The whole language, p.16
The Whole Language, page 16
Before I began the mass, I invited anyone up who wished to say anything to eulogize Chucky. There was silent reluctance and I started to think, Maybe no one will step up. Then an old veterano with a huge brocha (mustache), gray and rigid, ambled to the podium. He was wearing a muscle shirt and shorts. He surveyed the room, taking his time, until he finally said, “Chucky… knocked up my sister.” This shocking sentence detonated such an outburst of raucous laughter that it took some time for it to subside. The brocha guy knew how to ride the laugh like an expert surfer with a killer wave. And it went uphill from there. There wasn’t a wet eye in the house. All those who shared told stories filled with joy and tenderness. My heart sang at how melodious it all was.
At communion time, I did my usual invitation: “Pope Francis says that communion is not the grand prize for the perfect person, but food for the hungry one. We’re all hungry.” I invite them all to receive the Eucharist. They did, and communion took forever. People were weeping, old gang members whom I didn’t know received communion and gently touched my arm as they returned to their seats. I was struck at how moved to tears they were by Chucky’s death, when a woman, taking communion in her hand, looked at me with tear-soaked eyes and said, “Thank you for inviting us.”
Jesus says in John’s gospel: “I will not reject anyone.” Jesus always wants to show us our own humanity and reminds us that we cannot be friendly with ourselves AND judgmental at the same time. So be friendly. We aren’t ever called to some disconnected sanctity but fully engaged humanity. When we live close to the marrow of the gospel, we seek wholeness and not perfection. We seek to be balanced, integrated, and in harmony. You can’t find a moment in the gospel where Jesus punishes, excludes, or demeans. Our wide hearts hoping to meet the wideness of God. Becoming whole to meet our wholly spacious God. We may keep score until we discover that God doesn’t.
What unifies us as revolutionaries of tenderness is the longing to find our true selves in loving… in community. My friend Pastor Brady Rice says, “Church is a circle, not shoulder to shoulder.” We want to find the marrow of the gospel in this ever-widening circle. The treasure and the pearl. To find our open hearts—warm and affectionate—capable of creating a community with no outcast. Only in community can we step away from the scapegoating of our times and humanize the “other” by loving them. Luis, a trainee, said once, “Homeboy Industries is the opposite of things.” We all long to be lost in such a place.
We try and find our way together to Christianity as a loving way of life—not just as a system of beliefs, dogmas, and requirements, but as a tender disposition of the heart. If we were honest with ourselves, we’d find the longing to sidestep religiosity and move in the direction of mysticism. From piety, purity, and moralistic measuring to the expansive, deeper joy that comes from not judging. Christianity is not about morality, it’s about mysticism. When we are fearful, we distrust mysticism. Then we fall back on morality. That always moves from the outside in. Mysticism is the light from the inside out. Anchored in a mysticism emanating from within living “within the withinness of God,” we are transported from fast food to healthy nourishment.
With a modicum of cooperation, Jesus gladly sets the compass of our heart so that it stays robust and tender. We go to the returns department and trade in our small self for our true self in loving. Only in this way can the Church be not merely a stone in the riverbed, but the river itself.
I take Rascal to look at an apartment. It’s a tiny place behind a house. A converted garage, really, with bathroom, bedroom, and not much else. Rascal has had no luck in finding someone who will rent to him. I sometimes get trotted out in the hopes that the presence of, say, an old white guy might convince a landlord to actually rent to a gang member with a bunch of tattoos and felonies. Rascal is skeptical.
We meet the landlord, who greets us both warily on the driveway. We don’t even see the garage room. He asks us some questions in Spanish, and then signals to his wife, standing at a distance from us, up the driveway, that he will need to consult her. “We’re fucked,” Rascal says. “Now there is no way they’re gonna say yes. I mean, look at his ruca’s mascara.” True enough, the wife seems to be scowling and in Rascal’s general direction.
