How Wholeness Heals with Fr. Greg Boyle (Part 1)

Welcome to Hunger for Holiness, a podcast from the Center for Christogenesis. I'm your host, Robert Nakastro. Today, Ilya speaks with Father Greg Boyle, Jesuit priest and founder of Homeboy Industries, a gang rehabilitation and reentry program, which has grown far beyond its roots in Los Angeles, California. In this episode, Ilya asks Father Greg more about the background of this ministry, and the role wholeness plays in our lives, our communities, and our future. By the Greg Boyle, we are so delighted that you are with us this afternoon on our podcast, The Hunger for Holiness. I have been a great fan of yours for many years, I have to tell you. And I've used your book every year, I use your book Tatus in the Heart. That is really now a classic next to Augustine. So I know you laugh, but it's such tremendous insight into that book. And I know your other books as well, Barking and Choir, etc. So I thought maybe for our listeners, for those who may not be familiar with your tremendous work, could you just tell us a little bit what led you to start Homeboy Industries, and tell us just briefly about that wonderful ministry? Well, I was pastor in the mid 80s at Dolorver's Mission Church, which at the time was the poorest parish in the city of Los Angeles. And the parish was comprised of this tiny little area, very densely populated, largest grouping of public housing west of the Mississippi. So we had eight gangs at war with each other during that time. So I was pastor at 86, so 86 to 88 was, you know, immigration was kind of the big issue family separation. And there were endless raids at my parishioners, jobs and factories. And then in 88, I started burying kids. And so I've buried 257 since 1988, not all from that parish, but I run a large gang intervention program, so I get asked. So we started at school, and then we started a jobs program, and then we couldn't find enough felony friendly employers. So then we started our own kind of businesses and social enterprises. They're just to center prices, I might call them. And now, you know, you never intend to do such a thing, but we've evolved and backed ourselves into becoming the largest gang intervention rehab reentry program on the planet. So about 10,000 gang members walk through our doors every year. Wow, and it's really impressive. That's quite incredible, you know. And like you said, you started really just in a sense, an emission work and a ministry to be there with the poor and to walk with the poor and to help them. And his grown evolves is a good word here. Into this huge, you know, the largest for gang members. And what I like about your work quite honestly is that it's not just helping people, but it's actually bringing out their gifts. So in other words, they learn how to be productive members of society, which I think is a crucial element today. You know, there's two ways to do this. You can keep caring for people, but without empowering them to step forth. I mean, they kind of remain where they are in the mortalized poverty, but I think empowering their gifts allows them now to step into society. Hopefully just in some way that they can begin to be productive and really just be integrated into the larger whole of society. Is that something? Yeah, I think even more than productive is, of course, this is an area that you were such a contributor to was the notion of wholeness. Because we really, we're 35 years old and talk about evolving. You know, our model was nothing stops a bullet like a job. So it was job centric. Yeah. And that was when I think because we listened to gang members. Yeah. Once we knew gang members, then we said, oh, no, this an employed gang member, may or may not reoffend and an educated one may or may not. But then it became our absolute certain contention that a healed gang member will not ever return to prison. And so we became healing centric. Because in the end, you know, I think society looks at this population, hugely marginalized and traumatized and says that they need to measure up, that they need to somehow get better training or educated or, you know, build character in a way that's more sure. Right. But what they really need is just to heal. And then they know the truth of who they are and they inhabit that truth. And they'll be fine, you know, once they're healed, there's kind of a muscular hope that the place offers where they can be resilient and sturdy. And the world can go ahead and throw at them what it will. Yeah. But they're not going to be toppled by it. And so it's different, you know, it's our notion is, you know, that there's a culture and a community of cherished belonging in which they can inhabit their wholeness. And then they will be fine. You know, then they will be able to, you know, survive in a way that they hadn't been able to prior. You know, what's so interesting about your working and the approach to your work is, first of all, the emphasis on wholeness cannot be emphasized enough, bringing the heart, you know, or healing the heart of its brokenness of its hurt, deep hurt, the fractures of that heart and bringing that mind and heart together, body and soul, the whole person is person. And you use the language of community, which I think, and you can correct me, but I think that plays a central role in the healing process itself. You use the language of cherished community. And what I find interesting is, sometimes we consider the poor and the marginalized, those who do not say live up to our economic status or may appear like they're threatening to us. But I often think sometimes the greatest poverty may be among the wealthy, may be among those who have everything