Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

by Gregory Boyle

go beyond the mind we have.”

We settle for purity and piety when we are being invited to an exquisite holiness. We settle for the fear-driven when love longs to be our engine. We settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to this wildly inclusive, larger-than-any-life God.

“I’ve decided to be loving and kind in the world. Now . . . just hopin’ . . . the world will return the favor.”

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.

I’m not sure I want to spend eternity with a God who wants to be exalted, who longs to be recognized and made a big deal of. I would rather hope for a humble God who gets exhausted in delighting over and loving us. That is a better God than the one we have.

my image of God at five years old is not the one I have today. And if that’s true, why wouldn’t my sense of God be different ten minutes from now and twenty minutes after that?

God is not who we think God is. Our search for God is not a scavenger hunt; God is everywhere and in everything.

Some people say, “God is good, and God has a plan for you.” I believe that God is good but also that God is too busy loving me to have a plan for me.

Nothing is outside the realm of sanctity, for the world is infused with God’s presence.

you begin to learn not to discount the power of a single thing to carry within it supreme holiness.

Our mistakes are not the measure of who we are.

Staying anchored in the here and now liberates us from having the future all figured out, for better or worse.

The more you take things personally, the more you suffer.

The task at hand is not to change behavior but rather to see clearly.

foster an irresistible culture of tenderness.

If we could simply drop the burden of our own judgments, we could see with clarity and then compassion would be possible.

Moral outrage doesn’t lead us to solutions—it keeps us from them. It keeps us from moving forward toward a fuller, more compassionate response to members of our community who belong to us, no matter what they’ve done.

we belong to each other, and to this spacious God of ours, who thinks there are no bad guys, just beloved children.

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

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

“Stay close to your heart. You’ll be okay.”

Is God expansive or tiny? Is God spacious or shallow? Is God inclusive or exclusive?

The call to the margins, led by those we find there, is exhilarating and life-giving and renews our nobility and purpose.

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