The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness

by Gregory Boyle

The longing of the mystic is to be at home with yourself and then put the welcome mat out so that others find a home in you.

Mystics replace fear with love, vindictiveness with openhearted kindness, envy with supportive affection, withering judgment with extravagant tenderness. Now is the time, as author Brian Doyle suggests, to embrace “something other than combat.”

God is never toxic, but quite often our version of God, to which we cling, can be. We need to lose patience with such a puny god.

If our God makes us feel unworthy and in debt, wrong God. If God frightens us, wrong God. If God is endlessly disappointed in us, wrong God. A man I knew, after being fired from his job, said, “It’s a good thing I believe in God, who says, ‘Vengeance will be mine.’ ” Uh-oh. Wrong God.

God doesn’t want us to be good. We already are. God only longs for us to be joyful.

We never say to the homies, “We believe you can change,” but rather, “We know you can heal.”

It unlocks some door, however, to embrace this mystical view. It will keep us from seeking satisfaction in revenge. It frees us from thinking that peace will come from humbling others, or that being stern with our children makes them gentle, or that justice is pain doled out to those who behave badly. It holds us back from believing that our righteousness arrives when we prove someone wrong.

You teach children that they are valuable by valuing them. Not by insisting that they prove their value to you.

We’ve mistaken moral outrage for moral compass. Moral compass helps you see with clarity how complex and damaged people are. It is the whole language. Moral outrage just increases the volume and the distance that separates us.

I suppose if I thought moral outrage worked, I’d be out raging. But rage just means we don’t understand yet. Ten people were killed in the Santa Fe High School shooting in Texas a number of years ago. Senator Ted Cruz said, “Once again, Texas has seen the face of evil.” But a teenage girl and fellow student of the shooter said, “The one who did this must have been carrying a world of pain inside.”

Jesus doesn’t call us to be peace feelers, or peace thinkers, or peace lovers. Peacemakers.

If you don’t make a home for your own wound within, you will always despise the wounded.

True followers of Jesus aren’t under siege, but under the power of understanding love. It chooses to be intrigued by our world rather than threatened.

Bill Maher points out that Martin Luther King never said that Southern sheriffs have a point too.

We’ve grown accustomed in this age in which we live to think that thoughtlessness is telling it like it is. We mistake cruelty for strength. And exclusion has always masqueraded as a safeguarding of what is pure.

aren’t we SUPPOSED to lose our faith? It’s not different from our voices changing in puberty or hair turning gray. Like snakes shedding skin, aren’t we always meant to break through to something more expansive? The mystics surely teach us this. Otherwise, we just dig in our heels, get defensive, and get stuck pledging allegiance to our elementary school God.

We are always hopeful that the Church will see its Copernican Moment, when it decides that its center is not located in Europe, in white males, in mandatory celibacy. We all hope against hope that it will become the “wonderful adventure” that Pope Francis envisions. Church as movement and not decorative institution.

God stands with the powerless not to console them in their powerlessness, but to always remind them of their power. Hence, Jesus critiques all forms of domination and we are compelled to do the same as Church.

Our lives should be loud and clear, not our words.