Finally, the landlord breaks away from his wife and rejoins us. He looks at Rascal and says, after a beat, “Well, how will you ever know if you’re a good tenant if no one rents to you?” He then shakes Rascal’s hand. And suddenly, as homegirl Inez says, “God gets visual.” We all got caught up in the mystical “verb” of it.
Marcus Borg, scholar and theologian, says that “churchianity is not supposed to survive.” He makes the case that churchianity has no hospitality for mystery and uncertainty, and because it is reliant on hubris and has no humility, it can’t seem to appreciate any gray area (or as the homies tellingly call it, “the grace area”). Like with Pope Francis and “his mercy before dogma papacy,” there is comfort with the grace area, like the landlord with Rascal, who swerves around the dogma of renter rules and finds his way to the heart of mercy. Beyond the tyranny of dogmatic rules and regulations, humility calls the shots.
Good, healthy fear opens our hearts and we are intrigued by it. Like the Greek word uttered by Jesus when healing a deaf and mute man, “Ephatha”—“Be opened.” The Church is always beckoned to this—opening up so that a connection can be made. The Church then becomes like Jesus, a parable of God’s tenderness and gracious acceptance of everyone.
My dad used to write me every year, no matter where I was, on the Feast of Saint Gregory the Great. I don’t know that much about him, but Saint Gregory wrote this once: “We are saved by the people we despise.” The folks who create dis-ease within us, cause us to recoil and flee, to become defensive, the very people we disparage for disagreeing with us and who are on the polar opposite spectrum of our political beliefs—turns out, these are our teachers and our salvation.
We seek this luminous union with the one who is outside, the “despised one.” We are Church in our essence when we welcome these excluded, who are waiting for us. The root of the word “mystic” means “I am silent.” Which is to say “visible,” without the tsunami of words. It is the mystical view that frees us to take the gospel seriously and not literally. The Church that wants to come to us from the future is about witness, not words.
We’ve settled for answering Jesus’ question, “Who do you say I am?” by naming or blaming. Naming: “Jesus the Christ… and did I mention… Jesus the Christ?” Blaming: “You don’t belong to us… You are Them… You are a heretic,” etc. We’ve settled for a discipleship that names or blames. The requirement for “house-sitting” asks rather, “HOW do you say that I am?”
I am sitting behind my desk with four potential donors in front of me. I can see, over their heads, through the glass wall and door, to the beehive of the “well.” There are four homies at the large, sweeping reception desk and folks are signing in to see me, to visit a job developer, or to check in for a tattoo removal appointment. All seats in the reception area are nearly full and CNN is on the TV. I notice this guy come in. Clearly a gang member, but I don’t know who he is. I see that the faces of the four homies behind the counter are fixed on him. This may be due in large part to the fact that he has a soda can, and with every punctuation mark, a big dollop of soda flies and lands on the desk. A comma here. An exclamation point there. I recognize this as a combo burger of meth and madness. It seems inevitable that I will have to intervene. I’m about to stand when Miguel appears. He is the largest homie who has ever worked at Homeboy. He could play Chief Bromden in the Homeboy production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Miguel is in charge of security, though he does not like to be known as the head guy. His business card reads: “Community Outreach Worker,” but he’s our head security guy. He was a juvenile tried as an adult who spent twenty-one years in prison and half of that time in solitary confinement.
I watch as Miguel gently puts his arm around the shoulder of the meth/madness guy and then deftly guides him outside. (Our informal rule: always get the troublesome outside. Our population can get triggered so easily that if something “jumps off,” we want it at some distance from our folks.) Miguel tells me later what happens next.
With his kind and open heart, Miguel looks at our friend and says, “How ’bout you and me, we go to Placita Olvera and get us some tacos?”
The guy stares back at Miguel and slowly lifts his T-shirt, revealing a handgun tucked into the front of his pants. “How ’bout,” he says, with steel in his voice, “I put a bullet in your head.” He drops his shirt.
Miguel adjusts the setting of his heart. “Two tacos or three?”
