Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

by Gregory Boyle

I’ve learned from giving thousands of talks that you never appeal to the conscience of your audience but, rather, introduce them to their own goodness.

I eventually learned that shaking one’s fist at something doesn’t change it. Only love gets fists to open. Only love leads to a conjuring of kinship within reach of the actual lives we live.

It seeks an investment rather than futile and endless incarceration. Both this book and Homeboy Industries do not want to simply “point something out” but rather to try and point the way.

The kinship of God won’t come unless we shake things up—to “lose the earth you know”—to bark up the wrong tree, and to propose something new.

At Homeboy Industries, we don’t prepare for the real world—we challenge it. For the opposite of the “real world” is not the “unreal world” but the kinship of God. Therein lies our authenticity as people of faith and card-carrying members of the human race.

It is anchored in the truth that all demonizing is untruth.

How do we tame this status quo that lulls us into blindly accepting the things that divide us and keep us from our own holy longing for the mutuality of kinship—a sure and certain sense that we belong to each other?

Living the gospel, then, is less about “thinking outside the box” than about choosing to live in this ever-widening circle of inclusion.

Exactly what God had in mind. And I suppose, in order to know that mind, we need go no further than Jesus speaking to the gathered when he expresses his deepest longing: “that . . . you . . . may . . . be . . . one.” I suppose he could have been more self-referential. But it would seem that Jesus wants this to be about “us” and our willingness, eventually, to connect to each other. So the Choir gets barked at and, collectively, we move beyond the mind we have. And with enough jostling and juggling, we find ourselves anchored in God’s dream come true. Finally unsettled—connected to each other, entering kinship . . . now!

We have settled for a “partial God,” as Richard Rohr puts it, when every minute of every moment we are asked to “move beyond the mind we have” and land increasingly on a renewed and expansive view of God. We are human beings, so we endlessly create God in our own image. We can’t help ourselves. But certainly we can catch ourselves.

Our God is constantly saying, “Ándale” . . . “Go ahead.” We refine our sense, then, of God and what Ignatius calls the “Magis,” which refers to an affection for God. He also calls it “devotion,” which is a pervasive familiarity and union with God, a desire to want what God wants. We seek to live where God is and our understanding of that evolves and changes all the time. This is consequential for, as Jesus says, “Come to me and you’ll find rest.” We are not being offered sleep, but freedom. There is an openness—the spacious, expansive, inclusive heart to which we are invited. “Ándale.”

Hafez gives us this image: “God and I have become like two giant fat people living in a tiny boat. We keep bumping into each other and laughing.”

But it’s not we who needs changing—it’s our crooked path that needs to be smoothed . . . so we can be reached by God’s tenderness. 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.

But then he adds quickly, “You know what I do when I’m low on faith?” I shake my head and lean in. My faith’s gas tank has been known to hover at “E,” so I wanted to know. “I stand right here and I look at them mountains,” he says. “I stare at the blue sky and white clouds. I breathe in this clean air.” He demonstrates all of this. “Then I say to myself, ‘God did this.’ ” He turns to me, with some emotion and a surfeit of peace. “And I know everything will be all right.” The open-handed thrill of knowing what God wants us to know.

In a correspondence with a priest in Ireland, Jackie Kennedy wrote that she felt bitter toward God after the assassination of her husband. “How could God let this happen?” she asked. But God wasn’t in the Texas School Book Depository, aiding and abetting. God was—and is—in the heartbreak and in the insight born of sadness, and in the arms that wrap around our grief.

Some things are random and other things are meant to be in our control. So God is with me when “shit happens” and God is rooting for me when I need to decide things. And I’m okay with that. I don’t need God to be in charge of my life. I only need God to be at the center of it.

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.

Often enough, we get in the habit of shaking our fists at God and saying, WHAT do you WANT from me? We are programmed this way as humans. But I suppose it would be more accurate to ask God this: What do you want FOR me? For starters: life, happiness, and peace: My joy yours. Your joy complete. That’s it. Nothing less than that.

Dressed for a job interview, a homie once told me: “I just want to make a good expression.” That’s more like it. Our lives, fully expressive of God’s pleasure, delight, and loving-kindness. Pretty much it.

When we are disappointed in each other, we least resemble God.

Generosity in Buddhism is to be relieved of the “stain of stinginess.” God thinks there is plenty to go around.

I gather these six Belgian nuns in their living room. Their accents were thick and their hearts brilliant. “Hey,” I ask, “Would you guys mind . . . you know . . . moving out . . . and we could turn the convent into a school for gang members?” They looked at me, then at each other, and said simply, “Sure.” And that was the entirety of their discernment process. No stain of stinginess. The abundance of God breaks through the clouds in a solitary “Sure.”

