Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

by Gregory Boyle

The vast majority of homies who come to us at Homeboy have histories of trauma, which can lead to disorganized attachment patterns.

Attachment repair, then, is the order of the day at Homeboy Industries as gang members seek to “reidentify” themselves. Arrival at the heart of God is often impeded by one’s own history of trauma. This healthier sense of God may be achieved through a concept called “object constancy,” the capacity to hold on to the existence or “sense” of the caregiver, even when the caregiver is not physically present.

One of the many impediments to hearing the only message God longs to communicate to us is our marriage to the pain we carry and the lament that accompanies it.

With grace, we come to know that lament can’t get a foothold if gratitude gets there first.

I don’t need God to be in charge of my life. I only need God to be at the center of it.

After all, nothing depends on how things turn out—only on how you see them when they happen. Emmanuel: the name that means God with us is not moving the dials and turning the switches but tenderly holding us through it all.

I believe that God protects me from nothing but sustains me in everything.

When we are disappointed in each other, we least resemble God. We have a God who wonders what all the measuring is about, a God who is perplexed by our raising the bar and then raising it even higher.

But in all this, and in many other things, disappointment is not the

foot God puts forward. There is instead only a redoubling of God’s loving us into kinship with each other. If we truly allow that tenderness to reach us, then peace, justice, and equality will be its by-product.

In order to experience this mercy and love, we need to accept that there is room for us in it. God loves us whole and entire, and as a community, if we emulate that, then hunger, weaponry, inequality, and every other evil will dissipate into obsolescence. This can only come when I know that I am accepted especially at my worst.

We believe that God is inclined to decline our credit card, that our account with God has insufficient funds. We don’t understand God’s generosity—it flies in the face of our human allergy to having the wool pulled over our eyes. But God is not who we think God is.

This generosity with each other is gratuitous and abundant and who God is.

“Ever since Happiness heard your name,” the poet Hafez writes, “it’s been running down the street trying to find you.” In Wisdom it asks, “Who can conceive what the Lord intends?” No one escapes the notice of God. So we try to find the joy there is in God’s finding us. God intends our happiness. We pull up our antennae to its furthest peak and place ourselves on the lookout for glimpses of joy at its most unleashed. The path is cleared and God’s own tenderness is locating us. We never stop looking, until we realize that we have already been found. Good job.

But that’s what human beings do: we confine the divine. Ignatius of Loyola invites us to find God in all things. And he means all things. He is right in saying this, for the world is steeped in God. Grace indeed is everywhere. Ignatius discouraged his Jesuits from meditating on lofty, abstract divine truths. Meditate on the world, he instructed them, and all that happens in it, packed shoulder to shoulder with God. We live amidst a universe soaked in grace that invites us to savor it.

Slipping on my shoes, boiling water, toasting bread, buttering the sky, That should be enough contact With God in one day To make everyone “crazy.”

Every single moment of our lives asks us to be charmed, captivated, enticed, thrilled, and pleased. We don’t wait for such moments to fall out of the sky; we just put ourselves on high alert to catch these moments as they happen.

There is great dissolving of laughter all around, sacred to behold. And being alert to the sacred in our midst is a choice that gets more sure as we practice it.

C. S. Lewis wrote that “holiness . . . is irresistible.” It is our inkling, naturally, to suspect that doing tiny, decent things possesses a great power. It is a world-altering holiness in which our truest selves long to participate.

It would seem that, quite possibly, the ultimate measure of health in any community might well reside in our ability

to stand in awe at what folks have to carry rather than in judgment at how they carry it.

Awe compels us to try and understand what language her behavior is speaking. Judgment never gets past the behavior.

“After all,” he continued, barely getting out the words, “how can I help others to heal if I don’t welcome my own wounds?” And awe came upon everyone.

We are at our healthiest when we are most situated in awe, and at our least healthy when we engage in judgment.

For if we don’t welcome our own wounds, we will be tempted to despise the wounded.

what happens to us in childhood,” poet Jack Gilbert writes, “but what was inside what happened.”

We spend so much time asking where our suffering comes from, it leaves us little time to ask where it leads.

We must try and learn to drop the burden of our own judgments, reconciling that what the mind wants to separate, the heart should bring together. Dropping this enormous inner burden of judgment allows us to make of ourselves what God wants the world to ultimately be: people who stand in awe. Judgment, after all, takes up the room you need for loving.

The “monsters at the margins” are constantly under threat and they breathe in shame with every breath. They understandably think that their only recourse is defense and survival. When we conspire with God to move toward this transcendent awe, we are left with only a gentle touch, a tender laugh, and “survivor brain” gets soothed as never before.

How do we manage to measure success not in dollars but in change? (I lifted that last sentence from a bank ad.)

We are reverent, then, for the weight carried by those on the margins and stand present before the wordless goodness of our God in them.

You ask the homies on the phone, “What are ya doin’?” and they’ll always start off by saying, “Just right here.”

right here, staring at my son.” Jesus would insist that we are saved in the present moment. Just right here. So we choose to practice dwelling in the present moment. We need to find ways to establish ourselves in the here and now.

If your anchor is not centered in today, then you’ll blink and miss the delight of this very moment, which is always with us and is the perfect teacher.

The discovery that awaits us is that paradise is contained in the here and now. We let go of the desire to expect anything beyond it.

We miss so much “now” because we are rushing to “next.”

to embrace perfect presence in the moment in front of us.

Certainly, if we live in the past, we will be depressed. If we live in the future, we are guaranteed anxiety. Now is always vast and new. Like any practice, it’s not about technique or program. It’s a decision.

Besides, what they say is true: “The future is not what it used to be.”

embodying the sentiment I once read in a faux letter of recommendation: “Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap.”

“I am larger, better than I thought, / I did not know I held such goodness.”

“We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.”

We identify those things that close our hearts—grasping and anger, fear and pride—and turn to our world, instead, with a tender heart. We’re opened. We find the ability to be with anguish and pain without having to control or change it.

“Happiness,” Thich Nhat Hanh tells us, “only comes from kindness and compassion.”

Homeboy’s message is not “You can measure up someday.” Rather, it is: “Who you are is enough.”

“I’m at a pitchfork in my life,” a program candidate tells me. (Good thing I speak homie, so I know what he means.) “I’ve decided to be determined.” I ask him if he’ll test clean.

“All I have in my system is hope,” he says. “I will test positive for that.”

For unless love becomes tenderness—the connective tissue of love—it never becomes transformational. The tender doesn’t happen tomorrow . . . only now.

William James wrote, “The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change

the outer aspects of their lives.”