Boyle, Greg. Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion. New York, NY:
Free, 2010. Print.
In his 2010 book
Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, Fr. Greg Boyle, S.J. condenses twenty years of creative ministry with gang members into two-hundred pages of poignant, hilarious, heartbreaking storytelling. Boyle is the founder of Homeboy Industries, a multi-faceted gang-intervention program that provides jobs, training, tattoo removal, and most importantly, community for young men and women who are seeking new lives in East Los Angeles. Rooted in his understanding of Catholicism as faith that does justice, Boyle explores the concepts of God-image and self-image. In doing so, he specifically considers his program’s “homeboys” and “homegirls” who have been entrenched in the violence and poverty of gang culture. He also ponders questions of hope and success, acknowledging both light and darkness that he has encountered throughout his ministry. Most importantly, he promotes kinship, examining definitions of compassion, solidarity, and inclusion in light of such pain and heartache. By sharing stories of the women and men who have transformed him, Boyle reveals the power of relationship with marginalized people to bring his learned values of justice, love, and peace to life.
The impact of God-image and self-image on the establishment of peace and justice runs as a constant thread throughout Boyle’s parables. The epigraph from the gospel of Luke, “This day…with me…paradise” (Luke 23:43), immediately inserts readers into a Christian context. From the first chapter, it becomes apparent that Boyle’s spirituality—his lived experience of faith in relationship with God, others, and self—lies at the foundation of his work for justice. He writes, “…I am helpless to explain why anyone would accompany those on the margins were it not for some anchored belief that the Ground of all Being thought it was a good idea” (21). Boyle derives his images of God from a variety of sources in addition to Scripture, from Anthony De Mello to Meister Eckhart, from Dorothy Day to Algerian Trappists. They all point to a vast, inclusive, nonjudgmental God, free of human-made boundaries and full of delight in God’s beloved children.
Boyle’s stories indicate that he and the communities with whom he works mutually reveal the nature of this God to one another. Boyle, for instance, encounters God in the mother who takes seven buses to visit her son in jail (27), in the dancing “church ladies” who throw him the same surprise party every year (26), and in the Bolivian stranger who sprinkles him with rose petals following a humiliating Mass (34). The homeboys’ and girls’ images of God are inextricably linked to their images of themselves, many of which shift dramatically thanks to the Homeboy community and Boyle’s deep love for them. Their stories reveal the power of shame, an absence of self-love caused by years of internalized violence and isolation that often results in addiction (42-46).
How did Jesus respond to people paralyzed by shame? Boyle wonders. He ate with them (70). Thanks to Boyle’s presence and awareness of the gang members’ goodness, one young man learns, for example, that “he is a son worth having” (31), while another realizes through prayer that God thinks he is “firme” (Spanish slang for solid, looking good) (24). The homeboys’ and girls’ narratives delineate the importance of simply being named (47), the oppression of feeling inherently “bad” (52), and the life-changing impact of believing for the first time that somebody cares about them (52, 58).
Boyle further elaborates on this notion of self-love by exploring the ways in which wounds from childhood separate gang members from belief in their sacredness. He deems the father wound “every homeboy’s homework” (91), citing one boy who is traumatized by his father’s departure at age 6 and another who walked in on his dad shooting heroin and saying, “This will be you someday” Homeboy Industries attempts to meet people where they are and make up for the love they never got from addicted, abusive, or absent parents (Ibid). It offers for many gang members their first experience of unconditional love, which has the potential to outlive the conditional relationships found within gangs (94). Homeboys’ and girls’ stories display the ability of authentic community to introduce gang members to their true, sacred selves. Boyle talks about George, for example, whose destructive patterns are entirely dismantled as soon as he is offered access to an environment that helps to connect him to his own gifts (84). Immediately following his baptism as a young adult, George is told that his brother has been killed. According to Boyle, for the first time, George’s grief resembles God’s heartbreak, not revenge. Boyle calls George’s newfound connectedness “proof of the efficacy of this thing we call sacrament,” celebrating his resilience and the power of loving relationship (86).
Along with the light of Boyle’s stories of transformation comes the darkness of hundreds of funerals for murdered gang members. Holding on to hope in the face of such tragedy, Boyle reflects on hope in the slow work of God and the meaning of success. Several encounters with resistant gang members teach him that while he cannot force someone else to desire a new life, just showing up truly can change lives (114-115). Waiting patiently and continuing to offer nonviolent outlets can help people to make the choice to change every single day (121). It can lead a gang member finally to reject violence (111) or to get a job and support his son (118-119). Still, young people kill themselves and each other every day. Remembering two particular young men, Boyle comments, “…they are comrades in despair. And their inability to care for their own lives consistently plays itself out in the abandonment of all reason and surely of all hope” (124).
Why continue, then, when hope seems scarce and success unattainable? Boyle explains that his job is to begin caring where others have stopped. He feels called to live his faith by staying committed to people who everyone else would have fired. For Boyle, success need only come as a byproduct of fidelity (178). Working for justice is about disrupting the human-made categories that make us hate and exclude; it is not about sharing “success stories” (186). Boyle asserts, “Sooner or later, we all discover that kindness is the only strength there is” (124). He recalls hearing a gang member at a juvenile camp read 1 Corinthians 1:1-13. For the first time, he hears, “Love never fails,” and he believes it (124). Holding on to those small glimmers of love and hope ignites a spark that reminds human beings that light is better than darkness (127-128).
