Kinship

 

 

I love Gregory Boyle’s stories about the healing power and possibilities of kinship.  In his books, Tattoos on the Heart and Barking to the Choir, Boyle, a Jesuit priest, tells us about his 30 years of working with gang members in the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles.  Homeboy Industries, which Boyle founded, is “the largest rehabilitation reentry program for former gang members in the country” and which provides many services like tattoo removal, case management, education, and job training.  Most importantly, Homeboys is place where gang members can find the support they need to heal from the wounds of poverty, violence, neglect, and racism, which jumped them into gangs in the first place.   In the tradition of Dorothy Day founder of the Catholic Worker’s Movement, Boyle’s main message is (and I paraphrase here) that we need to stand with the poor and oppressed, the forgotten and marginalized, so that the margins where people are outcast might be erased.  Boyle has said, “We stand at the margins and with the marginalized so that all can be welcomed into a community of belonging and kinship. “   It is a radical message about radical loving.

 

Like Dorothy Day, Boyle is to my mind an extraordinary person in how he loves the marginalized and has given himself over to kinship with them. In most talks he says at some point, “It has been the privilege of my life to work with gang members.  They are my teachers.”  He doesn’t like to describe what he does as offering service to others because this sets up a false hierarchy between the server and the served.  He sees instead a “mutuality” where there is no hierarchy between service provider and service receiver.

 

Everyone who wants healing is welcomed into Homeboys – if they pass drug tests, stay sober, restrain from violence – so former gang members work side by side and receive services together. Homeboys takes a radical stance of loving acceptance to all “trainees”. Boyle has written that he loves young people who kill other young people that he also loves.  He has buried over 250 people killed by gang violence.  He embraces gang members who have murdered, raped, pushed drugs, and stolen.  While there are many stories in his books about gang members who have been healed by Homeboys there are also stories of those who leave, returning to drugs, violence, and long prison sentences. The cycles of violence, addiction, and death continue in L.A. where Boyle works. When asked how he keeps going he says it brings him joy to give love and be with the poor, the forgotten, and the marginalized because of what he receives in return.  Burn out isn’t a question. 

 

I am in awe of such loving and giving.  I wonder how so much radical loving is sustained and where it come from?  He doesn’t seem to feel much despair or if he does it is somehow continually transformed into compassion, hope, and tenderness.  Boyle has been threatened by gang members and those in the community who hate gang members.  He has been hit, spat on, yelled at, dismissed by those who he is lovingly offering to embrace.  Out of the thousands of gang members he has met through the years, many ignore what Homeboys has to offer.  How does someone persist in the face of so much rejection and failure?   

 

My own resilience in the face of rejection and apparent failure is shockingly low in comparison. I found volunteering at a nursing home overwhelmingly heartbreaking.  In addition to a lack of support from staff or the volunteer coordinator – I was left alone to teach yoga to residents - I was starting to despair at the enormity of the burdens that those near the end of their lives had to carry and the stress of the caregivers to provide adequate care.  I was also in awe of the strength with which so many met each day.  Boyle would say if you think about what you are learning and receiving from those at the margins – rather than what you are teaching and giving – then the experience is transformed into one of mutual kinship.  I got some of this during my stint but not enough to overcome the despair I felt for the suffering.

 

The capacity to be with the suffering requires great humility, surrender and tenderness.  And fuel from a deeper source than success, successfully saving others.  Boyle speaks of a loving God, who loves us just as we are. I wonder about this personified loving God.  Perhaps it is just easier to talk about God when they are personified. Mystics – in the contemplative stream of Christianity - speak of God as love and tenderness.  This has more resonance for me, the possibility that the spontaneous love I feel welling up inside of me for myself, for others, for life itself seems to come from a Divine source and not the outer circumstances of my life.   To  generously give this away, is what we were meant to do with it.