Homeboy

“Mother Teresa told a roomful of lepers once how loved by God they were and a ‘gift to the rest of us.’ Interrupting her, an old leper raises his hand, and she calls on him. ‘Could you repeat that again? It did me good. So, would you mind… just saying it again.'

Author and psychiatrist James Gilligan writes that the self cannot survive without love, and the self, starved of love, dies. The absence of self-love is shame, ‘just as cold is the absence of warmth.’ Disgrace obscuring the sun.

Emily Dickinson writes, ‘Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul that sings the song without the words and never stops at all.’ I’ve come to trust the value of simply showing up- and singing the song without the words. And yet, each time I find myself sitting with the pain that folks carry, I’m overwhelmed with my own inability to do much more than stand in awe, dumbstruck by the sheer size of the burden- more than I’ve ever been asked to carry.

We try to find a way, then, to hold our fingertips gently to the pulse of God. We watch as our hearts begin to beat as one with the One who delights in our being. Then what do we do? We exhale that same spirit of delight into the world and hope for poetry. In the utter simplicity of breathing, we find how naturally inclined we are to delight and to stay dedicated to gladness. We bask in God’s unalloyed joy, and we let loose with the same joy in whoever is in front of us. We forget what a vital part of our nature this is.

I suppose Jesus walks into a room and loves what he finds there. Delights in it, in fact. Maybe, He makes a beeline to the outcasts and chooses, in them, to go where love has not yet arrived. His ways aren’t our ways but they sure could be.

We have grown accustomed to think that loving as God does is hard. We think it’s about moral strain and obligation. We presume it requires a spiritual muscularity of which we are not capable, a layering of burden on top of sacrifice, with a side order of guilt. And so the voices at the margins get heard and the circle of compassion widens. Souls feeling their worth, refusing to forget that we belong to each other. No bullet can pierce this. The vision still has its time, and, yes, it presses on to the fulfillment. I will not disappoint. And yet, if it delays, we can surely wait for it.”

~ Gregory "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. At the conclusion of his theology studies, Father Boyle spent a year living and working with Christian base communities in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Upon his return in 1986, he was appointed pastor of Dolores Mission Church, a Jesuit parish in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles that was then the poorest Catholic church in the city. At the time, the church sat between two large public housing projects and amid the territories of numerous gangs. Father Boyle brings out the best in people who would otherwise be outcasts.