materially, but have lost something interiorly, in other words, that wholeness has become fractured by the quest for wealth, by the quest for power, by the quest for perfectability, like we can become super smart and super wealthy. And so I think this emphasis on wholeness may be one of the most critical aspects, not just for the homies of Los Angeles, but for all of us, you know, and I think your work helps bring that into a focus in a way because, you know, we might be very surprised to the future of the world belongs to. I think it will belong to those who are whole, to those who can value human personhood and community. And it's not so much pain and suffering, everyone undergoes pain and suffering, but how we can endure and live through those traumatic trials of life and come out knowing ourselves to be strengthened sometimes by these trials, that no matter what happens to us, that there's a preciousness to the human person that cannot be annihilated. Is that something that the homeboy industry is also looks at? Yeah, I think part of the thing is that I was speaking not long ago at a panel at the LA Times Festival of Books and, you know, we were going back and forth with a rabbi and a columnist. And then I said, you know, two of the kind of the principles that we embrace at homeboy industries are every single human being is unshakably good. And we belong to each other and there are no exceptions. And I said, do I think that all the vexing complex social dilemma that we need to address would actually find resolution if we embrace those two principles. And I said, yes, I do. And then the entire audience burst into laughter and it kind of startled me. And when the laughter subsided, I said, yes, I do. And gang members have sort of taught me that, you know, none of us are well until all of us are well. And even Jesus says, you know, be perfect as our father is perfect. Well, apparently the air America is not perfect. It's whole, you know, be whole. So then once you're talking about wholeness, it doesn't touch goodness. It's just, it's okay that we're all well talking each other home to wholeness. And none of that is kind of a valued judgment. It's a health assessment because I know from gang members at homeboy who, you know, act out outrageously sometimes and violently. And the homies always say, find the thorn underneath. You know, what language is this violent speaking? And they're exceptionally good at seeing that these things are indicators, not problems, that they point beyond themselves to things that need are addressing it. And precisely, we don't make progress on these huge things, you know, from wholeness to racism, to violence, to mass incarceration, because our diagnosis is kind of goofy. Your emphasis on the need for one another. So first of all, it reminds me of the Franciscan value of poverty, spiritual poverty, is not to live without things, but without possessing things. And the idea is a possession. It's not just things, but we possess whether it's our hurts or our anger's or, you know, the things that have happened to us. And we build those possessions. We store them up inside us, you know, like Jesus is talking about the barnhouses filled to overflowing, you know, with stuff, stuff that we can't get rid of. We can't let go. And I think it takes one another to help, in other words, part of that accumulation is really sort of in the Darwinian sense, a survival of the fittest, you know, it's that I need to protect myself in the face of hostility, in the face of these violent forces around me. And no one else is there for me. So I need to do it on my own. That I think is just part of the human phenomenon as well. I think those who are disenfranchised, it becomes even more accentuated because they're very two structures or tools there to really support them. So I think the building of communal relationships that can begin to say, look, this is not right, you messed up, but we're there for you. We love you as you are. You know, there's a preciousness in you and you have to know it, type thing. It reminds me of the African concept of Ubuntu. Exactly. And that's a concept I'm just learning, but that is such a beautifully rich concept of the interrelatedness of all beings in life. I think is Bishop Tutu says I am because we are. And if we could really grow into that on every level of life, all our problems would find a new resolution within the whole. It's not that, you know, we will continue to do violent things where unfinished, I see us as unfinished creatures in evolution. And there'll always be a part of us. I think that will be tied to this lower level. You might say of survival. And yet there's the deeper part of us that's of God in the image of God and therefore the capacity to really begin to love in a godly way. So I think maybe what homeway industry is really practicing is Ubuntu in your own way. Would you agree? Absolutely. Oh yeah, absolutely. And to the earlier point about the poverty, a homegirl named Ainez who was a senior staff there now and she was in prison in recovery and lost all her kids and got them all back. But hey, she said the other day, you know, connect to everything and attach to nothing. And I thought, you know, good, it's about a freedom to be able to, you know, discover your true self in loving. And so if the notion of all the folks who walk through our doors is that they've all come with, you know, what psychologists would call a disorganized attachment. You know, mom was frightening or frightened. And you really can't calm yourself down if you've never been soothed. And if it's true that a traumatized person may well be likely to cause trauma, then it has to be true that a