Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

by Gregory Boyle

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.”

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.

shaking one’s fist at something doesn’t change it. Only love gets fists to open.

What if we ceased to pledge our allegiance to the bottom line and stood, instead, with those who line the bottom?

kinship so quickly. Oscar-winning actress. Attitudinal waitress. Exactly what God had in mind. And I suppose, in order to know that mind, we need go no further than Jesus speaking to the gathered when he expresses his deepest longing: “that . . . you . . . may . . . be . . . one.” I suppose he could have been more self-referential. But it would seem that Jesus wants this to be about “us” and our willingness, eventually, to connect to each other. So the Choir gets barked at and, collectively, we move beyond the mind we have. And with enough jostling and juggling, we find ourselves anchored in God’s dream come true.

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 with me.” Come Dance.

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.

God is not who we think God is. Our search for God is not a scavenger hunt; God is everywhere and in everything.

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. It returns me to the stillness there. “Let us . . . strive to enter into that rest,” we read in Hebrews, knowing that this is never an end in itself but equips us to follow Jesus and create the kind of kinship about which God dreams. It is not sleep.

Come dance with me.

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.

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.

I believe that God protects me from nothing but sustains me in everything.

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.

We are all being invited into the roominess of God’s generosity. The wideness awaits us.

So we try to find the joy there is in God’s finding us. God intends our happiness. We pull up our antennae to its furthest peak and place ourselves on the lookout for glimpses of joy at its most unleashed. The path is cleared and God’s own tenderness is locating us. We never stop looking, until we realize that we have already been found. Good job.

So much about tenderness / gentleness. “What then do we have to fear? To be thrown into the tenderness of God?” It is tenderness that upholds my life.

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.

Though the words were not in his toolbox, I knew my father loved me. During my high school years, there were ten of us at home. At breakfast, my younger brother and sisters would take their bowls of Trix into the next room to eat in front of cartoons, while my mom would fuss with the endless loads of laundry. That usually just left my dad and me, eating our Cheerios and reading the LA Times in the breakfast room. He would be planted on a short bench at the end of the table, near the windows. I would sit in the middle, bowl tucked in close, paper spread out before me. We wouldn’t speak. Perkiness was strictly prohibited. “So, how’d ya sleep last night?” was never a question we asked. LA Times. Cheerios. Silence. When my dad was finished and got up from the table, he’d need to pass behind me. I’d instinctively scoot in my chair so he had room. But before moving past me, he’d place his empty bowl on the table. Then, standing behind me, he’d massage my neck, his thumbs digging deep. He smelled like Fitch shampoo and Aqua Velva aftershave. The massage didn’t last long, but he did it every day, wordlessly. Thirty years later, I’m on a silent retreat in a monastery in the California redwoods, sitting in the chapel and not having a good morning. I’m rehashing old story lines: ancient hurts and resentments. The soreness in my soul is palpable—enveloping me, actually. I’m in a chair in the last row, off to the side. There are huge windows behind me, the massive redwoods visible in t...

It’s the holiest person, I would assert, who is on the lookout for such moments of spaciousness and calm. Like Mando, sitting on his porch, finding his heart once again restored to some beauty, innocence, and wholeness. The Sufis call this hearing “the voice of the Beloved.”

And being alert to the sacred in our midst is a choice that gets more sure as we practice it.

Practice alertness to the sacred.

He has a taste of what it’s like not to be destroyed and liberated from all clinging and fear.

Amen and amen and yes and yes and yes.

All initiation stories are accounts of journeys involving scaling impossible mountains, going head-to-head with dragons, crossing raging waters. It is the holy and wholly brave risking of the life you know and the welcoming of something entirely new . . . and shenanigan-free.

Couldn’t be reading this at a better time for all of the wonder I experienced and am sitting with, knowing.

“Life’s great.” How, then, do we, as Hafez suggests, “stay close to any sounds that make you glad you are alive.” And why would we put a limit on such sounds? This is not so far from Ignatius’ call to find God in all things.

The divine always wants to be liberated, no longer confined for too long in compartments so tiny.

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.

“how can I help others to heal if I don’t welcome my own wounds?”

We are at our healthiest when we are most situated in awe, and at our least healthy when we engage in judgment.

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.

Remember what Michelle said about befriending my own fear — gently taking it by the hand and offering to help it overcome itself.

When an even greater clarity grips him, he says, “I don’t want to belong to my wounds.” Mary Oliver writes, “Let everyone in the world who suffers, have a day off.”

If this wasn’t the essence of my journey...

Judgment, after all, takes up the room you need for loving.

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. “Walk in my presence,” God says to Abraham, “and be without blame.”

The “monsters at the margins” are constantly under threat and they breathe in shame with every breath.

Awe trading places with judgment, swiftly and cleanly, “for fond love and for shame.”

Mary (and Jim Carrey) have landed on the one thing that is most important: to embrace perfect presence in the moment in front of us.

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.

there is no such thing as “dead” time—the moment that doesn’t count. All time is alive. Not a second passes that doesn’t allow us to ripen, to witness our lives with playfulness, flexibility, and an open heart. Every moment is a chance to wake up and smell that new soap.

“The future is not what it used to be.”

Now: the day of salvation.

“I am larger, better than I thought, / I did not know I held such goodness.”

“We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.”

We find ourselves on the lookout for moments of spaciousness and calm, when our hearts can be restored again to a place of beauty, innocence, and wholeness. Then we can hear what the Sufis call “the voice of the Beloved.”

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus cures a deaf man. He says, “Be opened,” and things that have previously held the man back, an inability to hear and speak, are lifted. We identify those things that close our hearts—grasping and anger, fear and pride—and turn to our world, instead, with a tender heart. We’re opened. We find the ability to be with anguish and pain without having to control or change it.

If love is the answer, community is the context, and tenderness the methodology.

Kindness ventilating our self-absorption, moments of rage, and the distance we create between ourselves and the broken. Works every time.

the only antidote to our misery is to stay in the present. This present is eternal, and the only eternity that counts is now. “This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know: that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness,” Mary Oliver writes. A grieving father and a warm, surprising sun reminded us that, indeed, paying attention, right now, leads us all to soulful living.

“Sell your cleverness,” Rumi writes, “and buy bewilderment.”

I love this.

And yet whatever leads us to recognize our “nothingness” hastens our falling into the arms of God.

We all clamor for praise and recoil at blame. They are oddly and equally seductive. They pull us away from our center, and yet we strangely have grown dependent on blame and praise. Instead, we have to find our way to notice and return. Notice the positive sheen of praise and still refuse to cling to it. Choose to move quickly back to the center. Let the pang of this blame wash over you, abide in it, and then return immediately to your center. We want the “bliss of blamelessness,” as the Buddha would say, and yet find ourselves attaching to the praise of the crowd or the surly comment of the disgruntled. We try and gently catch ourselves when we’re about to let resentment harden into blame and let the illusion of praise define who we are.

The more you take things personally, the more you suffer. You observe it, hold it up to the light, release it, and move on. One can choose to let suffering be the elevator to a heightened place of humble loving. You adjust the knot on the red string around your wrist and find your center again.