms that wrap around our grief. I have felt this every time a kid is gunned down. Or when you have to lay off three hundred of your workers because you can’t meet payroll. Or when you are given a cancer diagnosis. Such things don’t shake your faith—they shape it. 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 Friday was looming, I found myself needing $10,000—otherwise I’d be handing out IOUs. I was entering the panic zone, so preoccupied with worry that it became difficult to attend to my duties as pastor. The day before payday, a woman pulled up to the front of the parish office in what the homies would call a “bucket,” ignoring the designated parking signs. She said that it was urgent that she speak with me, so she was brought into my office. She was in her late seventies, dressed not too differently from a bag lady, layered and oddly arrayed. Her husband had recently died, she explained, and she had been cleaning his room. “He always respected what you do with gang members,” she said as she passed me a very worn paper bag wrapped around itself twice. She explained that she had found it under his mattress. I unwound the bag and found a stack of bills inside. “I stopped counting,” she said, “once I got to $10,000.” I didn’t. It was $12,000. 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 us to say, “God has his reasons,” or, worse, “Heaven needed another angel.” I believe that God protects me from nothing but sustains me in everything.

We are forever fretting over things we think ruffle God’s feathers. God is not feathered, though. A homie said to me once, “I think God has disowned me.” But Wisdom writes, “You love all things that are and loathe nothing.” Why is that so hard for us to digest? We are always trying to “make a good impression,” but God is not so interested. Dressed for a job interview, a homie once told me: “I just want to make a good expression.” That’s more like it. Our lives, fully expressive of God’s pleasure, delight, and loving-kindness.

When we are disappointed in each other, we least resemble God. We have a God who wonders what all the measuring is about, a God who is perplexed by our raising the bar and then raising it even higher. We would do well to ask ourselves, How does God handle dismay and disappointment? 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 Catholic 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.

God loves us whole and entire, and as a community, if we emulate that, then hunger, weaponry, inequality, and every other evil will dissipate into obsolescence. This can only come when I know that I am accepted especially at my worst.

We believe that God is inclined to decline our credit card, that our account with God has insufficient funds. We don’t understand God’s generosity—it flies in the face of our human allergy to having the wool pulled over our eyes. But God is not who we think God is.

I drive Chuy home and as we pull up in front of his East Side apartment he tells me that lately he’s “been having one-on-ones with . . . you know . . . God.” “I don’t understand it,” he says as he turns and looks at me. “The Dude shows up.” I find this pretty charming and chuckle at first. Then I see that Chuy is as serious as can be. “I mean . . . why would he do that?” he asks, allowing his tears free passage. “After all the shit and bad I’ve done, why would he show up?”

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. We tend to think the sacred has to look a certain way. In our minds, we call central casting to supply cathedral spires, incense, jewel-encrusted chalices, angelic choirs. When imagining the sacred, we think of church sanctuary rather than living room; chalice instead of cup; ordained male priest instead of, well, ourselves. But lo—which is to say, look—right before your eyes, the holy is happening, even if you are hesitant to believe it.

What God considers sacred won’t be pigeonholed. 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. Ignatius of Loyola invites us to find God in all things. And he means all things. He is right in saying this, for the world is steeped in God. Grace indeed is everywhere. Ignatius discouraged his Jesuits from meditating on lofty, abstract divine truths. Meditate on the world, he instructed them, and all that happens in it, packed shoulder to shoulder with God. We live amidst a universe soaked in grace that invites us to savor it.

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.

In the highpoverty urban communities of Los Angeles County, one in three youth suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s twice the rate of soldiers returning from war.

After mass, the crowd ushered me out to the plaza, where one of the usual feasts awaited us. A short woman approached and hugged me. I reached down and kissed her on her forehead. “So you know?” she asked. I said yes, thinking this woman was Lupe Montes, whose eldest daughter, I’d heard, in her seventh month of pregnancy had just given birth to a stillborn boy. But as I continued to hold her, I realized that this was not Lupe Montes. Wrong Lupe. And yet I could have hugged and kissed anyone in the courtyard that evening, all poor and laden with burdens—way more than most—and any one of them could have asked, “So you know what I’m carrying?”

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...