The two of them begin to walk down Alameda and the four blocks toward Olvera Street, the oldest center of the city of Los Angeles. Miguel tells me that while they make their way to the Placita, our brother has a conversation with the voices in his head, but Miguel says, “The voices don’t stay in his head.” They leap out of his mouth like a bunch of frogs, and he turns his head and talks to himself. “Shoot his ass.” And the voice turns in, “Nah, he’s okay.” “Ya can’t trust him,” says the one. “He’s buyin’ me tacos,” finishes the other.
The pair arrive at the taco stand and Miguel hands him a plate of three tacos. Our friend takes the first taco and hurls it to the ground, dispatched to do so, no doubt, by one of the voices in his head. Perhaps a sacrifice to Pachamama to calm the torment ever accompanying him. But then he inhales the other two tacos, because he is deeply and thoroughly hungry. Miguel answers the question: “HOW do you say that I am?” That’s how.
Miguel spoke the whole language. He was able to locate this guy in a net of mercy. He didn’t warehouse his love, he let it flow and overflow. The river itself. Miguel resided in a place where nothing threatened him and everything elated him. God singing loud enough to be heard. He was able for a moment to puncture this man’s isolation. Joy and bravery. The Church making the argument with his life. Two tacos or three? This way is tried. This way is certain.
Chapter Seven
The Lining of the World
Hegel thought that a slave was one who lived in fear of death. He thought “work” was the answer to the dilemma “I will die.” But we all want to find the path that renders death a finished product and a fulfillment. We want to know that whatever happens is not the end of the story. After all, we will all be dead a lot longer than we will be alive. What we seek is not the end of something, but something we gain. We long to put it all together like the great Stephen Levine, who suggested that “death, like birth, is not an emergency but an emergence.” He posited that it’s more akin to a flower opening than to anything else.
A homie I don’t know writes me from prison wanting help when he gets out. He closes with this: “PS: There’s a rumor going around saying you have passed away. If so… I’m very sure you’re in heaven and will have this letter answered.” Condolences accepted. I’ll inform my assistant.
When my mom was in her eighties and my father had been dead for twenty years, she received one of those annoying appeal letters for money from a nonprofit. Okay. Full disclosure. It was from Homeboy Industries. It asked for a donation and suggested that you might want to give in someone’s name, honoring them. She thought this was a good idea. She writes my father’s name, Bernie Boyle. Then it asks for the address of the person, so they can be notified of the gift. So, she writes, “Heaven.” Then adds, “If you find the address, will ya let me know?” She thought this was hilarious.
Finding “heaven’s address” is really about putting death, ultimately, in its place. A man named Frank Buckles turned one hundred years old and people asked him, naturally, about his secret to longevity. “If you feel… like you’re going to die… don’t.” Awfully good advice. Death is always a comma with a side order of exclamation point. Punctuation matters.
The ladies from Dolores Mission had given me a plaque with a Scripture passage on it. T-Bone is reading it on the wall in my office while I’m on the phone. “You like that?” I ask him when I hang up.
T-Bone says, “Yeah,” and I ask what is his favorite part. “This line right here,” he says. “ ‘I was a stranger and you invited me in naked.’ ” I’m an old English teacher. Punctuation matters. Death is not a period. It’s a comma. Commas say, “Keep going.” Not done yet. Don’t die. I’ve buried so many homies who didn’t let anybody put a period where a comma belonged.
Like Jesus, who delays in getting to the twelve-year-old girl who is sick. Because he slow-dragged, she dies. But she doesn’t have to stay dead for long. We don’t have to stay dead either, nor stuck in the death-dealing things that hold us back. Jesus arrives. No one has to stay dead for long. Which is a good thing, since death is so permanent and none of us are really ready for that level of commitment.
I was invited to speak in the Black Hills of South Dakota at the Crazy Horse Memorial. I brought Joseph and his son, Joey, both workers at Homeboy, because they are Mescalero Apache. Joseph’s middle name is Thunderface. The sculptor’s widow presented me with an amazing handmade quilt I gave to Joseph and his son for safekeeping. They both remembered that a year after the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, Crazy Horse, the war leader of the Lakota, was asked derisively, “Where are your lands now?” Crazy Horse just pointed to the distant Black Hills and said, “My lands are where my dead lie buried.” He was untouchable. The admonition, as with death, is to find the thing no one can take. After all, there is no such thing as a dead person, only a dead body.
