Gregory Boyle - The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness

Author of the New York Times Bestseller

Tattoos on the Heart

The Whole Language

The Power of Extravagant Tenderness

Gregory Boyle

Founder of Homeboy Industries

Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

The
Power
of
Extravagant
Tenderness

A VID R EADER P RESS

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Copyright 2021 by Gregory Boyle

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First Avid Reader Press hardcover edition October 2021

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Interior design by Lewelin Polanco

Jacket design by Math Monahan

Jacket artwork by Fabian Debora

Autho photograph Eddie Ruvalcaba

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-9821-2832-6

ISBN 978-1-9821-2834-0 (ebook)

For Doug Christie, Paul Lipscomb, and the Tuesday Night Gang

M ost of this book Ive written during the first nine months of our viral awakenings: COVID-19 and the deepened reckoning of our countrys systemic racism, Americas searing and formative pathology. The pandemic has widened the health and economic divide and has pulled back the curtain, revealing the need for radical changes in the social contract. Its true enough that we were all caught in the same coronavirus storm, but we soon saw that some were weathering it in ocean liners and some in inner tubes. Some, even, clinging barely to a piece of driftwood. We are in different-size vessels, facing the same storm.

The fault lines have been revealed. Weve come to see that inequality is not a defect in the system. It is the system. We saw the white, rich curve flatten while the darker, poorer curve was on the rise. (Ive buried many who succumbed to the virus, which includes three double funerals.) We are all trying not just to make the present bearable but the future possible. We want a different world.

Eight-year-old Dorothy Day was in San Francisco when the 1906 earthquake struck. What she remembered most was the unifying and generous response of everyone in this time of crisis. She asked herself, Why cant we live this way all the time? Its a good question that weve posed to ourselves during these months. Clearly, 2020 has been our collective annus horribilis. And yet, maybe we have also been given a new way of seeing more clearly, seeing that scarcity is a myth and abundance our newfound truth. 2020 vision. They say that when we have more than we need, instead of constructing a higher wall, we build a longer table.

Surely our nation was ailing long before the virus arrived. The pandemic didnt create our disparity, but it did exacerbate it. Its become hackneyed to say we dont want to return to normal. We want to put a stick in the spokes of normal. With both systemic racism and poor communities of color disproportionately suffering from the virus, we all would like an invitation to a new paradigm, please. Our current times have reinforced the notion that we dont change people by arguing with them. The invitation should not enfeeble with guilt but rather enable folks to high purpose. Once we abandon winning the argument, we can begin to make the argument with our lives.

Masked and at a distance, I participated in two marches during this period. The experiences for me seemed to obliterate long-held narratives that undergird the lie and denial that hold up a racist system. White folks, I think, felt an epiphany of our complicity in four hundred years of systemic racism, awakening in us a new language and a resolve to grow more and more antiracist. We needed to see each other with the eyes of belonging. Now we must choose to be allies as never before.

For every one of us, the pandemic didnt just alter plans, it also torpedoed identity. Who am I, after all, if how I am relational gets toppled? Giving talks, presiding at mass in detention facilities, or kicking it in my office with gang members. It all stops and there is grieving to be done. So, you lean into the grief. You allow yourself to be curious about it. This curiosity will always lead to savoring. It will blossom into what Saint Ignatius calls relishing. Before you know it, next stop: joy. If were lucky, grief never leaves us where it found us.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote toward the end of his life: If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.

Epilogue. Its okay, really. Once youre a geezer, Im not sure how shapely the story gets. I was interviewed on a podcast recently and the woman asked what I wanted my legacy to be, you know, now that youre sliding into home plate? I said that I didnt do legacies and that I mainly felt I was still at bat. But surrender is the order of the day, and you relinquish things all the time. Eventually, life itself.

While I write this above paragraph, I am interrupted by a call from an LAPD officer, telling me about a guy in the psych ward at White Memorial Hospital Medical Center who says the voices in his head are telling him to kill Father Boyle. Ive never met him. Apparently, hes never even been to Homeboy Industries. The officer asks if Im scared, meaning, I think, do I feel threatened? and if I am, he will need to pursue this. I ask him to tell the gentleman to take a number and get in line. Not sure the cop fully appreciated my humor.

We know that the kinds of stories Jesus told were parables. A man, after a weeklong series of talks I gave at the Chautauqua Institution, told me, Im Irish, so dont tell me what to do; instead, tell me a story. Okay. Im Irish, too. And besides, people hope for our attention, not our opinions. Arguments dont change minds, stories do. Jesus seemed to understand this. Parables dont tell you what to do and they have no didactic endings. After all, whats the conclusion of the Prodigal Son? The moral of that story is what we put on it our response to it. Parables were how Jesus tricked people into things. This book will also have parables.

Years ago, I was in the office, all alone, at 7:30 a.m., and I answered the phone.

The voice on the line said, Hey, G. Are you there?

I just repeated the question back to the homie on the other end. Are you there? The homie quickly recognized it as a less-than-stellar question and tried to repair things. When I said, Are you there, I meant, Are you ALL there? Like, you know, right in the head?

Good recovery, I told him.

I suppose this book is about being all there.

Its not every day I get called to testify in a deportation hearing at the Federal Building. The hearing was about a kid I know named Peter, who after ten years in prison now faced being shipped back to Uzbekistan. He came to this country with his mother when he was seven years old and settled in a part of Lincoln Heights where, once he hit his teenage years, he found himself incorporated into a Latino gang. I knew him only from detention facilities. I was happy to help him not get deported.