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October 19 - October 27, 2021
“I think we settle for just forgiveness, when we’re being offered mercy. I think mercy is more spacious. Let’s embrace mercy.” In this way, as my friend Jack Kornfield says, we “set the compass of our heart.”
The father’s hope (and our invitation at Homeboy) is that this son will touch the center of his pain, go through it, not avoid it, and come out the other side.
Mercy is better because it is always reverent of complexity. Forgiveness is the step toward mercy. “Mercy,” Pope Francis says, “… that’s the name of God.”
There is this “hermeneutical shift” at Homeboy where we are changed by what we are focused on. We focus on therapeutic mysticism and it transforms us. You can’t help but become an ambassador.
Republicans used to speak of “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” How about no expectations? Just healing—just relational wholeness—just the tender glance. This is what restores and that’s enough.
In 1954, Rome outlawed the “worker priests,” those Jesuits and others who, rather than sit in parishes, worked in the factories, accompanying the workers. Vatican officials evidently felt that such casting of their lot with the people and those on the margins threatened the notion of the “pedestal priest.” In the Hebrew Bible, the word for “holiness” literally means “set apart, other.” “Clerical” (cleros) means the “separated ones.” So does “Pharisee.”
We are sacramental to our core when we think that everything is holy. The holy not just found in the supernatural but in the Incarnational here and now. The truth is that sacraments are happening all the time if we have the eyes to see. Limiting them—seven for men, six for women—does not advance the kinship of God.
“Damn, G… if I was Pope, I’d canonize you right away… with the biggest cannon I could find.” He went on to say this would all happen in the Homeboy parking lot and we could charge admission.
Of course, Mark Twain was right, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”
We all engage at Homeboy in attachment repair. Every person is a practitioner who offers their time, tender consistency, and assured predictability. Everyone recognizes that attachment disorders result from problems with trust.
when I tell Joseph, who is out of his mind on PCP, “No, son, we won’t let you in the building. We love you so much. We won’t let you step one foot in here. But the minute you surrender to your own healing, we got you. Not until then.” Clear is better than tough. Affection dresses up like this sometimes.
He told me once, “I’ve found poetry in my pain.” In the end, all great spirituality is about what to do with our pain. We hesitate to eradicate the pain, since it is such a revered teacher. It re-members us. Our wounds jostle from us what is false and leaves us only with a yearning for the authentically poetic.
Homegirl Inez says, “At Homeboy, we don’t check boxes, we check pulses.”
Jesuit activist Daniel Berrigan said that “the great revolutionary virtue is endurance.” Part of that endurance comes from abiding in yourself and choosing to stay on good terms with your life. We even accept the invitation to forget ourselves on purpose.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study helps us to see this large margin. It is a questionnaire that identifies ten childhood traumas that have happened before one’s eighteenth birthday. Five are personal: physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect, and emotional neglect. The other five are related to family members: a parent who is an alcoholic or a drug addict, a mother who is a victim of domestic violence, a family member in jail, one diagnosed with mental illness, the disappearance of a parent (divorce, death, abandonment). The experts say that if you are a 4 or 5
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Every single homie and homegirl who enters our place is a 9 or 10 on the ACEs. This is the margin. This is the degree of difficulty. This is the burden at which we all stand in awe.
“Still a long way off,” the Scripture says, as the father goes running. “Mercy within mercy within mercy,” as Thomas Merton put it. Something merciful and healing happens when you decide that escaping yourself is no longer an option. Our re-creation requires this, and we rest in the merciful bath of self-acceptance. Not just a bath but mercy as the water we swim in. In German, the word for “mercy” translates to “warmheartedness.”
Plato was right: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” And Max was fighting a battle I’ve never been asked to wage. Society punishes people for bad behavior, and we call it justice, but real justice restores.
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.
“The point of Homeboy,” one trainee told another, “is not just to pay your bills but to heal your ills.” After that, it’s not so much smooth sailing as it is resilient and integrated enough to deepen the sense of your own truth.
