The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness

by Gregory Boyle

Meister Eckhart writes: “How long will grown men and women in this world keep drawing in their coloring books an image of God that makes them sad?”

God does not test nor burden us. Ever. We need, Teresa of Ávila cautioned, to “overthrow any government inside that makes you weep.”

And we are “God’s delight” who is endlessly pleased with us, who always, as Hafiz reminds us, “is playing catch with your soul.”

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

Jesus uses the word “hypocrite” and its original meaning is “performer.” Which is to say, goodness is not about a measurable performance, about being better than we were yesterday. Jesus uses this term when folks make a big show of things, which is why he says we should fast and pray and give alms in private; don’t perform.

In the mystical view, goodness is our starting point, and realizing it, not becoming it, is the task.

We want to hold the wounded AND the person who did the wounding—because we are all always both.

Ignatius said that his “last defect” was that when he walked the halls and saw another Jesuit, he would laugh because he was so filled with the other’s goodness. He finally “reduced this” to a smile. Such an impulse comes from knowing that the Tender One has “pitched his royal tent inside of you,” as Hafiz writes, “So I will always lean my heart as close to your soul as I can.” A smile is hard, then, to contain.

A senior staff member asked me once, what was a force more powerful than death? I said to her that I thought it was inhabiting your true self in loving and thereby no longer being a stranger to your own unshakable goodness. Homeboy is the Lost and Found Department. We all lose ourselves and find ourselves in the other, and then so find our true selves in loving. A powerful force.

We find our true selves IN LOVING—in the verb of it. Otherwise, we get stuck in the noun of it. What seeks perfection is not our self but our love.

Victor had been invited into his own gracious heart and RSVP’d. Transformation is not just a destination, but a process. He saw his own goodness and then could repurpose himself for positivity.

Lifelong learning is, of course, magnificent. Yet, it will be difficult for these kids to shake the already solid sense that they are deficient because they don’t measure up. But if we learn from them and cherish them, and one another, all of us inhabit the truth of our unshakable goodness, and with it, our common dignity and noble hearts.

Dwelling deep within all our souls is this undeniable, inexhaustible wellspring of love, wisdom, and goodness. If we can’t uncover and see this essential purity in ourselves, then everyone we see is ugly, limited, and not measuring up.

Truth be told, Jesus hardly mentions “sins,” and I’m not sure he’d say he died for them. In John’s gospel, when he speaks of the “sin of the world”—it is singular. And the sin is the division we create, the scapegoating, the otherizing, the striking of the high moral distance. But Christian love resists the scapegoating agenda by remembering the humanity, “the other.”

Theologian Ron Rolheiser points out that, in the original language and context, the widow, orphan, and stranger were those folks whom society looked at and said, “We can live without you.” The singular sin of the world? To fail to see with God’s eyes. To see goats, when, really, we are all just sheep.

Micah 6:8 fills most of us with a sense of clarity as to what we are to DO with our lives, generally speaking. “To act justly. To love mercy. To walk humbly with your God.” I saw a translation recently that framed the second part this way: “To love goodness.”

We can be mindfully awakened in loving awareness of our fundamental dignity and goodness. Beyond creepy clowns and menacing chefs, there is goodness. Then our grief and trauma are mere visitors, but not who we are. The goodness puts the thumb on the scale.

I would think that loving goodness covers every base. Yes, there are urgent things to do, but God loves us into doing them. Once this is our heart’s compass, no one needs to tell us not to covet our neighbor’s goat.

Eric finished and turned to his stunned audience and asked if there were any questions. There is only silence for some time. Then Louie, our photobomber, rose. He had something to say but he was still crying so hard, it was momentarily a struggle for him to locate his question. He could only utter one word: “Why?” Eric began to cry as well and said, “Because you are deserving. You are worthy of beauty and music. And because… there is no difference between you and me.” And here, I suppose, is the faith that saves… when we are anchored in love, tethered to a sustaining God and ever mindful of our undeniable goodness. That’s why.

The Pharisees kept trying to be somebody, but they didn’t know they already were. You teach children that they are valuable by valuing them. Not by insisting that they prove their value to you. There are lots of things and toxins and blindness that keep us from acknowledging this and seeing it AS true, but nonetheless, it is immutably certain. Before we can love goodness, we need to find it, and see it. It’s there. It’s there.

People aren’t “wicked,” they are just strangers to their own goodness.

How long have we trotted out this chestnut: “Love the sinner, hate the sin”? Yet, hating the sin hasn’t gotten us very far. It has kept us from the love of our understanding hearts. We’ve reduced morality to just a high level of horror at hating the sin, rather than helping the ill, healing the traumatized, or bringing hope to the despondent.

It’s a truism at Homeboy to say: “The homies are used to being watched. They aren’t used to being seen.”

God’s] love thaws the holy in us,” Teresa of Ávila said. Love is God’s meaning and being. Create a culture of this, then homies can suddenly move from invisibility, from unspecified “me,” to the wide-open spaces of our common truth.

Kierkegaard writes: “To be entirely present to oneself is the highest thing and the highest task for the personal life.”

