Finding Mercy in Impossible Times (Father Gregory Boyle)

Listen now (43 mins) | "I think it's the only thing that can actually dispel fear and part of the thing too is, is it effective? Are we successful? Well then we're not called..."

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Gregory Boyle is a Jesuit priest and the founder of Homeboy Industries. It’s a massive—and beautiful—gang-intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry program here in LA, where Father Boyle is from.

Today, Father Boyle is sharing what he’s learned since starting Homeboy in the late 80s, and some of the most salient stories from his new book Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times.

We talk about how that might sound soft and saccharine, and why it’s quite the opposite. He explains why he so deeply believes two things: One, that everyone is unshakably good. And two, that everyone belongs to us. He talks about the difference between hope and optimism, and forgiveness and mercy. And why the moral quest has never kept us moral. It’s just kept us from each other.

If you’ve ever wondered why it feels like we’re not making progress…or how to get underneath a complex issue…or create a container in which someone else can feel their wholeness—I think you will find inspiration in Father Boyle’s words.

After our conversation, I’ll share a simple list that summarizes more of Father Boyle’s beliefs, which I love.

MORE FROM FATHER BOYLE:

Homeboy Industries

Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times

Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:

ELISE:

Well, thank you for your service. Thank you for the book. Excellent timing. Let's start with this moment in the airport. For one, you seem to spend an awful lot of time on planes, but for two, I loved the anecdote about seeing the woman in the t-shirt love, not hate, and then had sort of an immediate instinct to not high five her, but to reflect that this is maybe why we're so stuck. Can you talk a little bit about that moment?

FATHER GREG:

Yeah. The moment you refer to is when I saw a young woman and the T-shirt said Love, not hate. I remember saying that I had this insight as soon as I saw the t-shirt. I thought that's why we don't make progress, partly because if I wore a T-shirt that said love, not hate it would I think principally be about me and it can't be about me. And then it also sets up I belong to the group that loves and I stand against the group that hates, and I think precisely because it draws lines instead of erases them that it's why we don't make progress. So let me step back a little bit. The surgeon general, our current one said that mental health is the defining health issue of our time and I think he's absolutely right. And what are the indicators that that's true? Well, for example, hate crimes are up 300%, so what would we think means?

So you go, oh, people must be really morally badder than they've ever been. What would we think? Why would that be? I think it's obviously because mental health is the defining health issue of our time, and so I think that's an important thing to kind of underscore because then if you think hate gets abolished by standing up to it, I think one would not understand what hate is about because nobody healthy hates ever. So if it's true that nobody healthy hates, well then it's about health. It's not about up to bad people who are not like me.

It's just an indicator indicator. So what are the other indicators? Well, fentanyl use and overdoses are way up. Homelessness is explosive. Teenagers stare at, they're hypnotized by their cell phone or locked in the room staring at a computer screen. So I just think all these things are indicators that what we have on our hands is a health issue, not a hate issue. That always kind of pushes my button because I think when are we going to stand up to hate? You go, who do you think you're talking about? You're talking about people who are unshakably good and belong to us, but they're not as healthy as people would hope one to be, and so how do we walk each other home to health? That's kind of the whole point,

ELISE:

Particularly when I feel like as those of us with more progressive values or who would proclaim that we're on the side of love don't necessarily practice love, we don't get to pick and choose who we love. It seems in some ways hating the people who hate is

FATHER GREG:

Exactly.

ELISE:

An equivalency and self-defeating. So I love, I mean I a hundred percent believe with those core tenants, which is everyone belongs and everyone is unequivocally, undeniably. I know you go through a roster of descriptives, but good…

FATHER GREG:

Unthinkably, unthinkably good. I never see essentially good or pretty much good or fundamentally good. I always say unshakably good. You don't want to have there to be any discussion or doubt.

ELISE:

Yeah, there's so many beautiful moments scattered throughout the book that go back to that theme that you mentioned of Vivek Murthy, this idea of loneliness and disconnection and as being a core wound. When you mention someone in Australia who works with juvenile delinquents and he said something about how you can see in their eyes that they're already preparing for you to abandon them and that essentially the entire penal system is all about abandonment.

FATHER GREG:

They said a woman who works with the homeless, she says the homeless don't become homeless, they run out of money, they become homeless because they run out of relationships.

