Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

by Gregory Boyle

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.

Humility can prepare the soil that leads you to rely on nothing until you want nothing. No clinging and a light grasp. Entering into the kinship of God requires humility.

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.

“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.

“I used to walk the bad path,” one might say, “but now I’m on the good path.” It’s a natural thing to say, but I don’t think there are two paths. There is only the Good Journey.

Like the homie who presents to me some certificate of achievement for one thing or another, I want him to know that he is the achievement.

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

The hope, always, is that homies won’t settle for just answers but instead hold out for meaning. The goal is not perfection but a wholeness anchored in grateful living, in knowing what you have.

The Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez believed that only one kind of person transforms the world: the one with the grateful heart.

I tell the older guys, the ones who run the place, that it’s never about behavior, it’s about identity—that versions of an old self have to die in order for a new, brilliant one to emerge and see the light.

Denial is perfectly beneficial until it’s not anymore. Then we need to find the safe place to peel back the layers of our own pain.

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

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.” In a vocation, a marriage, recovery—no matter what your lips seem to be saying—you have to renew this “yes” all the time.

When we label folks scum, it makes it all right to do anything we want to them. Who doesn’t belong? We try and imagine Jesus and God compiling a list of those who should not make the cut, but we come up short. We can’t think of anybody. The minute we accept this to be true, we will see racism, demonizing, and scapegoating dissipate in the wind like sand on a blustery day. The great Jesuit Howard Gray said: “God has no enemies and neither should I.”

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

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. If we can find ourselves in this salvific relationship to those on the margins, we see as never before and it becomes our passageway.

Delighting is a real antidote to the chronic toxic stress that folks at the edges carry.

To embrace tenderness, writes the theologian Jean Vanier, is the highest mark of spiritual maturity.

He knew, even from where he was sitting, that prayer should help us enter the world, not run from it.

We are meant to hear in these words a call to seek out the isolated, the rejected, the abandoned. Then we are meant to walk toward them, with open arms, and bring them in to the place of belonging. This is the essential task of the Choir.

“Tell me who you’re with and I’ll tell ya what you’re doin’.”

My spiritual director, 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.”

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; we are all a cry for help. The affection of God unfolds when there is no daylight separating us.

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.”

Many high school volunteers, long accustomed to building the orphanage or feeding the homeless in a soup kitchen, ask me what they’re supposed to “do” at Homeboy, and I always answer: “Wrong question. The right one is: What will happen to you here?”

At Homeboy, we often say, “Community trumps gang.” Only by offering a real, live community are you able to shine a light on the empty, shallow, and false “belonging” of a gang.

Receiving them and allowing yourself to be reached by them is all that’s asked of us. And anyone who is the proud owner of a pulse can do this. Wage peace by listening.

Every moment, it turns out, is an invitation to recognize our interconnectedness. “You are the other me and I am the other you.”

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. What is hoped for is a lighter grasp, a gentler receiving. Can we love people, then have our reciprocal expectations disappear? I don’t empower anyone at Homeboy Industries. But if one can love boundlessly, then folks on the margins become utterly convinced of their own goodness. We find our awakened connection to each other—a focused, balanced attention to the person in front of us. To reach and be reached, to savor the world, seeking only to receive the gift. And the world gets saved, and a decision gets made to live in each other’s hearts.

The kinship of God is where everyone matters.

Demonizing and judging one another can’t survive the plentitude of community. With this beloved community, we cease to create a world that, unwittingly, makes life so tough on one another. What kinship always seeks to underscore is that separation is an illusion. However, we know that that doesn’t just happen overnight.

Jesus has high hopes that we will move from separation to solidarity to kinship.

Now, we can be astonished at the authority of Jesus, who calls us to love our enemies. Or we can just love our enemies and so astonish the world as to jostle it from its regular course.

For Jesus, the self that needs to die is the one that wants to be separate. This is the self that recoils from kinship with others and balks at union at every turn. It is the self that wants it all to remain private and thinks it prefers isolation to connection. We know that the early Christians believed that “one Christian is no Christian.” This larger sense of belonging to each other acknowledges that many are the things that connect us, and those things that divide are few and no match for our kinship.

Fandom is of no interest to Jesus. What matters to him is the authentic following of a disciple. We all settle for saying, “Jesus,” but Jesus wants us to be in the world who he is.

It would seem important to test what kind of praise is the right kind—the kind that just might bring a smile to God’s face. We think the praise required of us is the maintenance of a constant state of astonishment at Jesus. Personally, I don’t think he wants so much for us to wave palm fronds at his authority, but rather to locate our own—to be not so astonished at Jesus’s authority but to live astonishingly, inhabiting our own power to live as he would.

Hope is not about some assurance that everything will work out but rather about a confidence that purpose and luminous meaning can be found there, no matter how things unfold.

Hope is in the relationship, in seeing Jesus and being Jesus.

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

What this place announces to the world is aspirational and not declarative of a fully formed, complete thing. Our community has always been about longing; always the desire for the desire.