We are all, then, as my friend Pastor David Moore says, “medics in a war zone.” These “medics” have an ability to self-regulate in such a way that it can reduce everyone’s toxic stress—even their own.
It called to mind a homie, Joseph Holguin, who told me once, “Show me a place of struggle, and I’ll show you a place of strength.” Create the place, the culture that repairs attachment and reconnects severed belonging, then you have a place of strength, a nerve center of hope.
What we do at Homeboy is restorative justice. We restore people to wholeness, health, and the fullness of their own truth. None of us are whole until all of us are whole. Surely part of this is what Paul Tillich believed was the core of Christian faith: “to accept the fact that we have been accepted.”
At Homeboy, we talk about the Hope/Healing Index. We always want to stay less interested in making statements about hope. We want to generate it. In the Second Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, the word “encouragement” is mentioned ten times.
We simply have this capacity to buoy folks in a hope that floats. Theologian John S. Donne speaks of a parable of sorts that takes place during the time of the great exploratory voyages. These Spanish sailors are aboard this huge vessel at the mouth of the Amazon River, and they are dying of thirst. And yet, they were floating, without knowing it, in fresh water. We think that we rest upon undrinkable salt water. Donne calls it “a parable of exhaustion and inexhaustible life.” We can always be drinkable water for each other if we set our hearts to it. We can sometimes live our life dying of
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He hadn’t “worked out their differences.” There are no differences. Only “samenesses” that bind us together. Jesus doesn’t call us to be peace feelers, or peace thinkers, or peace lovers. Peacemakers. We are asked to create something. We begin by swapping out a habit.
Nico tells me this shortly after his metanoia, this change of heart. “I was telling myself the other day, like G always says: ‘You’re a fuckin’ dumbass if you go back to the neighborhood.’ ” My eyes widen. “Well, maybe not in those exact words, but that’s my interpretation.”
Trayvon, his face laced with tattoos, asked, “Now why would you be glad that I was born?” I had to think. “Well, that’s easy,” I told him. “It’s cuz you’ve altered my heart. I have more room in it now, because of you.” I had never seen Trayvon cry before. Heal the wounds. Warm the heart. Maybe, I think, the time of transformation, for both of us, has shown up.
The homie Stevie says, “If you don’t deal with your pain, you’re in a car without brakes. Eventually you crash.”
“Well,” I begin cautiously, “science and Jesus.” I tell them that science shows us that some folks are born left-handed, and I ask them if they would insist that their left-handed child be forced to be right-handed now. They both shake their heads no. Then I ask the wife, “What would Jesus do?” There is no hesitation. “He’d go to the wedding.” Even the husband nods. “When you think about it,” I tell them, “that was all Jesus did in his earthly ministry: he went—to lesbian weddings.”
So, we need to allow it. Jesus lived, breathed, and embodied a boundary-subverting inclusion. If it’s inclusive and wildly so, then you know you’re warm. You are close to it. Nothing is excluded except excluding.
The Church speaks the whole language when it includes. It was intended, by Jesus, to be an alternative social vision. It is what Scripture scholar Marcus Borg called Jesus’ “politics of compassion,” which was counterposed to the politics of purity and holiness. Our demand that things change, and this “social vision” become reality, must be born from our compassion and not our contempt. It’s mercy that softens us to always find room in our hearts. Turns out, this supple mercy can be kryptonite to how we sometimes see things in the Church.
But really, it was about inclusion. The healing was secondary. What was ultimately treasonous about Jesus was his inclusivity. He ignored boundaries. Jesus plowed right through them. If Mother Teresa is right, that we’ve drawn our family circle too small, then Jesus sought to correct that. “The excluded,” Pope Francis tells us, “are still waiting.”
Authentic Christianity never circles the wagons. It always widens the circle. It also knows that there is no need for an “in crowd” if everyone is in.