cherished person will be able to find their way to the joy. There is and cherishing themselves and others. But the difference is, you know, I've never transformed a life in my life. And I know that the truth, you know, because I never say, you know, we will transform you if you walk into the doors at home, boy, but rather transformation will happen here. And then it becomes all hands on deck. These offering a dose and people are living from a place that says tenderness is the highest form of spiritual maturity. And people are coming out of prison and they're used to being watched, but they're not used to being seen. And so people are being seen. And, you know, oh, nobly born, remember who you really are, you know, people are holding the mirror up. They're not holding the bar up and asking folks to measure up. They're just saying, here you are and you're amazing. But the homies who are the security guards outside, you know, the woman who's teaching this guy how to make a croissant, everybody's giving a dose of attention. And everyone becomes sort of like a dry sponge, you know, that water hits it. So it's all hands on deck, you know, you don't go to the margins to make a difference. You go there so that the folks there make you different. And then everybody's sort of inhabiting this in an exquisitely mutual way, their own dignity and nobility. And so they don't receive something from me. But I allow, I try to allow myself to be reached by them and to have my heart altered. And sometimes I think if all of us are willing to allow ourselves to be shaped by the other and hold people in a place of cherished belonging, well, then that's kind of a secret sauce, I think. All of us want to belong to cherished and be cherished. So what keeps so many from discovering this wholeness, love, and community? Next, Ilia asks Father Greg what prevents people from having at home the community they see at homeboy industries. And later, Father Greg and Ilia diagnose some dynamics that make the situation of belonging so challenging, especially for us in the West. As attracted as that sounds and I think it's very true in the meaning, I see how difficult it is for a consumer society, a society that is enamored with technological devices with the idea of improvement, whether it's improvement of mind, of body. We have a kind of, on the other hand, kind of a rampant individualism in our own day, where we're preoccupied with becoming something more than what we are. I mean, you know, so many people today, so why I say this because what your topic here requires attention, right, attentiveness to the other, which is, I mean, what you're saying here is something very constant, what Pope Francis is calling for in La Dalle Tocé, you know, this kind of interdependence, but that's just a concept unless it's brought into actualized existence through attention, through love, immutuality, you have to want to be, you know, in a sense, you have to want to be whole in relation to another person. I see those values lacking actually in Western culture today. I teach a class on technology and human evolution, and yesterday we talked about biohacking, you know, literally implanting chips into the human brain so that we'll be able to navigate more seamlessly in a technological world. And I'm deeply concerned about that one that we're altering, the human person, the human brain, the human genome. Second, who benefits from this technology? Who will, in a sense, you know, go forth in technological evolution? Who's left out? And so I think, you know, the values that you bring to the emergence of person at home boy industry have never before been more necessary. And the question is, how do we reclaim those values for a society as a whole? For society that is preoccupied where our attention is not toward one another, it's really towards something that's out there in cyberspace, something that's alluring. And therefore, we're not attentive to what's present before me. In fact, most studies show that a lot of kids today suffer from attention deficit disorder because their minds are being rewired by technology. So what do we say to the world we find ourselves in, in right of the fact, that there are people, you know, struggling to gain a new existence, coming at a prison, you know, coming from the streets, from gangs? How do we bring these worlds together or we just do we live in layers? But I also think, you know, and you, I suspect you know this from traveling around and speaking is that there's a kind of a longing out there, you know, and where people really want to enter into some relational wholeness that they know is some key to moving beyond the mind and they have and to being freed from fear that keeps them really stuck. And so the great John Lewis used to say, we live in the same house and it wasn't aspirational. It wasn't like one day we might live in the same house. It's a declarative sentence. We all live in the same house. And it did make a distinction about you will some people live in the basement. No, we all live in the same house. And I think people are looking for an invitation. I mean, I'm always heartened by it because I think, you know, what's out there is, especially in people's kind of quest for spirituality that's different than perhaps the religion that you and I were kind of raised on, they want us to go that spacious and expansive and that the longing and the hunger is so profound and deep that I think there's something also kind of right. I always find it at home, where as people will come in and we have eight tour groups a day or so. And they always say, wow, you know, there's, I don't know what this is, you know, it always called an aroma. And it's, it