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.

“Saintliness” has become a far cry from “sainthood.” One can’t help but think of the New Yorker cartoon in which a man stands at the pearly gates before Saint Peter, who is seated at a desk, peering at a computer. Peter says to the guy, “You say ‘meek,’ but our records show ‘passive-aggressive.’ ” We settle for the look of holiness rather than the likes of it.

After all, like certain bodily functions, discovering the holy in all things is indeed a process. It is also an impulse, like smiling, which does not await the arrival of joy but actually precedes and hastens it. Being alert to the sacred in our midst is a choice that gets more meaningful as we practice it.

Our mistakes are not the measure of who we are. Neither are our legs. So we choose to let the right things define us.

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.

The divine always wants to be liberated, no longer confined for too long in compartments so tiny. That holy amazement at God wants to burst forth, to blossom and bloom, and to be made flesh . . . here. Since the glass is already broken, might as well make as much contact with God to make us all crazy.

There is one line that stopped me in my tracks: “And awe came upon everyone.” 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.

Often what is discovered in the wings of pain is a shame to which folks cling.

What is most crushing sometimes is not the pain, exactly, but what stands right behind it—“Not what happens to us in childhood,” poet Jack Gilbert writes, “but what was inside what happened.”

Locating our wounds leads us to the gracious place of fragility, the contact point with another human being. When we share these shards of excavation with each other, we move into the intimacy of mutual healing. Awe softens us for the tender glance of God, then enables us to glance in just the same way.

“Mijito,” I tell him, “don’t wait to be ready. Decide to be ready.”

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.

How many chances a day are we given to recognize this—an opportunity to practice sacred presence? Smack dab, right in front of our eyes. We miss so much “now” because we are rushing to “next.” I’m walking with two homies, moving at quite a clip, and outpacing them. “How come I’m forty years older than you guys and you walk all slow?” I ask. They both shrug. “Cuz we’re not in a hurry,” one says.

What is Mary doing that Jesus likes so much? Mary (and Jim Carrey) have landed on the one thing that is most important: to embrace perfect presence in the moment in front of us.

To practice the sacrament of sacred presence is to be Jesus, and to see Jesus. It’s all right in front of us, here and now.

Staying anchored in the here and now liberates us from having the future all figured out, for better or worse. Besides, what they say is true: “The future is not what it used to be.”

His very being and utterance of this word seem to enliven what Walt Whitman wrote: “I am larger, better than I thought, / I did not know I held such goodness.”

Scripture reminds us, constantly, that we are meant not to wait for salvation but to watch for it today. Heaven, then, is not a promise we await but a practice we fully engage in. What is entirely available to us is the Kingdom of God, or what the Buddhists call “Pure Land.”

Homeboy receives people; it doesn’t rescue them. In being received rather than rescued, gang members come to find themselves at home in their own skin. Homeboy’s message is not “You can measure up someday.” Rather, it is: “Who you are is enough.” And when you have enough, you have plenty. In this effort, we are always paying attention and are obedient to that. The word “obey” has its origin in “listening.” It is difficult to truly and deeply listen. When a homie is sitting in front of my desk, the mantra on a continuous loop in my head is “Stay listening.” Another handy one is “Now. Here. This.” Listen here and now and only to this person.

We so fear being duped, yet much of that comes from being a stranger to our own wounds.

But if one’s wounds are near at hand, it leads to compassionate understanding and makes kindness more readily available right now. “Love is the eye,” Hugh of Saint Victor writes. It is our lens and way of seeing. It is the answer and solution to our shortsightedness, on those days when we can’t see straight.

“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 writes.

See something. Say something. They’ll believe you. The time for any of us to be returned to ourselves is now. The ground beneath our feet is the Kingdom of God, the Pure Land. It’s not around the corner, it is the corner. Kinship is not a reward bestowed at the end. It’s here, it’s now, it’s at hand and within our reach. And this moment is the only one available to us.

Rather, it is the humility that can lead to a peaceful surrender and a pervasive sense of gratitude.

“Sell your cleverness,” Rumi writes, “and buy bewilderment.” 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.

Our fragile ego gets nicked and yet we are called again to the joy of self-forgetting. “Unless you become like these children,” Jesus says, it’s hard to enter into the kinship to which we are all invited. The best you can hope for, sometimes, is to completely enjoy the trip home to the humble place.