Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

by Gregory Boyle

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

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.

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.

“Stay awake.” This is not a warning that death is coming but a reminder that life is happening.

No hopeful kid has ever joined a gang.

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.