Join the Choir

 

 

 

Hopelessness is the enemy of justice.  You are either hopeful or you are the problem.

Bryan Stevenson, Equal Justice Initiative

 

You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.
Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart:  The Power of Boundless Compassion

 

I have been inspired by these two present day Bodhisattva’s, people who dedicate their lives to ending the suffering of others.  Bryan Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative more than thirty years ago to adjudicate for the wrongfully convicted.  In 2018 he established the National Memorial for Peace and Justice dedicated to remembering and honoring the thousands of Black people lynched during Jim Crow and The Legacy Museum:  From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, the nation’s first museum to acknowledge and reckon the country’s brutal history and legacy of enslavement and system of institutional racism.

 

Gregory Boyle has been working with LA gang members for about the same time first as a parish priest in the poorest neighbor of LA and then through Homeboy Industries which provides jobs, training, and tattoo removal, among many other services as a pathway out of gangs, addiction, poverty, and incarceration.  Mostly, Homeboys offers a loving community of hope and kinship for those demonized and the marginalized by society. 

 

Their lifelong dedication to the disenfranchised in the face of daunting obstacles is breathtaking. Things did not – do not – always work out well.  How, I wonder, does one find the strength to carry-on in such difficult situations and low odds of success?

 

While Bryan Stevenson has been able to exonerate many men unjustly sentenced to death, he has not been able to save all of them.  How do you continue with your work when a bad day means that someone you love and care for is unjustly put to death or remains locked-up for another decade?  Gregory Boyle has buried hundreds of young people killed by gang violence, people he loved killed by people he loves.  Out of the thousands of former gang members helped by Homeboys, many thousands remain out of reach or return to the streets because of too much woundedness and the corrosion of racism.  How does Gregor Boyle withstand so many funerals, gun violence, so much heartbreak?

 

Remarkably, these Boddhisatva’s share stories of joy and hope not despair.  This is the great love story about the sweet tenderness that rises up between people when loving reaches over the walls of woundedness and disregard to create the community of belonging.  Boddhisatva’s arresting ability to be with the suffering is fed by the deepest source of the Self, the well-spring of compassion.  The small self could never withstand so much heartbreak, rejection, failure.  One needs a heart that is soft and supple so that it can expand open wide enough to hold the sorrow and let in the joy. 

 

We are all nourished by Boddhisatva’s even from a distance.  We are social beings.  When we see great offerings of love our own hearts grow larger.  We become inspired to love beyond small means, beyond our bounds.  When we offer kindness to one another no matter how seemingly small the act we help to nourish the ecology of tenderness in the world.  Placing our ears to the ground to hear the resonant vibrations of the many acts of generosity all around us, the amazing and the ordinary, will call our own hearts to join in the choir.