ELISE:

You mentioned the three buckets of and often the overlapping of those three buckets of people who come to homeboy and the biggest bucket is despair and that's always present and then trauma and then mental illness and mental illness. From how I understood it, you were categorizing it as people who are hearing voices and truly we have a very wide frame for mental illness, but it seemed like you were talking about people who need medication or care,

FATHER GREG:

Somebody who has a diagnosis. I just had a homeboy in my office schizophrenic and trying to get him back on his meds and he kind of jumps off and he goes, I don't like the meds because they make me feel tired. I said, well, let's try to find the balance so that we don't have to let you go for getting in the face of your supervisor. So now he's a rarity. I mean he's also been a gang member and also shares in the undergirding despair and then certainly with the trauma, but he has the additional bucket of a real diagnosis that needs attention and in his case needs medication.

ELISE:

I know Homeboy, I know you don't like the word intervention or rehabilitation program. How do you respond to this overwhelming need? And I know that you guys train and are helping people create this structure in order to hold these people or container in which to where they, I think in many ways self-heal, right? Or you provide the loving parameters in which they can start to rebuild relationships.

FATHER GREG:

So we have the Global Homeboy Network, we have partners, people who have started similar programs modeled on our culture and how we operate, and a lot of them are not dealing with gang members or even returning citizens. They address housing or homelessness or mental health population or disaffected youth or whatever complex social dilemma it is. They're using this model as a way to address it. So those are our partners. Homeboy is only in Los Angeles, homeboy industries, but there's rise up industries in San Diego and Braveheart Industries in Glasgow, Scotland, new life communities in Chicago.

ELISE:

And maybe this is the perfectionist in me that wants to believe that there's some way to reach everyone and help everyone and to clearly, I'm sure part of your work is not being able to help everyone. How do you manage that internally, all that hoping,

FATHER GREG:

I think we all do what we can do and 10,000 people walk through our doors a year here so people get hope from each other and from everybody supplying a dose of tenderness and care and everybody's on the receiving end of it. It's a way to engage full participation in cherishing love. Then you end up being the front porch of the house everybody wants to live in. Then you can be a kind of model in the country, in the world where a community of enemies are really more supportive than, for example, this morning on the weekend we had one of our workers, Isaac was killed in a hit and run accident and his father worked also named Isaac. So Junior was killed Saturday early morning and his father got up at the microphone at morning meeting and he was just weeping and everybody was weeping and he says, my son found a home here at Homeboy before he ever found a home with me

Because father was a drug addict and gang member in prison and it just blew everybody away. It was powerful and it was honest and he was just there to thank everybody for being the first home that this kid had ever known was here, which allowed then for his father to make amends really and to show a home that this kid didn't have when he was just growing up. I mean, it was very moving, but so people will talk about it as more home than home. Thanksgiving day for I don't know how many years, maybe 15 years. We have a huge feast. We had 48 turkeys and we just fed hundreds and hundreds of our homies and their families. This is their place, this is their home.

ELISE:

I was just interviewing an author named Pico Iyer and he had this brief mention in his book that in the Bible it says the most repeated phrase is “be not afraid,” which is stunning actually, because I think maybe you of most people in this country are probably contending with fear and I think about what you do. I don't have the temperament. I have way too much anxiety and fear and obviously in this moment in time, there's so much fear running through the country. How do you counsel people to manage their fear when it must be so present even if people might not recognize it as fear?

FATHER GREG:

Yeah, yeah, be not afraid in one form or another is mentioned 365 times throughout scripture, so that's one for every day just to keep you. And I think, I don't know if I do handle the fear thing, I think some of it is it's focus. If your focus is love, then fear doesn't have much room. And so I always say that the two marks of authentic discipleship, if you will, are fearlessness and joy and the opposite are sadness and terror. But I think those things are surmounted only if your emphasis is love. Love is the only thing that makes progress. We want to discover our true selves in loving. Loving is our home. And if once you know that's true, then you're never homesick again. So suddenly you're never afraid because you're just putting the next loving foot in front of the next. That's all we can do and anchored in the present moment and fully loving.

I think it's the only thing that can actually dispel fear and part of the thing too is is it effective? Are we successful? Well then we're not called to be successful. We're called to be faithful. So you want to stay faithful to this project of cherishing love, which is love with its sleeves rolled up, you want to be anchored in that. It doesn't allow much time to be fearful because you're too busy being loving. So I always say that about God. I always say God is too busy loving you to be disappointed in you, but it also means the same thing in terms of our own lives, and so it's all we can do is just to do that. What will happen the day after tomorrow? I don't know. All I know is the only thing that I can do and it's enormously powerful and that is to love whoever's right in front of me

ELISE:

And loving it needs a rebrand in some ways there's a cultural perception of it as being so soft and saccharine, but it's probably the hardest skill or quality.