If you don’t make a home for your own wound within, you will always despise the wounded. I would tell them that I was just trying to take seriously what Jesus took seriously.
There is no place in the gospel where Jesus is defensive. In fact, he says, “Do not worry about what your defense will be.” Jesus had no interest in winning the argument, only in making the argument. A follower of Jesus does this by loving in an openhearted and always clear way. Our lives are supposed to make the argument. Being clear is better than defense. Clarity is authenticity and needs to be a hallmark of our faith community.
But 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.
In The Brothers Karamazov (which I read for the first time during a pandemic book group), a young woman has lost her faith and she seeks counsel from a monk. He doesn’t speak to her of God. He just tells her to go home and practice loving with those with whom she has contact. He assures her, “This way is tried. This way is certain.” A mystical, loving way of life. That’s it. Buddha didn’t teach Buddhism—but a way of life. Jesus too.
Churches in second-century Rome fed twenty thousand of the city’s poor. This is how they saw themselves: leading with their hearts, loving with their service. A Greek philosopher described Christians to Emperor Hadrian in this way: “They love one another. They never fail to help widows. They save orphans from those who would hurt them. If they have something, they give freely to the one who has nothing. If they see a stranger, they take him home and are as happy as though he were a real brother.” Not a religion so much as a way of living and seeing.
We all hope against hope that it will become the “wonderful adventure” that Pope Francis envisions. Church as movement and not decorative institution.
Richard Rohr says that for Saint Paul, “you do not live in the world and go to church. You live in the church and go to the world.”
We keep thinking we are being called to DO something at the margins. But the real question is: Who will we become as we stand there? So warmly embrace any invitation to stand in the lowly place that reminds you of your abiding goodness and points the way to joy. We are beckoned to be a Church that does this.
In early Christianity, it was illumined love, not the law, that drove the vehicle. In this way, as Hafiz suggests, “we are house-sitting for God. We share His royal duties.”
In the gospels, we learn that Jesus sent the disciples out, two by two, because we aren’t supposed to go it alone. One Christian is no Christian, as I believe the early Christians used to say. No Lone Rangers. It’s only in community that we can move into the world with authority to be a part of the healing of “unclean spirits.”
The disciples didn’t leave Jesus’ side with a fully memorized set of beliefs. Rather, theirs was a loving way of life that had become the air they breathed, anchored in contemplation and fully dedicated to kinship as its goal. “And only at that shrine,” Teresa of Ávila writes, “where all are welcome… will God sing loud enough to be heard.”
In the flyer and in my letter of invitation, it had a controlling idea for the day: “How would you start a conversation about Jesus with the person behind you at the checkout line at a grocery store?” I saw that and was heartened that the date didn’t work for me. My answer would have been to hightail it to the eight-items-or-less express lane. Our lives should be loud and clear, not our words. The great Shirley Torres at Homeboy says, “We’ve become a culture that lectures more than listens.” It’s not about broaching a subject, but living clearly.
We try and find our way together to Christianity as a loving way of life—not just as a system of beliefs, dogmas, and requirements, but as a tender disposition of the heart. If we were honest with ourselves, we’d find the longing to sidestep religiosity and move in the direction of mysticism.
The root of the word “mystic” means “I am silent.” Which is to say “visible,” without the tsunami of words. It is the mystical view that frees us to take the gospel seriously and not literally. The Church that wants to come to us from the future is about witness, not words.
Miguel spoke the whole language. He was able to locate this guy in a net of mercy. He didn’t warehouse his love, he let it flow and overflow. The river itself. Miguel resided in a place where nothing threatened him and everything elated him. God singing loud enough to be heard. He was able for a moment to puncture this man’s isolation. Joy and bravery. The Church making the argument with his life. Two tacos or three? This way is tried. This way is certain.
I’m an old English teacher. Punctuation matters. Death is not a period. It’s a comma. Commas say, “Keep going.” Not done yet. Don’t die. I’ve buried so many homies who didn’t let anybody put a period where a comma belonged.