This hope-filled love is integral to Boyle’s understanding of compassion, which, a lifelong inmate teaches him, is synonymous with God. Boyle’s friendship with this prisoner evinces compassion’s call for people to spread lasting loving-kindness as Jesus did (62). Critical to Boyle’s definition of compassion are forgiveness and empathy, gifts that are especially difficult to extend to people who kill one’s friends. Boyle describes these broken killers as “Sheep without a shepherd. And no less the real deal. But for lack of someone to reveal the truth to them, they had evaded healing and the task of returning them to themselves got more hardened and difficult. But are they less worthy of compassion…? (66)” Boyle displays a deep connection to Jesus, who inspires him to love enemies and be with victimizers as well as victims. For Boyle, Jesus was not just a “man for others”; Jesus was a “man with others,” working for kinship with them rather than just offering service (71-72). In order to build a beloved community, Boyle asserts, people must strive to break down the illusion of separateness to achieve solidarity (71-72, 80).
Though I found myself completely engrossed throughout this entire book, I resonate most with Boyle’s emphasis on solidarity. In the sixth chapter, entitled “Jurisdiction,” Boyle tells a story about a scrawny, friendly, consistently shirtless, alcoholic man named Junior, who he sees leaning out his window every day on the way to work. Despite innumerable attempts to help lead Junior to sobriety, Boyle cannot succeed. Nevertheless, every single day, the two men share a joyful greeting. One day while passing, Boyle is surprised not to see Junior at the window. Moments later, however, he hears Junior shout after him, “I love you, G-Dog! [...]You’re in my…jurisdiction.” Boyle creatively unpacks this encounter and challenges readers to see that we are all in each other’s jurisdictions all the time (129).
As we strive to believe this notion, I wonder, too, how we truly can come to see God as a model of expansive acceptance that we can imitate in our own lives. How, specifically, can we break down barriers that separate us? As a Catholic in an institution that has become increasingly infamous for its lack of inclusion and equity, I am grateful for the gift of Boyle’s images of God. Keeping the character of this all-loving God in mind inspires me to remember that God is always bigger than I ever could imagine. With roots in such a God, I feel empowered to be fully present to people living on the margins. Boyle references Dean Brackley, S.J.’s concept of “downward mobility,” standing in solidarity with the marginalized as an act of protest. I applaud this suggestion, particularly for middle- and upper-class, white, educated Americans in whom autonomy and upward mobility have been so strongly inculcated. I agree wholeheartedly with Boyle’s assertion that the margins cannot just be erased by the powers-that-be (177). I believe Boyle and I would agree that only creative modeling of kinship in communities has the potential to move oppressors in that direction.
I would like to challenge Boyle, as an exemplar in the realm of social justice, to more deeply explore some of his key themes on a larger scale. Boyle asks, for gang members, how to dismantle the groupthink that makes them believe that they are who they hate (129-130). I appreciate the ways in which this simple concept—“We are all in each other’s jurisdictions all the time”—can be taken from the micro level of one interpersonal relationship and expanded. It is often socially accepted in our schools, cities, country, and world to define ourselves by who we hate. How much easier is it at times to articulate what we are against rather than what we are for? I find myself imagining what the world would be like if individuals were to consider universal jurisdiction in their homes, if families were to do so in their neighborhoods, if neighborhoods were to do so in their cities, and so on, until this universal jurisdiction could become the status quo for international relationships. This simple idea could even revolutionize the way human beings treat the planet. How can we create a world in which people realize that every living thing is in the same jurisdiction all the time?
I am intrigued by a comment that Boyle makes in his final chapter, in which he challenges Dorothy Day, who he admires a great deal. Day asserted that ministering to slaves is not enough. To work for justice, she believed that people must try to change the social order and end slavery as well. Boyle disagrees and suggests that accompanying the slaves and living in solidarity with them are paramount. In Boyle’s view, accompaniment leads to the dismantling of the system, and kinship requires more than strategizing (173). Knowing about Day’s life of voluntary poverty and self-giving, I am not altogether convinced that the two exemplar’s views are very different. Still, if Boyle is opposed to the intentional undoing of systemic injustice, I would have to agree with Day. Both approaches—solidarity and social action—serve critical needs in the breaking down of unjust systems, structures, and relationships.
Greg Boyle lives in the world as a real and radical disciple of Jesus whose humor, passion, and courage will touch anyone open to the unique gift of Tattoos on the Heart. By engaging issues of self-image and God-image, hope and success, and compassion and kinship, Boyle inspires people from the inside out to encounter the astounding potential for goodness in God, in themselves, and in one another. With such a foundation, human beings truly have the ability to change the world. Boyle’s life embodies these adapted words of Mother Teresa, who believed that “Kinship results when we realize that we belong to each other” (187).
© 2012 Katie Davis