FATHER GREG:

Maybe we do need a new word. I think it's why one book, I talked about tenderness in this one, I'm talking about cherishing. It's all a way of work. Its way from our head to our feet, otherwise there's no connective tissue. Some Christian folk will talk about loving on people and I wrote about that in the book book. I was thinking, yeah, why don't you just love them? Why do you have to love on them? And I thought, I don't know, maybe there's kind of a distance there that maybe you love your kids but everybody else you love on them. I just think tenderness is the only thing that could scale the barriers, the wall of shame and disgrace that keep people stuck and it's tender and it's cherishing, it's and it's holding people and it's really hard to do. Cherishing is actually not hard, but remembering to cherish is really difficult. So how do we remind ourselves with every breath we take that the task at hand is to really cherish people? I know it feels squishy. I even went through that with my editor. He didn't want cherished belonging, he wanted just belonging. And even though there were 99 books out named Belonging, I said no because cherishing is kind of the key thing because it breaks through. You want to love your neighbor as yourself, but this kind of is about no love your neighbor as you love your kid, you cherish your kid.

And so it's different.

ELISE:

One thing that I think is so powerful about your work, and I felt this at various moments when I was reading the book, that moment for example, when you're on the plane and one of the homies you're with sets off the alarm by vaping or at another moment when he wanders into different guy who wanders into the woman's bathroom in the airport. Again, this all takes place in planes, but I would be intervening and trying to save them or keep them from any consequences and you seem so skilled, which I think is the whole point of letting life run its course without intervention. Partly,

FATHER GREG:

Yeah, I suppose. But I also feel like the task is not to save rescue or fix anybody, it's just to let things unfold as they do.

ELISE:

That is so hard in our culture where that is our instinct to save fix. You have this line in the book where you write, those of us privileged to work at homeboy, don't give the homies the reason to live. We cherish them until they can find their own. We don't supply them with the purpose, but rather nurture a culture where they can discover one for themselves. So that seems sort of the opposite of fixing and saving. How do you teach that? How does that extend beyond you or is that just so built into the ethos of homeboy that everyone understands that that's their job?

FATHER GREG:

Well, I don't know if it's built in. I think everybody has to battle with that every day. I can't turn the light switch on in the darkened room for you. You have to do that. I have a flashlight. I can aim the beam of light on the light switch, but you have to walk up to the light switch and you have to turn it on. I can't do it for you.

ELISE:

It's so true and such a difficult in the same way that I think loving is very difficult to master. That's very difficult to master too, and I say that as a parent, but not even dealing with anything difficult at this point. So if we could all learn that skill, when you think about our culture and moving forward and how these crises, I mean you've been at this for a long time and obviously you started homeboy at the height of a crisis. I'm going to guess you feel hopeful and optimistic, but do you feel like at some point we'll ever be on the other side where we practice love and cherish belonging more widely? Are we at the end of the polarization where it's going to erupt into something different or is it only going to get worse? First?

FATHER GREG:

There's a difference between optimism and hopeful. So I'm a hopeful person. I think optimism is concerned about how things turn out and hope is not about how things turn out. Hope is about being faithful to loving and that's what you do. Knowing that love never fails and that is something you can take to the bank. Love never fails, never. So you want to be able to stay anchored in joyful hope. It's not about how things turn out, it's about how you see things and you want to see things as God does. I would say where it's just all love, only love nothing but love. And then you're hopeful that it is true that only love will make progress and love never fails. So rather than making some calculation about, but is this effective? Will it work? Will we succeed? That stuff is removed from your vocabulary and then suddenly you're just free to love. Now people don't like that. Funders don't like that. They want to measure, but if you love without measuring without regret, that's where we need to live. And that may feel squishy to some people, but my confidence in that is total.

But optimism is settling for something quite superficial and it's not that sophisticated, but hope is. That's huge. So it's kind of the same relationship between why settle for forgiveness when you can have mercy that's way more spacious and expansive in the same way? Why settle for optimism when you can have hope? It's just larger and we all long to attach and align ourselves with a larger love where the joy is. So you want to kind of inch your way there as surely as you can

ELISE:

You have this beautiful moment where you write forgiveness is the raft, but mercy is the shore. We want to get to the shore. That's such a beautiful idea and forgiveness is hard enough for people, but I feel like, but mercy is the shore. Love that.

