Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

by Gregory Boyle

when you are bound by nothing, you can go beyond sorrow. It can’t get a foothold.

“Nah, I’m tellin’ ya all this cuz I know that bench.”

“Not everything that is faced can be changed,” James Baldwin wrote, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” 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. “When we see clearly,” says Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein, “we behave impeccably.”

“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.

Some days, the best you can hope for is to plant yourself in the surety of a love that won’t budge in the face of a knucklehead mistake.

Martin Luther King Jr. called “the power of God transforming the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope.”

Pope Francis, who says that communion is not some grand prize for the perfect person but rather food for the hungry one. When the time comes, I try to get the congregation to embrace their collective hunger

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

Chinese proverb, “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right name.”

Hopeful kids don’t join gangs. Gang involvement is about a lethal absence of hope. No kid is seeking anything when he joins a gang, he’s always fleeing something.

Desmond Tutu was right when he said there are no evil people, just evil acts; no monsters, just monstrous acts.

what if, for example, to the police there were no bad guys—only the desire to protect people? What if the only response was: we will not let you hurt yourself or anybody else.

What if, then, we insisted that everyone belonged to us?

The invitation for the Christ in me is to see the Christ in you. There is no one outside of that way of seeing.

“No one is born a slave,” a homie named Cisco tells me, “but some of us are born into slavery.”

It’s not about taking the right stand on issues but about standing in the right place, with the excluded and the demonized.

that true spirituality ought not end in the privacy of our soul but in real kinship with the poor.

When he asked her how to live the gospel, she simply replied: “Stay close to the poor.” She could have said, I suppose, help the poor, rescue the poor, save the poor. But no—stay close to the poor. The invitation is not to romanticize the poor but to recognize that some essential piece of our own salvation is tied up in our proximity to those on the outskirts.

imploring his “shepherds” to get out of their offices so they can “smell like sheep.”

Dorothy Day simply asserted that “love and more love is the solution.”

Bill Cain, says, “Putting on Christ is the easy part, but never taking him off . . . that’s a challenge.”

Judyth Hill’s idea: “Wage peace with your listening.”

Service is where we begin, yet it remains the hallway that leads to the ballroom. The ballroom is the place of exquisite mutuality.

An Aboriginal woman from Australia said to some earnest, well-intentioned missionaries: “If you’re coming to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

We always seem to be faced with this choice: to save the world or savor it. I want to propose that savoring is better, and that when we seek to “save” and “contribute” and “give back” and “rescue” folks and EVEN “make a difference,” then it is all about you . . . and the world stays stuck.

The good news, of course, is that when we choose to “savor” the world, it gets saved. Don’t set out to change the world. Set out to wonder how people are doing.

There is a Navajo conception that a criminal is one who acts as if he has no family.

As Dorothy Day writes, “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”

Qur’an: “I create diverse tribes, so that you might come to know each other.”

I have learned that it’s never about “saying” very much at all but, rather, receiving, listening, and valuing people until they come out with their hands up—feeling, for perhaps the first time, valuable.

Listening and receiving is the great equalizer. Really. Who can’t do that?

“Mercy,” Mary Oliver says, “is when you take people seriously.”

What Martin Luther King Jr. says of church, could well be said of this book: “It’s not the place you come to, it’s the place you go from.”