February 2011 Philadelphia Chapter of Pax Christi U.S.A.

Tattoos on the Heart

“I have spent the last twenty years building a reputation for myself…and now…I regret…that I even have one.”

This is Scrappy, tears flowing, asking Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ, for help. His resume: I know how to sell drugs. I know how to gangbang. I know how to shank fools in prison. I know how to drive, but I don’t know how to park. And I don’t know how to wash my clothes except in the sink of a cell. Fr. Greg: “I hire him that day, and he begins work the next morning on our graffiti crew.” Scrappy’s past haunts him and he is shot and killed by a gang member.

Tattoos on the Heart is a book by a Jesuit priest, Gregory Boyle, who for over twenty years has labored with young Latinos (homies) in Los Angeles. Boyle practices a gospel of “boundless compassion,” a “no matter what” has transpired in a homie’s life. No one is beyond redemption. One of his gifts that radiates throughout the book is his marvelous sense of humor. With a M.A. in English, he hits the right chords with quotes from theologians, philosophers, poets to illuminate this amazing and dangerous world. The best summary of Tattoos is to quote the author.

Boyle began in the 1980s when in L.A. County there were 100 gangs and 86,000 members. In his parish, Dolores Mission, 8 gangs, 1100 members, predominantly Latinos, living in nearby projects. There are healings and transformations as startling as Jesus healing lepers. There is a hard reality stat, that lends an authenticity to his words; Boyle has presided at 168 funerals of young persons. Guns in the projects were omni-present. Today there are dramatically fewer.

Fr. Boyle, or ‘G’ as he is affectionately known, discovered as a young priest in Cochabamba, Bolivia the heritage of the Conquistadors on the Quechan Indians. Celebrating a wedding Mass, he was unable to persuade a single person to receive communion. The sense of unworthiness, this “toxic shame” was all encompassing. This same heritage was rampant among the homies in L.A.

“We think blemishes are shortcomings. We think our continually hardened responses are not just proof of our humanity but (somehow) of our unworthiness…homies identify with and grow attached to their weaknesses and difficulties and burdens. You hope, in the light of this, to shift their attention and allegiance to their own basic goodness. You show them the bright blue sky and their sacredness, and they are transfixed only by the ominous clouds.” Boyle’s mantra is affirmation. Quoting Perma Chaldron, “You are the sky. Everything else is just weather.”

Homeboy Industries is the place where thousands of young persons have found help, counseling, job training etc. “We began tattoo removal because of a guy named Ramiro…A gang member fresh out of prison, with a long record, had ‘Fuck the world’ tattooed on his forehead…He told me that his job search was not going to great. I’m only imagining him at McDonald’s, ‘Do you want fries with this?’ And seeing mothers grab their kids, fleeing the store…Little by little we erased his forehead…no trace left of the angriest moment in his life.”

Fr. Gregory rotates celebrating mass in 25 Detention Institutions and Prisons. Talking to 15 lifers in Folsom Prison, a discussion emerged about the difference between sympathy and empathy and then, what is compassion. An old timer said, “Compassion, that is something altogether different. Cause that is what Jesus did. I mean, compassion is God.” It is difficult not to be repelled by some victimizers, guilty of heinous crimes. Boyle sees his task as “returning themselves to themselves.”

“If there is a fundamental challenge within these stories, it is simply to change our lurking suspicion that some lives matter less than other lives.” Another Boyle lifeline, “we aspire to broaden the parameters of our kinship.” And he throws in a thought from William Blake, “We are put on earth for a little space that we might learn to bear the beams of love.”

Among homies there is an impending sense of death always lurking. A complement to a young woman worker on a bright new dress evokes a passionate response, “G, make sure I’m buried in this dress.” It is a rarity to preside at a death from natural causes. His work is grounded in solid theology, but his insights are experiential. “There is a palpable sense of disgrace strapped like an oxygen tank onto the back of every homie I know...children emerge from the wreck of a lifetime of internalized shame, a sense that God finds them (us) wholly unacceptable.” There is a desperate need for acceptance.

G has an antidote to our internalized shame, resilience. “Sometimes resilience arrives in the moment you discover your own unshakeable goodness… And when that happens we begin to foster tenderness for our own human predicament. A spacious and undefended heart finds room for everything you are and carries space for everybody else.”

Gregory Boyle is the real thing. He brings to mind the theologian James Allison who describes the apostolic community’s “change in the perception of who God is. They were able to remove any vestiges of violence from God, then understand God as Love…there is no change in our perception of God without a corresponding change in our perception of ourselves and of our relationship with others.”

Lastly he echoes the cry of the Palestinian Church in the Kairos Document of 2010. “In the absence of all hope, we cry out our cry of hope…We believe that God’s goodness will finally triumph over the evil of hate and of death that persist in our land. We will see here a ‘new land’ and ‘a new human being’, capable of rising up in the spirit to love each one of his or her brothers and sisters,”

“Either I am a nobody or I am a nation.” Derek Walcott

Joe Bradley

Joe is a member of CPF

Tattoos on the Heart, Gregory Boyle, Free Press

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