FATHER GREG:

But if you had written the prodigal son story differently where the son comes home and then the father rather than hug him and kiss him and cry, the father looks at the son and says, what do you have to say? I'm sorry, but the father doesn't say that. The son says it. The son says, I sinned against you and I only deserve to be a servant or whatever. He says, but it doesn't matter to the father, you were dead. Now you're alive. That's all I care about. I don't care about you apologizing or me forgiving you. It's more why would you settle for that kind of back and forth when you can just have fourth, which is mercy.

ELISE:

You also make this point and I am hoping you can elaborate on it. You're talking just generally about this language of being against and you say We don't make progress on antisemitism because we stand against it, but rather when we get underneath it and really I guess in some ways understand it, right? Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

FATHER GREG:

Well, everything is about something else. So if somebody is antisemitic, it's an indicator of something. It's the same distinction as somebody with lung cancer. You can say, I'm going to calm this, I'm going to stand up against this cough and maybe it would work, but the cough is an indicator. The cough is telling you you have lung cancer, so you need to somehow address the lung cancer. That's the point. I think that's what I mean by getting underneath.

ELISE:

Yeah, that it's not about the antisemitism. At a certain point you mentioned, and I could not agree with this, more you write, is white supremacy an ideology or an illness? No one healthy thinks Israel has no right to exist. No one healed thinks Hamas doesn't belong to us. No one well thinks Palestinians shouldn't be free. No one whole says from the river to the sea. And that's sort of it in a nutshell that I don't know when it became so difficult for us to be able to hold all of these ideas simultaneously. In your experience working with gangs and that instinct to sort of turn each other into the enemy or align with the right side, is that just who we are as humans? It's so much easier to go binary. Is that your experience of it? It's so hard to stand in the middle.

FATHER GREG:

I don't know if it's easy or hard. It's human.

So humans are always drawing lines and we're being invited constantly to erase them. So that's where we need to be. We need to be in anything that drives a wedge between us needs to be bridged instead because we want to obliterate the illusion that we are separate

And because we're not, but we're endlessly trying to live in that place, us and them is the opposite of how God sees. That's why I feel like if we embrace those two belief systems that everybody's unshakably good, that we belong to each other well then that's going to usher in all sorts of really helpful things where we're able to erase the margins that exist between us and then to be anchored in a kinship and a connection and a cherished belonging. That's kind of God's dream come true anyway.

ELISE:

And you see this every day, right? You see people who would otherwise be mortal enemies come to belong to each other. This is the practice, right? Of homeboy industries. What is it that breaks the spell? Is it just relationship?

FATHER GREG:

Yeah. I mean, Brian Stevenson would say vicinity. So once you're in the vicinity of another person, you can't maintain the distance. Human beings can't sustain being enemies, but you won't discover that unless you're actually in the vicinity of each other. So you have two homies working side by side in the bakery making croissants, and it just in a matter of time, they will be bonded in a way that they've never known, not in their family, not in their gang. Now does that always happen? Yes, always. Any exceptions? No, never. Because human beings, once they're in the vicinity of each other, they really do long for the connection with each other.

ELISE:

If you were to minister to our entire country, what would you prescribe? What do we need to do to move past this? Just get closer.

FATHER GREG:

Yeah. Well, I also feel like the starting point are those two principles because if you don't believe that everybody's unshakably good, then you have to demonize the other. And if you don't believe that we belong to each other, then you have to be about excluding people. And that's why we don't make progress. One of the reasons is because it's the opposite of those things are indeed true, unshakably good, even Donald Trump. Now there are people who can't see it, can't recognize it, and that will come if we help each other walk towards wellness and health. But that's kind of the problem is they can't see it.

ELISE:

And I think when people hear something like Donald Trump is unshakably, good people's heads spin off in part because they feel like acknowledging that means accepting his behavior or exonerating it or saying, oh, this is fine or okay, and there's a distinction.

FATHER GREG:

Well, because I've worked with gang members, I've never met anybody evil, ever, ever, ever, ever. Now I've met people who've done horrible things, but I know enough to know that none of it has to do with morality or their goodness. It has to do with a wide variety of factors. The moral quest has never kept us moral. It's just kept us from each other. And so that's the whole point because the morality of he's a bad person. I'm a good person. Yeah, that's why this isn't working. He had a Thanksgiving message where it was a rant and it was just off the wall. And I don't go, what a jerk.