Jesus would insist that we are saved in the present moment. Just right here. So we choose to practice dwelling in the present moment. We need to find ways to establish ourselves in the here and now. The Buddha teaches that life is only available in the here and now. Jesus doesn’t teach differently. We hold out for happiness, healing, transformation, always awaiting a few more conditions that need to be met. This is one of the reasons why happiness eludes us in the now: we still think it’s around the corner. If your anchor is not centered in today, then you’ll blink and miss the delight of this very moment, which is always with us and is the perfect teacher.

The discovery that awaits us is that paradise is contained in the here and now. We let go of the desire to expect anything beyond it. The awareness of this keeps us from the suffering generated by resisting life as it is. This ability to stay focused on the present is what some today would call “mindfulness,” a kind of attention that can help us all grow rich in the things that matter to God.

One Sunday, I was sitting with my friend and Jesuit brother, Al Naucke. Both of us had our coffee and were silently turning the pages of the paper when the doorbell started to ring repeatedly. Initially, Al and I hid behind our papers, waiting it out. The doorbell rarely rang, but when it did, it was almost always some homeless person. Finally, Al, the way better man, quietly put down the paper. There was no annoyed sighing (though who would blame him?). Some ten minutes later he returned, sat down, took a sip of coffee, and resumed his reading. After a few beats I asked, without lowering the paper, “Well?” “Well what?” Al replied, not lowering his paper either. “Who was it?” From behind the sports section he said, “Jesus, in his least recognizable form.”

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.

Pema Chödrön invites us to “let ourselves be nailed to the present moment.” Certainly, if we live in the past, we will be depressed. If we live in the future, we are guaranteed anxiety. Now is always vast and new. Like any practice, it’s not about technique or program. It’s a decision.

It is difficult to truly and deeply listen. When a homie is sitting in front of my desk, the mantra on a continuous loop in my head is “Stay listening.” Another handy one is “Now. Here. This.” Listen here and now and only to this person.

We need only meet the world, today, with a loving heart, to determine what we will find. A loving heart doesn’t color your world like rose-colored glasses; it alters it. William James wrote, “The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”

I’m sitting in my office with Anderson Cooper when he says, “The police say you’re naïve. That gang members take advantage of you.” I always have the same answer at the ready: “How can someone take my advantage when I’m giving it?” (Years later, in another interview with Cooper, this time sitting in our brand-new bakery, he tells me he remembers my answer and uses it himself from time to time with his friends. I thank him and ask if I’m due any royalties.) We so fear being duped, yet much of that comes from being a stranger to our own wounds.

“Don’t lose one day,” he continued. “Don’t let a day go by that you don’t pay attention to your kids. Don’t waste time in ‘Aquí mando yo’—[‘I call shots around here’]. Our children are loaned to us. They belong to God, and they will return to God. Don’t waste one day in not loving them.”

See something. Say something. They’ll believe you. The time for any of us to be returned to ourselves is now. The ground beneath our feet is the Kingdom of God, the Pure Land. It’s not around the corner, it is the corner. Kinship is not a reward bestowed at the end. It’s here, it’s now, it’s at hand and within our reach. And this moment is the only one available to us. In Advent time, we are reminded over and over again: “Stay awake.” This is not a warning that death is coming but a reminder that life is happening. Now . . . is the day of salvation. We see as God sees: with amplitude, wideness, and mercy. The only moment left to us to participate in this larger love, this limitless, all-accepting love, is in the present moment. Can you hear it? The voice of the Beloved.

Humility returns the center of gravity to the center. It addresses the ego clinging, which supplies oxygen to our suffering. It calls for a light grasp. For the opposite of clinging is not letting go but cherishing. This is the goal of the practice of humility. That having a “light grasp” on life prepares the way for cherishing what is right in front of us.

