Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

by Gregory Boyle

“Not everything that is faced can be changed,” James Baldwin wrote, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

A homie, quite proud of his personal transformation, once said to me: “I used to look in the mirror and say, ‘You are a fuckup.’ Now I say, ‘I’m proud of you.’ ”

We bring as much compassion and wakefulness to our own lived experience and know that nothing human is ever abhorrent to God.

A homie, Shaggy, once texted me: “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

“The walking back,” poet Jack Gilbert wrote, “was the arriving.”

Richard Rohr, who says, “If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.”

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.

“Find your story,” he quoted me. “Know your story. Remember your story. Tell your story. And always know, that at the end of your story, you are its hero.” He said he had never forgotten that. I didn’t recall having said it, but I took him at his word. “And here,” he said, “I had always thought I was the villain of my story.”

There are no monsters, villains, or bad guys. Eddie seems to know this. There are only folks who carry unspeakable pain. There are among us the profoundly traumatized who deal in the currency of damage. And there are those whose minds are ill, whose sickness chases them every day. But there are no bad guys. Jesus seems to suggest that there are no exceptions to this. Yet it’s hard for us to believe him.

Write about this in whatever the hell you’re writing. I am coming at life, now, from a fundamentally different vantage point than the lens of total depravity that I grew up with.

Slapping the dismissive label of “evil” on a person has never seemed very sophisticated or reverent of human complexity.

Not all choices are created equal.

Wage peace by listening.

Again, our separation is an illusion.

It’s mutual. This is why it can’t be about you. If it is, then it becomes “collecting people,” incessant ingratiating, and a frantic credentialing of self. What is hoped for is a lighter grasp, a gentler receiving. Can we love people, then have our reciprocal expectations disappear?

We want to get to the edge, as Czeslaw Milosz says, where “there is no I nor Not I.”

What kinship always seeks to underscore is that separation is an illusion.

Jesus was always inviting folks to move beyond the limitations of the blood family. The early Christians would greet one another with a kiss on the lips, which in those days only the members of the same family would do. Jesus has high hopes that we will move from separation to solidarity to kinship. God knows that we just keep waiting for the Kingdom to show up . . . just around the bend. Turns out, it is the bend. Just around the corner. The Kingdom is the corner . . . where we can kiss each other on the lips.

Demonizing will always wither under the heat of kinship. It melts at the sight of our shared belonging.

Now, we can be astonished at the authority of Jesus, who calls us to love our enemies. Or we can just love our enemies and so astonish the world as to jostle it from its regular course.

For Jesus, the self that needs to die is the one that wants to be separate. This is the self that recoils from kinship with others and balks at union at every turn. It is the self that wants it all to remain private and thinks it prefers isolation to connection. We know that the early Christians believed that “one Christian is no Christian.” This larger sense of belonging to each other acknowledges that many are the things that connect us, and those things that divide are few and no match for our kinship.

“I’m your biggest fan. I have all your albums. I’ve never missed a concert!” As is often said, Jesus does not say in the gospel, “Worship me,” but simply “Follow me.” I recall being interviewed on the Christian Broadcasting Network by a woman who, having just listened to my litany of things we do at Homeboy Industries, from tattoo removal to job training, case management to mental health counseling, paused cautiously once I had finished. “But how much time do you spend at Homeboy Industries each day, you know, praising God?” she asked. I actually didn’t know what to say to that, but found myself offering: “All damn day.” How does praise please God, anyway? Or what would God find pleasure in? Find the thing that quenches God’s thirst. Since God is on the receiving end of all this praise-filled attention, it would seem to make sense to ask ourselves: What kind of praise does God have any interest in? Does exaltation matter to our “exhausted” God? I received an award once at a gala dinner. I was the second to be recognized, and the woman before me was breathless and seemed hugely panicked while giving her acceptance speech. “First, I have to thank Jesus Christ,” she began, “because, after all, without him I am nothing.” And all I’m thinking is: hostage video. I’m imagining Jesus offstage, behind the curtain, holding this woman’s dog with a pistol to ol’ Fido’s temple. “That’s right,” Jesus says, and nods. “Damn right, ya better thank me.” I already knew that in my speech I wo...

This is the essence of the threat I keep feeling. This chapter is exactly what I needed to read. This is the lead of faith — to believe that I, and no one else, is separate. Jesus would you heal me and save me all over again?

“Hope does not disappoint,” Saint Paul tells us. This is always a challenge with gang members—who, more often than not, don’t think their own death is a waste but think that their lives are.

“I’m messin’ up in school,” a young homie tells me. When I ask him why, he says without hesitation: “I know why. I don’t have a dream. Ya gotta have a dream, something to look forward to.”

Hope is not about some assurance that everything will work out but rather about a confidence that purpose and luminous meaning can be found there, no matter how things unfold. “The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat,” Cornel West writes, “is that without hope...

Another homie tells me, “I’m always thinking ahead, but only one step ahead.” He adds, with a tint of sadness, “I’m so distant from the hope of myself.” This kid isn’t longing for advice. Hope is in the relationship, in seeing Jesus and being Jesus.

A woman once scheduled an appointment with me, and before I knew it she was unleashing the myriad ways God was disappointed in me and Homeboy Industries. “As a Bride of Christ, I need to tell you that this place does not give glory to God,” she said. I listened until I no longer could. “Look,” I said kindly, “thanks for visiting and bringing me this important message. But you see all those people out there?” I pointed to the reception area packed with gang members waiting to see me. “I only have an hour left to see them all.” She stood huffily. “So you’re telling me these people are more important than the Lord?” “No,” I said as I walked her to the door. “Jesus thinks they are the Lord.” I was hungry, and you gave me to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink. I was a gang member without hope, and you gave me some.

A lifer at Lancaster prison told me once that he’d discovered compassion breeds hope. That’s exactly what we aim to do at Homeboy. Every day we try to create an environment where an optimal healing process can take place—an environment where one can truly be helped through the process, and thriv...

They found their hope and “destination” in relationship, love as the only reliable salve there is.

Lately, protests suggest that without justice there can be no peace. Others might soften that message by saying, “If you want peace, work for justice.” And this is true. But I think it is even more true to say: “No kinship, no peace. No kinship, no justice. No kinship, no equality.”

The Buddhists work with conflict by dropping the struggle altogether.

It is true enough that we could make the world more just, equal, and peaceful, but something holds us back, in all our complicated fear and human hesitation. It’s sometimes just plain hard to locate the will to be in kinship even though, at the same time, it’s our deepest longing. So no matter how singularly focused we may be on our worthy goals of peace, justice, and equality, they actually can’t happen without an undergirding sense that we belong to each other. Seek first the kinship of God, then watch what happens.

He is proof that only the soul that ventilates the world with tenderness has any chance of changing the world.

“If we walk in the light,” the apostle John writes, “then we have fellowship with each other . . .” All of us kin and kissing on the lips. 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— Seek first the kinship, and watch what happens.

“It’s not the place you come to, it’s the place you go from.” And the hope is that one goes from this humble effort of a book to the margins and the nurturing of the kinship of God.

“I’m good, G,” he says. “Don’t even trip. Got enough to take the train, with five bucks extra . . . so I can hand it to someone right now who needs it more than me.” He opens the door and puts one foot out and takes a deep breath. “I got air in my lungs,” turning to me, “I’m good. Love you, G.”