Gregory Boyle - Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

Praise for

A Los Angeles Times bestseller

Winner of the 2010 SCIBA Book Award for Nonfiction Best Books of 2010: Publishers Weekly

In this artful, disquieting, yet surprisingly jubilant memoir, Jesuit priest Boyle recounts his two decades of working with homies in Los Angeles County, which contains 1,100 gangs with nearly 86,000 members.... From moving vignettes about gangsters breaking into tears or finding themselves worthy of love and affirmation, to moments of spiritual reflection and sidesplittingly funny banter between him and the homies, Boyle creates a convincing and even joyful treatise on the sacredness of every life. Considering that he has buried more than 150 young people from gang-related violence, the joyful tenor of the book remains an astounding literary and spiritual feat.

Publishers Weekly Starred Review

A set of stories that will stir many emotions. They will leave you dumbfounded at the power of love and compassion to break down high walls built by anger and pain.

America magazine

Incandescent, always hope-filled and often hilarious. Boyle somehow maintains an exuberant voice that celebrates the strength, compassion and humanity of people often demonized. He simply highlights charity and goodness wherever they are found. Boyle intersperses his narratives about gang members and his work with them with theological and spiritual reflections from a variety of theologians, poets and other writers. By introducing book-buying, highly educated readers to people we may never otherwise encounter, Boyle aspires to broaden the parameters of our kinship.

The Christian Century

One of the bravest, most humane, heartbreaking, brilliant, and hopeful stories Ive read in ages. Father Greg, the Gandhi of the Gangs, fills Tattoos with unquenchable soul force and down-to-earth love.

Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart

Father Boyle reminds us all that every single child and youth is a part of Gods jurisdictionand when they know that we are seeing them as God does, they are capable of great things. Father Boyle is a national treasure.

Marian Wright Edelman, president, Childrens Defense Fund

Sometimes we are allowed to see in our own lifetimes what we were supposed to see in the life and ministry of Jesus. Read, and let your life be changed!

Father Richard Rohr, O.F.M., Center for Action and Contemplation, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Tattoos on the Heart is an astounding book and a remarkable testament. No one brings more triumph and tragedy to the street gang story than Greg Boyle. No one brings more conviction and compassion than Greg Boyle. And no one writes the gang story more beautifully.

Malcolm Klein, professor emeritus, University of Southern California

A spiritual masterpiece touching the innermost sanctum of the human soul. Boyle approaches each person as a child of God and fully deserving of love and compassion. His capacity to reach the heart of the most hardened, and to see the best in everyone, inspires. I laughed, wept, and underlined on virtually every page.

Kerry Kennedy, founder of the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights

An extraordinary reflection of a life totally committed to reshaping and redirecting the lives of countless young gang members (from L.A.s gang culture), Greg Boyles Tattoos on the Heart proves one man with courage is a majority.

Martin Sheen

Tattoos on the Heart is an honest, raw, and compelling collection from Father Greg Boyles life and work with gang-involved youth. His commitment should teach us all a lesson in compromise, sharing, learning, loving, and, most important, living life to the fullest.

Anjelica Huston

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To the Homies and the Homegirls

This day... with me... paradise.

Luke 23:43

I suppose Ive tried to write this book for more than a decade. People encouraged me all the time, but I never felt I had the discipline (or blocks of time) to do it. I have all these stories and parables locked away in the Public Storage of my brain, and I have long wanted to find a permanent home for them. The usual containers for these stories are my homilies at Mass in the twenty-five detention centers where I celebrate the Eucharist (juvenile halls, probation camps, and Youth Authority facilities). I illustrate the gospel with three stories and usually tell another one just before communion. After Mass once, at one of these probation camps, a homie grabbed both my hands and looked me in the eye. This is my last Mass at camp. I go home on Monday. Im gonna miss your stories. You tell good stories. And I hope... I never have to hear your stories again.

Along with my ministry in jails, I give nearly two hundred talks a year to social workers, law enforcement, university students, parish groups, and educators. The stories get trotted out there too. They are the bricks around which I hope, in this book, to slather some thematic mortar that can hold them together. With any luck, they will lift us up so we can see beyond the confines of the things that limit our view. After recently bumping heads with cancer, I started to feel that death might actually not make an exception in my case. So sensing that none of us will get out of this alive, I asked for and was graciously given a four-month sabbatical by my provincial superior, John McGarry, S.J., and sent to Italy. This will explain the ragu de agnello stains on some of the pages that follow.

There are several things this book knows it doesnt want to be. Its not a memoir of my past twenty plus years working with gang members. There is no narrative chronology that Ill follow, though I will give a brief aerial view of Dolores Mission and the birth and beginnings of Homeboy Industries. The subsequent stories will need that kind of contextualizing at the gate (as the homies say), if they are to make sense. I would refer the reader to an excellent account of those early days at Dolores Mission in Celeste Fremons G-Dog and the Homeboys . Her keen portrayal of the young men and women who struggled with this gang phenomenon in the early 90s in that community has now become an even more powerful, longitudinal study in the sociology of gangs, with her two recent updates of the material. (Young gang members write me from all over the country, after having read Celestes book, and have been deeply moved by it. Most say its the only book they have, thus far, ever read.)

My book will not be a How to deal with gangs book. It will not lay out a comprehensive plan for a city to prevent and intervene in their burgeoning gang situation.

Clearly, the themes that bind the stories together are things that matter to me. As a Jesuit for thirty-seven years and a priest for twenty-five years, it would not be possible for me to present these stories apart from God, Jesus, compassion, kinship, redemption, mercy, and our common call to delight in one another. 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. William Blake wrote, We are put on earth for a little space that we might learn to bear the beams of love. Turns out this is what we all have in common, gang member and nongang member alike: were just trying to learn how to bear the beams of love.