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January 27 - February 9, 2020
There is nothing more essential, vital, and important than love and its carrier—tenderness—practiced in the present moment.
always have the same answer at the ready: “How can someone take my advantage when I’m giving it?”
But if one’s wounds are near at hand, it leads to compassionate understanding and makes kindness more readily available right now.
“This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know: that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness,” Mary Oliver
Each time, I watch the homie on the receiving end of the golpe just stand there, iron-jawed and unflinching, as he takes the punch. A little bit stunned and wobbly, sure, but nonetheless, refusing to respond in kind. The stiffness of their jaws seemed to announce, You cannot take me to that place.
Like Jesus, who emptied himself, this humility keeps us from clinging to power and our own cleverness. In our raw need, we find our true selves and discover the misery there is in ceaselessly needing validation.
We still need to contend with the original prejudice that some people are important and others don’t count.
Not more, but the same. To think otherwise is to mire ourselves in the opposite of kinship,
palpable wave of gracious inclusion. This is the sound of someone previously outside being given the welcome mat to enter inside.
Our fragile ego gets nicked and yet we are called again to the joy of self-forgetting. “Unless you become like these children,”
The root meanings of the word “embarrassment” are “blockage,” “obstacle,” and “impediment” to thought or action.
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.
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.
The more you take things personally, the more you suffer. You observe it, hold it up to the light, release it, and move on.
having a “light grasp” on life prepares the way for cherishing what is right in front of us.
checked it out, handed it back, and said, ‘Let me give you some advice. Don’t hand your stuff to strangers. You don’t know who they are. My old self woulda run off this bus with your phone. But now I’m a rehabilitated gang member, cuz I work at Homeboy Industries.’ ”
A homie, Shaggy, once texted me: “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
youngster
To that end, we try to foster an irresistible culture of tenderness. We want this steady, harmonizing love to infiltrate the whole place.
the animal-vegetable-mineral of the gang issue: cops, academics, electeds.
There are three great fortunes that have landed in my lap that account for the fact that I have never taken another person’s life:
First: by sheer dumb luck, my life has been almost completely devoid of despair.
Second, I cannot identify any defining trauma in my upbringing or in my life
Third, I have never been plagued by mental illness.
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. Most
Their “sin” is the power pack driving their shame. This source of disgrace is never-ending, and they are aware that others identify them by it.
After a homie’s transformation, his own choosing needs to be constant. A “yes” must be repeated, deepened, made new over and over again—or else it ultimately becomes a “no.”
a recent magazine Q and A, 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.”
Yes!
People know that the “original program” is about living the gospel with joy and always being mindful of the poor.
about standing in the right place, with the excluded and the demonized.
it is a holy, radical take, precisely because it takes seriously what Jesus took seriously: inclusion, nonviolence, unconditionally compassionate loving-kindness, and acceptance.
true spirituality ought not end in the privacy of our soul but in real kinship with the poor.
“Do not be afraid.” A homie told me once that some version of that phrase is mentioned 365 times in the whole of Scripture. “One for every day of the year,” he said.
Silliness, I have learned, has its place in the sacred and in the oneness of the Choir.
We can stare right back at the terrifying darkness of what we’ve been through in our lives and grab it by the handle. We confront it with an open-hearted kindness as Jesus does. Suddenly, plagues and earthquakes have lost their menace
stay close to the poor.
He would take his leave the same way every time. He’d open the door, straddle between being in and out, and turn to me and say, “Today was a beautiful day. Tomorrow will be even better.”
For this reason, like most utterances of Jesus in the Gospel, “I will not leave you as orphans” is not just supposed to fill us with consolation but to be received as an invitation. It seems to say, As I won’t leave you an orphan, don’t you leave anyone behind.
The Choir aims to challenge the politics of fear and the stances that limit our sense of God. It believes that a love-driven set of priorities will ignite our own goodness and reveal our innate nobility, which
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
At Homeboy Industries, I’m not the “Great Healer” and that homeboy over there is in need of my precious healing. Truth be told, we are all in need of healing;
“How do you reach them?” “For starters, stop trying to reach them,” I said. “Can YOU be reached by THEM?” Folks on the margins only ask us to receive them.
What Homeboy seeks is relational. Certainly silliness, among other things, can get you there. We
Only connect.
create a connection of hearts, to show others that they are seen, acknowledged, and embraced
he says with the clarity of a saint. “No, there is no comparing what this man has suffered and what I’ve lived through.” Now he thinks and his eyes moisten before he speaks again. “No, I wasn’t competing with him.” A tear trails down his cheek. “I was connecting with him.”
pediches,
firme
preciosity
It’s not about giving and receiving; it’s not about “It’s better to give than receive”; it’s not about “I received more than I gave.” And it is not about “I just want to make a difference.” It’s mutual. This is why it can’t be about you. If it is, then it becomes “collecting people,” incessant ingratiating, and a frantic credentialing of self.
