Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

by Gregory Boyle

“But now I welcome my wounds. I run my fingers over my scars. My wounds are my friends. “After all,” he continued, barely getting out the words, “how can I help others to heal if I don’t welcome my own wounds?”

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.

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.

If love is the answer, community is the context, and tenderness the methodology. Otherwise, love stays in the head or, worse, hovers above it. Or it stays in the heart, which is never enough. For unless love becomes tenderness—the connective tissue of love—it never becomes transformational.

We can feel blocked from the eventual liberation of “humbling ourselves” by clinging to the sting of embarrassment and by lamenting our red-faced horror of being singled out. We can feel impeded from the transformation that comes from having a different lens from which to view things.

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.

The task at hand is not to change behavior but rather to see clearly. After all, God doesn’t want anything “from” us, only “for” us. God won’t be loving a homie more if he stops gangbanging. God only has this holy longing to free us from terror and anxiety. A by-product of knowing this is behavior change. Then God’s vision becomes ours.

“Working on yourself” doesn’t move the dial on God’s love. After all, that is already fixed at its highest setting. But the work one does seeks to align our lives with God’s longing for us—that we be happy, joyful, and liberated from all that prevents us from seeing ourselves as God does.

Christianity in its earliest years was known as “the Way”—not necessarily a secret formula but a path of transformation that would lead to abundant life. It was not an entry gate to how God might like us better but a good journey promising fullness.

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

It is, in essence, the difference between carrying the torch and being the torch. When we shine light, the darkness doesn’t necessarily disappear. It doesn’t seem to leave—that unspeakable thing that happened to you that reduces you to “a little boy in a big-ass room”—but now it merges with the light. The terrible thing has become bright. Not obliterated, but its own kind of fuel, its own kind of illumination.

It is this preferential care and love for the poor that sets the stage for the original program. It doesn’t draw lines—it erases them. It rises above the polarizing temperature of our times. It doesn’t shake its finger at anybody but instead helps us all put our finger on it. We could ask ourselves, I suppose, if God is conservative or liberal, but I think that’s the wrong question. Instead we should ask: Is God expansive or tiny? Is God spacious or shallow? Is God inclusive or exclusive? What are the chances that God holds the same tiny point of view as I do? Well, zero. The Choir aims to challenge the politics of fear and the stances that limit our sense of God.

The original covenantal relationship in the Hebrew Bible (the original original program) went like this: “As I have loved you, so must you have a special, preferential, favored love for the widow, orphan, and stranger.” God knows that these folks know what it’s like to be cut off. And because they know this particular suffering, God finds them trustworthy to lead and guide the rest of us to the birth of a new inclusion, to the exquisite mutuality of kinship: God’s dream come true.

In the end, though, the measure of our compassion with what Martin Luther King calls “the last, the least, and the lost” lies less in our service of those on the margins, and more in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them. It speaks of a kinship so mutually rich that even the dividing line of service provider/service recipient is erased. We are sent to the margins NOT to make a difference but so that the folks on the margins will make us different.