Famously, the Dalai Lama was interviewed in English and was asked to comment on “self-hatred.” He just couldn’t understand the question. He turned to his translator, to no avail. Finally, he said, “I just don’t understand this question.” Then he paused, gently tapping his hand on his chest. “Everybody has Buddha nature.” To borrow from Obamacare, goodness is our “preexisting condition.”

There is the greeting “Namaste,” which means: “I greet the Holy One in you.” I acknowledge the fullness of God and the solid goodness at your core.

We will consult either fear or love (since fear is love’s opposite). Then there remains no justification for our fear, ever. Thich Nhat Hanh doesn’t speak of “original sin” but “original fear” or even “original wound”—that begins when we enter the world gasping for air.

“Don’t tell me what we need—tell me what we have.” It was his surefire way to assess what to bring home. Not about deficits or what we lack, but always what we have in abundance. It’s always more illuminating to see what you have rather than lament your need. There is an abundance of goodness and innocence—focus on that.

Erich Fromm says we have two main fears: losing control and becoming isolated.

My friend Sister Peg Dolan used to say, “Each of us is a word of God spoken only once.”

We have long been saddled with the notion that mysticism is some otherworldly escape, above and beyond this earthly existence. But it’s not “escapism,” it’s “dive-right-in-ism.” The binary mind is just unable to see wholeness.

Saint Ignatius always encouraged folks to trust their own experience. Mystics are joined to their experience in a nondual consciousness. Their experience is both/and, not either/or.

A job is good, but healing is forever.

Moses saw God “face to face.” It is how we are meant to see God and each other. “Face” in Hebrew symbolized the entire person.

Consequently, at Homeboy Industries, mysticism is our “core competency.” The therapeutic mysticism at Homeboy chooses love as the architecture of our hearts. The world will focus on outcomes or behavior or success. Mysticism glances just above what the world has in its sights.

It is the absence of relationship that leads to isolation. In fact, relationship building IS crime prevention.

Because culture is about holiness and wholeness. Culture eats strategy for breakfast; processes for lunch; and structures for dinner.

In fact, our eighteen-month training program mirrors the eighteen months it takes for an infant to attach to the caregiver. It is not a time period calculated to capture how long it takes to locate another job or get a GED. Healing takes a lifetime but surrender to this moment can carry you. And headway gets made and attachment repaired so that people can finally see.

Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner said, “The Christian of the future will either be a mystic… or he will cease to be anything at all.” He’s not suggesting that “we see visions” but that we be “visionary.” We are asked to see as God sees and this changes all we view. We see wholeness, and it helps all of us rewire, not just the traumatized. The mystic’s quest is to be on the lookout for the hidden wholeness in everyone.

“So,” he asks, “how does it feel to be married to a living saint?” Mrs. Rogers winces. “Yeah, I don’t much like that word. It suggests that his way of being,” pointing to her husband, “is unattainable. He’s not a perfect person. He gets angry. He’s learned how to deal with it.” She now looks at the journalist. “He works at it. It’s a practice.” The gentle road home. You don’t chase happiness, you cultivate tranquility.

Turns out no emotion is final if you dedicate yourself to this practice. Mister Rogers could, as they say, allow himself to be carried by the river of feelings, because he knew how to swim. He practiced at it.

Researchers will say, for example, that mentorship helps teens overcome trauma. But they will take the wrong message from their own findings. The presumption will be that it is the “content” delivered by mentors that is so compelling. Truth be told, it’s the context that matters. Youth, as they say, rare...

The outsider’s belief system rests in information. What’s different at Homeboy is that content and information are always secondary to context and transformation. Our cultural context is the accepting community of tenderness that receives them. This is primary. Content is offered once this is established. Transformation happens where this is afforded.

Robert, trying to calm Richard down after one of his fleeting outbursts, asked him, “Have you ever thought that maybe you don’t love yourself?” When Richard told me of this exchange later, he said, “Damn, G. That question got me to open the hurt locker. I realized I didn’t know what love WAS.

The wife couldn’t speak after spending several hours taking in the morning meeting, getting a tour, and talking to folks. It took her a bit to compose herself and say to me: “This… is the Sistine Chapel.” We all knew what she meant. There is something of a sacred shrine to the place, where homies find a power that says no dark fate determines your future. You can sit in any chair in the house and be captured by a noble spirit and you watch folks embark on a journey to fullness, a broad-shouldered resilience and wellspring of joy. Michelangelo could not have painted it better.

To be sure, this liberation requires their cooperation. In any case, WE don’t liberate them. We can only create a place of liberation.

Most valuable of all is their vulnerability. This is the Velcro of attachment. It is how we adhere and connect to each other. Homies work with the “Inner” and it transforms the “Outer.” Speaking of this inner work, a homie said to me: “If you don’t work on something, it will return and it will be humbilizing.”

And I’m afraid one of these vatos will turn to me and ask, ‘What kind of cholo cries?’ and I’m gonna hafta say… A transformed one.’ ” Velcro. We all want to become transformed people—not just folks with answers.

If you talk about health instead of hate, there is no severed belonging. If you say “Terrible” instead of “Evil,” there is no severed belonging. Not “Erase the Hate,” but “Increase the Health.”