Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

by Gregory Boyle

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.

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 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.

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?

Lety, a homegirl who has been through the wringer and then back again, sits snug up to the front of my desk. Name any horrific, terrible thing that could befall a human being and it’s befallen her: prison, drug addiction, domestic violence, kids taken away. It would be a far shorter list if you wrote down the horrific things that haven’t happened to her. In fact, I can’t think of anything. I would not have survived one day in her childhood. She’s asking me for some help when she suddenly says, “I wish you were God.” I laugh, but I see that Lety, a famous chillona (crybaby), is starting to well up. “Why do you wish I was God?” I ask. She needs time here—for composure, not composition of thought. “Cuz . . . I think you’d let me into heaven.” This blindsides me and now I become a chillón. I need my time to formulate a response as my eyes moisten. I grab her hands and pull her as close as I can across the top of my desk. I look her in the eyes. We are both crying. We gaze at each other for a very long time. “Lety,” I begin, “I swear to you, IF I get to heaven and you’re not there . . . I’m not stayin’.”

Homies often say, “I was raised on the streets,” but Monica truly was. Homeless, a gang member, and a survivor, her behavior at Homeboy can often be alarming. She once kicked in our glass front door. On another particularly wild rampage, she went into our kitchen and began to gulp down a purple all-purpose cleaner call Fabuloso. (“Fabulosa” later became her nickname among the homies.) Despite these outbursts, I still hope she’ll get caught up in the rapture of the Holy Trinity—Recovery, Meds, and Therapy—but you take victories where you can. I once corrected her for speaking with some harshness to one of the trainees. “But that’s why I told her to ‘Shut up,’ ” she said, stone-faced, “instead of ‘Shut up, you fucking bitch.’ ” Progress. Awe compels us to try and understand what language her behavior is speaking. Judgment never gets past the behavior. After another incident, Father Mark tells her, with tenderness, “I wish I could adopt you.” “You would not want me for a daughter,” she tearfully replies. “Course I would,” he says. “It would never be boring.” Mark knows he can’t carry what Monica carries. But he can carry her.

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

Readying oneself for awe, at every turn, insists that compassion is always the answer to the question before us.

Paradise is not a place that awaits our arrival but a present we arrive at.

Richard Rohr was right: “We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.”