After a young man, Frankie, was killed, I went to his home. I had known him practically all his life. I was led into his bedroom by his sister and she retrieved a strongbox from a shelf in the closet. “He kept all his valuables here.” When she opened it, there was only a small pile of prayers he had kept and written down. One said simply, “We conquer death by continuing.” It was his “Black Hills.” Indeed, his valuables.
Death is not to be feared—but deadness, go right ahead. When Lenny wasn’t gangbanging, he was using heroin. I buried his father, who died of an overdose. Lenny’s dad had made the acquaintance of heroin when he was not even out of his teens fighting in Vietnam. Lenny got up at the funeral and said, “My dad was painfully human.” He even conceded, “I suppose I tried heroin myself, just so I could understand why my father loved it more than me.”
Lenny wrote me from prison once, managing to keep “deadness” at a reasonable distance. “I’ve got good news and bad news,” his letter said. “And since you’re not here with me, I can’t ask which you want first. So… the bad news: I just got a six-month add-on for a scuffle I got into. And the good news: I just saved $100 on Geico car insurance.” We continue and death gets conquered.
In a later missive, however, from prison, Lenny wrote: “I’m not afraid of death, in fact, I’m curious. It’s the only thing I haven’t tried yet. I want to die—cuz I want to yell at God. I’m pissed at him. I want to look him in the eye and say, ‘What was up with that?’ ”
We want to lift the veil on death. We want to pull back the cover and find what is luminous and victorious underneath it. We long to see now, the light, peace, wonder, and joy that is revealed past the devastation and disaster of death. I visited Ruben’s mother. He was killed the day before while fixing his car in front of his house. She was crying when I arrived, and I suspected she hadn’t stopped since her son left us. “I don’t hate those who did this to my only son. I forgive them. But mainly, I pray for them. I pray with all my heart that their mothers will never, ever know this pain.” Forgiveness conquers death. It is indeed luminous and we continue.
A Jesuit friend of mine went to a huge party for his grandfather, who, like Frank Buckles, also turned one hundred. They rented a hall, everyone ate and drank, and folks got up on the stage and told stories about the guest of honor. Finally, the old man himself got up to speak at the end of a very long evening. He made his way slowly to the microphone and surveyed the room. This was all he had to say:
“If… you’re given a chance… to die… in your seventies… take it. Thank you very much.”
Denial with death is a given. The human capacity to keep what is real at arm’s length is astounding. A panicky homie called me once because he didn’t know what to do. “We were all sitting in this living room, high as fuck, and there was a gun, and I had it and was playing with it and it went off… shot Monica’s mom in the face. It just barely happened right now. I don’t know what to do.” I always counsel the same thing: Turn yourself in. I can’t remember if he did or not, but the next day, he called collect from jail. “Can you believe it, G… they’re accusing me of shooting Monica’s mom in the face?” Denial happens. Sometimes the narratives we tell ourselves can be downright stupefying.
Once I had a homeless man stand in front of my desk and say, “As you can see, I’m in a wheelchair.” He seemed pretty convinced of it and would not hear otherwise.
I was at a university some years ago, speaking to a class. I brought Hugo with me, a towering gang member near thirty. During his part of the presentation, he said that he ran away from home at nine years old.
During the question-and-answer period, a young woman asked, “Why’d you run away from home at nine?”
And he answered, “I just was tired of listening to my parents.”
As we drove home, I asked Hugo, “Remember that question the woman asked, about why you ran away from home?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you remember your answer?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, what did you say to her?”
“I said I ran away from home at nine because my mom kept beating my ass.”
“Well, no, actually, son, you didn’t say that. You said, ‘Because I was tired of listening to my parents.’ ”
He was shocked. “Really? I said that?”