No hopeful kid has ever joined a gang. Never in the history of gangs, and never in the history of kids. Not once, not ever. Hopeful kids don’t join gangs. Gang involvement is about a lethal absence of hope. No kid is seeking anything when he joins a gang, he’s always fleeing something. There are no exceptions. That is a good diagnosis. Journalists in particular have a hard time with this concept. “Well, everyone knows that kids join gangs because they just want to belong,” more than one has scoffed at me. “Not true” is always my reply. “Kids join Little League because they want to belong. They join gangs because they want to die.” I tell them that it’s more accurate to report, “Everyone says kids join gangs because they want to belong.” If they were to interview a homie, however, they would be told that the gang is like “a second family” and “they have my back.” Gang members will say, essentially, they are looking for “wine, women and song.” Join a gang—see the world. They say this because it is easier than explaining how “my mom used to put cigarettes out on me and hold my head in the toilet and flush until I nearly drowned.” Gangs are the places kids go when they have realized their life as a misery. And who doesn’t know by now that misery loves company? But in thirty years of walking with gang members, I’ve never met a bad guy. One would think I would have by now.

There are three great fortunes that have landed in my lap that account for the fact that I have never taken another person’s life: First: by sheer dumb luck, my life has been almost completely devoid of despair. I have always been able to imagine my future, and consequently I care about my life. (And because I do, I care about others’ lives as well.) Second, I cannot identify any defining trauma in my upbringing or in my life to date that would lead me to such a place of rage. Struggle and suffering, yes. But the golpe of huge, damaging trauma? Never. Third, I have never been plagued by mental illness. I have never had to navigate schizophrenia or been burdened with sociopathy, psychopathy, or bipolarity. I have issues like everyone else, but I won the mental health lottery. It is not my moral superiority or heightened emotional intelligence that accounts for my lack of a murderous past. It is luck. Sheer dumb luck at that.

“Decide right now not to romanticize any of your gang past,” I tell them as we go inside. “Every homie who’s ever come to terms with his life knows that no kid is seeking anything when he joins a gang; he’s always fleeing something.”

Nothing can render a person more a stranger to himself than the unspeakable things he was forced to endure when young. Coming to terms with the traumas of one’s childhood is an arduous task. It’s much easier not to look at it, and easier for everyone else not to hear of it.

I take Mauricio with me to speak to a psychology class at the University of California, Irvine. He’s in his late thirties and quite visibly a gang member. After we finish our talk, a young woman in the class asks him why he ran away from home at nine years old, a fact he’d mentioned in his remarks. Mauricio shrugs a little and says, “I was tired of listening to my parents.” Later, on the drive home, I ask him if he remembers what he’d said. He says yes. I ask him to repeat it. “I said I ran away from home ’cause my mom would beat my ass.” I tell him that he said no such thing, that in fact he’d said he was tired of listening to his parents. “Serio?” he says to me in disbelief. I ask him if he’s ever met his father. No, he has not. His mother tortured him daily. One year, when he was in the second grade, she sent him to live in the backyard with a lengthy chain affixed around his neck. The yard became his toilet, his bedroom, his cell. Neighbors would sneak him food but never call the authorities on the mother. She finally let Mauricio back in the house once summer had ended. Running away from home two years later seemed pretty sensible.

Good kids or bad kids. Gang members think they are the villains of their own stories largely because society has insisted on it.

The things that haunt us, that cause us grief, can lead to emotional bludgeoning and tidal waves of shame. One of the signature marks of our God is the lifting of shame. Demons keep us from who we are. Jesus, we’re told, drives out demons—or anything that’s taken us over: drugs, celos, barrio. Yet, Jesus wants to demote “sinful behavior” and emphasize restoration in its place. Jesus, frankly, is not big on demons. He is more interested in driving out demonizing. So people in bondage need liberation, and people in exile need to return home. People who are blind need to see, while people who are sick and wounded need healing. People who are outcast need community. But we have been programmed to think that sins define us and that, once we have reached that point, there is no going back. Homies have their behavior always on their minds. Their “sin” is the power pack driving their shame. This source of disgrace is never-ending, and they are aware that others identify them by it. In the gospel of Luke, Jesus is passing through Jericho. He’s not staying. The gospel writer seems determined to underscore this. Jesus is just passing through the town. The crowds gather to watch him pass. A villager named Zacchaeus is too small to see much, so he scrambles up a tree to catch sight of Jesus. As Jesus is passing through, he spots Zacchaeus and says that he wants to stay—at his house. The entire crowd gasps. Zacchaeus is the chief tax collector—that is, the poster child of “the bad guy,”...