is. It's an aroma. It's, you know, it's, there's something that's in the air. And then you look around and you see black and brown men and women, gay, straight enemies, everybody has to work with rivals. Yep. You know, and guys who used to shoot at each other are standing next to each other, making croissants. And so it's kind of a, you know, it's an invitation, it's kind of the front porch of the house everybody wants to live in. But then you connect to this longing, people want to live in a different house. Yeah. They really do, if one believes that everybody's unshakably good, that once people are healed from all the things that cause them great anguish. And then once you know that we belong to each other, and as long as you know that there are no exceptions to this, then people don't feel so much indicted, you know, as invited. And they kind of want it. They want this. And, and we have like 300 volunteers at home, boy, but they'll come and say, well, what am I going to do here? And I always say, no, the question is, what's going to happen to you here? And it always happens. It's way beyond that kind of thing where you go to the soup kitchen and say, I think I got more out of this than you know, that kind of thing. It's deeper than that. I found transformation here too. And it's kind of a unique thing to and speaks to a community of kinship such that God might recognize. That's beautiful. I mean, it reminds me of something that Barbara Fien once wrote, "Careful one another humanizes us." You know, and I think that's what you're saying, "Careful one another really makes us person." You know, in the deepest humanity of what we are. And that's really beautiful. And I think when we are not there for caring for one another, we're kind of partial individuals, longing, as you say. You know, so many people are longing for that humanization, for that wholeness. I do think people, they desire it and fearful. And that's something of the strangeness of being humans. You know, we both are attracted to it. And yet we are resistant because we're not sure what it's going to cost us or what will be lose something that we cherish. Well, I lose my privacy. You know, well, I lose my computer. I don't know what it ever it is. We fear long. Myself. But we want that gain. You know, and I think it seems to me that two things, one is that it's a radical faith. You know, that God is here. You know, this capacious God of love is here in this moment in this person. And therefore, it is really being empowered by that love. I think unless love drives out fear, we're always fearful in our search for love. And it doesn't work. You know, I think that even goes a little bit to you, you mentioned several times, people who come and we want to do for others. Because they're kind of doing for others, makes us feel good. Oh, look what I, you know, I feel good. I went and helped the poor today. I went to the soup kitchen, but it's not that about that at all, is it? You know, it's really because you're poor, you know, you're part of that poor situation. And we need one another to be enriched in what love is about in its fullness. I mean, how do you lose yourself, you know, forget yourself on purpose? How do you really give yourself up? And part of the problem is people are always looking for a return. And the great discovery, of course, is that, you know, defining your true self and loving. And then you know that loving is your home. Yeah. And then you realize you're never going to be homesick. So then it's an intentionality at home. These, you know, so many are in recovery. And, you know, they'll say one day at a time. And I always say, no, that's too long. You know, one day is really too long. The intentionality is to cherish with every breath you take. Cherishing people is not hard. Remembering to cherish people is exceedingly difficult. And it's kind of where our own spiritual practice and, you know, where's our anchor? Where's the ground of our being? It's not like once and for all. Everybody knows that. And it's not even like I pray in the morning, I'm good for the rest of the day. Everybody knows that's not true either. But it's part of how can you connect your own breathing to cherishing? Yeah. That I'm going to really forget myself on purpose right now. I'm going to bow to the person, you know, in front of me. And I'm going to kind of enter into this other so that you can hold this other in a place of real cherishing. Yeah. And then in the end, it's not like, oh, now I'm my best self. But no, it's like a like a homie said to me, the other who we were finishing a conversation. And he stood up and I stood up. And he said, you know, I think life is just removing the blindfold. And I said, I think you're right. I said, but what do you see when the blindfold falls? And he thinks for a second, he puts his hand right here and he says, goodness. And you guess, that's what it is. It's not about, I hope to be a better man tomorrow than I am today. No. Yeah. It's about being the goodness that's always been there. This is how God sees you. Right. And then once you, you cannot love goodness out there, you know, until you see it in here. This concludes our first episode with Father Greg Boyle. Listen next time when Ilia and Father Greg discuss the challenges of growing movements like homeboy industries. Support for a hunger for wholeness comes from the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer supports a movement of organizations that are applying spiritual solutions to society's toughest problems. Please consider getting involved at Fetzer.org. And a special thanks to our team at the Center for Christo Genesis. I'm Robert Newcastle. Thanks for listening.