Bernie & Father Greg

A Zen master & a Priest who loves Gang members connect cause they care & they accept unconditionally.

“Miss Eve and Mr. Barney (Bernie Glassman) are here in Birmingham, AL, and Mr. Barney, as some of the staff refers to him, is working hard. With his left hand resting comfortably in its mitt, his right hand is busy transferring blocks from one container to another, carrying a spoonful of beans and emptying it someplace else, putting one cone into another, and he’s timed to see how many he can get done without dropping them in 30 seconds flat. You call that work! Each exercise requires a different way of grasping the object with the fingers, a different twist of the wrist, a different reach with the arm.

Everything was fine till I saw him working on a calculator with his right hand. He’s finally learning to use a calculator, at the age of 78! Now I know why we were so broke all those years.
It really is hard work. I’m amazed at how versatile his dead-fish hand has become. When it’s forced to do things, it does them, and you could almost see new brain cells lighting up, new connections being made. As if the brain is saying, Oh yes, I remember now. I remember how to do this.

After therapy Mr. Barney is exhausted—not physically, mentally. It’s not the muscles in the arm and hand that strain him, it’s the palpable brain work. And I’m moved by how a 78 year-old man meets the challenge to learn new things, set new goals, and do new activities.

We live in a culture that so denigrates the elderly. At his age he’ll never change, people say. That’s being demonstrated as untrue day after day in front of my eyes. Mr. Barnie’s willpower is as strong as it ever was, as is his drive to get well. And the brain can get it together. Edward Taub emphasized to me last fall that his research shows that the brain cells relating to physical functions can come back at any age.

Out in the lobby I talk to lots of folks in wheelchairs, and others with aphasia who speak with difficulty. They’re young and old and everything in between; they encourage me and each other. A young, handsome man built like a football player, sitting in a self-propelled wheelchair (he has no legs), watches Mr. Barnie walking slowly with a cane. “You’re doing good, man, you’re doing good!”

And after Mr. Barney enters the clinic, Andrea, a thin, middle-aged woman tells me this before I get up to follow him: I fell 8 years ago. Since then my nerves go all hot and burning on me, I get lots of shots of pain and my muscles kill me in both arms and legs. I had an operation on my neck 7 years ago and that made things worse. I can’t work no more, on disability only that don’t pay the bills. Only one thing I got going for me, and that’s that the dear Lord gave me a great ear to listen with. I’ve always listened real good. The one thing that makes me feel better is when I’m with people who’re worse off than me and they start talking. I was with folks the other day who had terrible face disfigurement and I could listen to them talk. That’s when I realize that I am so much better off than them and I thank my God that I have this life and that I can listen, you know what I mean? How did you learn to listen so well? My God, only my God.”

“Father Greg hugs

Bernie in his wheelchair. Bernie has been in Homeboy to visit with Fr. Greg and Fr. Greg has visited Greyston too. We sit to talk, and instantly I hear, not just words, but a language that is precious to me beyond words, aspirations that sent me roiling back in 1985 when I first came to Greyston.

“This is a community of tenderness. The people coming here are wounded. I’ve gone to many conferences about gangs, and when you ask why people join gangs you hear: “To belong, to be part of a community, for excitement.” They’ll tell you that, too, if you ask them. You know why? Because it’s easier to give that answer than to say that my mother extinguished her cigarettes on my skin, or else that my father pushed my head into the toilet and flushed. Nobody wants to talk about those things. But here they can, and that’s why nobody here will tell you that they joined a gang in order to belong. They joined because of their wounds, because they were broken.

What about tough love? I ask him. Lots of people working with gang members and addicts believe in that.

Don’t get me wrong. We have an 18-month program and at certain times we ask people to leave. But even then there’s tenderness, not just in what you do but how you do it. Let me tell you a story. We had trouble with someone in the program so I convened my council to get their advice, half of whom are homies. One man, who’s been in prison for 25 years and then with us for a long time, said about the person we were discussing: “He can’t smell the stink of his own shit, he’s gotta go.” And then another homie spoke up, and said: “All he smells is shit.” So we kept him on.

Basically, we all have our wounds. We’re ashamed of them and try to hide them. We try to escape the shit of our lives in so many ways, but not until we’re ready to stop doing that do things start changing. Many of the people coming here, all they’ve smelled is shit their entire lives. Here is where it begins to change, because we’re a community of tenderness. Here is where they can get close to their own brokenness.

A community of tenderness, I think, remembering the big men outside with tattoos covering almost every inch of their bodies. We are relational, we are not transactional, he says. And even as he says that I see people stopping outside the glass door of his office waving and blowing kisses, and this Jesuit blows kisses back right away to men and women, waving gaily to infants held by their mothers even as he talks to us. Young children are instructed by their parents to clean his glass doors with Windex. I can only imagine how many fingerprints have been left on that glass over the 30 years that Homeboy Industries has been in existence.

We don’t give you a checklist of what you have to do, he adds. We don’t say: “You need substance abuse therapy, you need counseling, you need anger management, you need this and you need that,” like some McDonald’s hamburger with this and that on it. We’re relational here, that’s what it’s about. There’s so much I want to hear from him. We can’t replicate or clone people like you or Bernie, I tell him, but I’m also not sure we could train folks to be quite like you. What can we learn?

There are 125,000 gang members in Los Angeles County, he replies. It’s important for 125,000 gang members out there to know that we’re here because that’s the only hope they got, and just knowing that, even if they don’t ever go through our doors, will make some difference in their lives because there’s nothing worse than living in hell without any hope at all. We’re here for the long run, says this Jesuit who started this work alone three decades ago, with leukemia that, at least for now, is in remission. You got to be here for the long run.”

~ Father Greg Boyle (born 1954) is an American Jesuit priest. He is the founder and Director of Homeboy Industries and former pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Los Angeles.

~ Bernie Glassman (born 1939) is an American Zen Buddhist roshi and founder of the Zen Peacemakers. Glassman has become known as a pioneer of social enterprise, socially engaged Buddhism and "Bearing Witness Retreats" at Auschwitz and on the streets.

~ Eve Marko is one of the founding teachers of the Zen Peacemaker Order and a principal teacher at Green River Zen Center in Massachusetts, USA.