Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

by Gregory Boyle

We see as God sees: with amplitude, wideness, and mercy. The only moment left to us to participate in this larger love, this limitless, all-accepting love,

Joshua

“If you’re humble, you’ll never stumble.”

“The true way to be humble is not to stoop until you’re smaller than yourself,” Phillips Brooks writes, “but to stand at your real height against some higher nature . . .”

Juan Diego, to whom Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared, described himself this way: “I am a nobody. I am a short rope. A small ladder. The tail end. A leaf.” Modern eyes roll at such a display of humility, but there is something exhilarating in finding our right size in our thorough insignificance.

It is liberating to be brought back to one’s insignificance. We are allowed to abandon the pretense that we are more than we are and find comfort in knowing that we are enough.

In our raw need, we find our true selves and discover the misery there is in ceaselessly needing validation.

saw a local elected official trying to

That day four gang members shook the hand of the president of the United States. The commander-in-chief. The most powerful man on earth. And even he is not more important than the homies whose hands he shook in that airless room.

The whole world can love you, hoist you on its shoulders, wave palm fronds wildly as you enter town, and “like” you countless times on Facebook. But one person raises an eyebrow in our general direction, and we unravel. Just one person, unbelievably, has that power.

While we long to be lost in God’s love, we often get lost in the one person who doesn’t like us, or in the homie who is disappointed in me, or in clinging to one’s reputation and what people think.

We all clamor for praise and recoil at blame. They are oddly and equally seductive.

we have to find our way to notice and return. Notice the positive sheen of praise and still refuse to cling to it. Choose to move quickly back to the center. Let the pang of this blame wash over you, abide in it, and then return immediately to your center.

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

Pretty much it. We keep moving,

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

Adolfo was already the accomplishment. He just didn’t know this yet.

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

period before people find the next door. At Homeboy Industries, I tell our senior staff that part of our task is to “line the hallway,” to make that distance stretching between the old and new versions of one’s self a comforting one.

The hallway can be long and the lure to return to an old, tired, but known and safe version can be compelling. And those who line the hallway haven’t arrived fully either.

Joey discovered that once you try wanting what you have, everything changes.

Jesus speaks of those “who belong to the truth.” It is not something you say but something you own. You belong to it. It is rooted in self-acceptance and openhearted awareness.

I have taken, lately, to loosely quoting Pope Francis, who says that communion is not some grand prize for the perfect person but rather food for the hungry one.

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

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

Every homie I know who has killed somebody—everyone—has carried a load one hundred times heavier than I have had to carry, weighed down by torture, violence, abuse, neglect, abandonment, or mental illness.

One of the signature marks of our God is the lifting of shame.

A “yes” must be repeated, deepened, made new over and over again—or else it ultimately becomes a “no.”

Whoopi Goldberg was asked to name the living person she most admired. “Pope Francis,” she responded. “Yeah,” she added,“. . . he’s goin’ with the original program.”

People know that the “original program” is about living the gospel with joy and always being mindful of the poor.

“Anyways . . .” (as the homies say), years later, Pedro Arrupe was visiting Brazil when, by chance, he met a very poor man who invited him to his home in a nearby favela. He had a gift for the padre, he explained. So Arrupe accompanied the man and was led to a shack, where the man lived with his wife and children. It was so rough, small, and spare, it took Arrupe’s breath away. He was moved so deeply, his eyes brimmed with tears. The man led him to a huge opening in the wall. Not a window but just a hole, and he pointed. It was a sunset. The only gift he could give was the view. “I know,” Don Pedro later said, “that we learn much when we visit the poor.” The view from there is what we get.

That pure, simple, loving outlook is why we, the Choir, are drawn to the original program. It’s not a liberal or conservative view; it is a holy, radical take, precisely because it takes seriously what Jesus took seriously: inclusion, nonviolence, unconditionally compassionate loving-kindness, and acceptance. The Choir finds itself drawn like moths to the flame of its authenticity. What we discover when we embrace it is that true spirituality ought not end in the privacy of our soul but in real kinship with the poor.

Dorothy Day, when he was in his twenties and studying to be a priest. When he asked her how to live the gospel, she simply replied: “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.

Jon Sobrino suggests as much in his provocatively titled book No Salvation Outside the Poor.

The founder of academic medicine, William Osler, wrote, “I don’t want to know the disease the person has. I want to know the person the disease has.”

There are two hundred references in Scripture that ask us to take special care of the poor.

It is this preferential care and love for the poor that sets the stage for the original program.

It believes that a love-driven set of priorities will ignite our own goodness and reveal our innate nobility, which God so longs to show us.

Martin Luther King calls “the last, the least, and the lost”

Pope Francis writes that “the Gospel of the marginalized is where our credibility is at stake.”

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.