Last Christmas, he sent a tweet or whatever they're called that said, Merry Christmas and may all my enemies rot in hell. Now I look at that and I don't go, wow, what a bad guy. I look at that and I go, nobody healthy has ever said that, ever. I know. If he were my father, all my siblings and I have seven of them, we would sit down with him and we'd say, dad, no, we love you. You can't run for president because you're not whole. You're well, you're not healthy. How can we get you back to a place of wholeness? No one needs to be a psychiatrist and know that this is illness, but you do have to be well to know that he isn't. And that's the key. You don't have to go to Harvard to know that he isn't. And you don't have to be a psychiatrist. You just have to be. Well, none of us are well until all of us are well. So how do we help each other move towards the wholeness that we're all distant? That's why we're walking each other home to that.

ELISE:

I'm nodding emphatically because yes, a hundred thousand percent. And that's a much more substantive conversation, I think, for all of us, rather than assigning people to camps and demonizing them and discarding them or presuming to exclude them.

FATHER GREG:

Yeah, you want to get underneath things. You want to understand what does this mean? Who are the people who 300% increase in hate crimes? Who are those people? The boogeyman or are they people who belong to us who are not? Well, okay, well let's help them. You hear every day you're being challenged because just today, I've had three or four moments like that where people are coloring outside the lines. They're just behaving badly. And the goal here is not to create a behaving community, but a cherished one. So we're always asking what language is that behavior speaking? And then it just changes how you see things. I dealt with a guy today who people were saying, oh my God, he is out of control. He flips out. And anyway, but then somebody on my staff said, but that's why we exist. We exist for that guy.

So they had let him go and he appealed to me and I asked around, I said, what do we need to do? And this woman here, Shirley, she said, yeah, that's why we exist. We exist for that guy, so let's give him another chance. And it was perfect. He was even off the wall as I was having this conversation. But I still believe that people can be cherished into wholeness. I think they can be cherished into a place of balance and where the stillness is in charge, where people can be their calmest, most reflective selves.

ELISE:

Father Gregory Boyle is beyond a hero, and he would definitely not want to be called a savior at all. That's in some ways antithetical to what his ministry is about. But it is quite stunning to think about what he's done. And if you want to help his mission, it's Homeboy Industries. Donations obviously are very welcomed for this incredibly beautiful and essential work. And I want to give you a list of the things that Father Boyle believes, because I think this is a great, very simple list. And again, I think as you're listening and you're thinking about, oh God, but I would like to exclude those people or those people, that's not what we're being asked to do. And what we're being asked to do in so many ways is so much harder, but it's what a civilized people does. We care about each other. We cherish each other.

So this is the list of things that he believes. One, God is in the loving. Two, God is inclusion. Three, demonizing is always untruth. Four, we belong to each other. Five. Separation is an illusion. Six, tenderness is the highest form of spiritual maturity. Seven. This is a George Saunders quote, kindness is the only non delusional response to everything. Eight, love your neighbor as you love your child. Nine, we are all unshakably. Good. 10. A community of cherished belonging is God's dream come true. Thinking too about that comment about where he talks about how loving on suggests a distance in the same way that sometimes when we act like saviors of other people, it creates a distance or better than, and I've written a bit about the word empowerment. I don't like the word empowerment typically, because often it's used. It's often used to describe women. I'm, this company is empowering women, and it implies that women or the community that they're talking about don't have power.

And maybe they might not in some classical definition of the word, but in the same way that I think we're all good. I think we all have access. We power in the spiritual sense. But along those lines of loving on someone, there's this, he tells the story of a friend of his who is a mystic, of course, and she was, I guess she usually, when she walks around the city, I think she lived in San Francisco, she usually brings clean socks. So this is friend Mary, and she passed a homeless woman. She didn't have any socks. This woman was barefoot. Her foot was really swollen and she was yelling. So this woman, Mary walks past her and then stops and comes back and she asks this homeless woman for directions. And she said to Father Boyle, Mary tells me that the woman came to complete stillness and saw me and knew everything necessary about me.

We were in the same world. And they shared this moment. And of course, Mary, she didn't actually need directions, but this woman told her where to go. And Mary said, I asked for knowledge. The woman for a moment felt noble. And it's such a beautiful metaphor actually, to ask directions, ask for directions of each other, just this idea of leaning on each other's wisdom. I don't know. There was something about it that I just can't stop thinking about this idea of ennobling each other by asking each other for guidance. Such a beautiful and simple thing to do.