Tattoos, gangsters and “the slow work of God”

I had a pretty good feeling going into it that I’d love Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion. It had been talked up by some people whose opinions I consider highly, and I’d learned enough about Homeboy Industries and the work of Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle among gang members in LA to know it was going to be a remarkable story. I wasn’t disappointed. He tells of coming to serve in the Dolores Mission Church, “the poorest parish in the Los Angeles archdiocese”, in gang territory between two large public housing projects. Though he was raised in a very different, more affluent part of LA, he credits a stint in Bolivia as what prepared him for his life’s work:

I can’t explain how the poor in Bolivia evangelized me during that year of 1984-85, but they turned me inside out, and from that moment forward I only wanted to walk with them. This was a wholly selfish decision on my part. I knew that the poor had some privileged delivery system for giving me access to the gospel. Naturally, I wanted to be around this.

The book is full of stories of gang members, which presumably would make it a sobering read, but Boyle masterfully takes us on a journey from tears to laughter and back again, sometimes in the span of a paragraph or two. He was an English major, so his writing is excellent, and his colorful language in conversation with “homies” keeps things lively. The funny stories remind us that gang members are just kids, while the tragic stories remind us that they are simultaneously kids trapped in terribly destructive cycles.

Through Homeboy Industries, Boyle and a committed team have been giving gang members the chance for redemption through employment, job training and tattoo removal. But Boyle is careful to show that he’s no hero. Rather, if anything, he demonstrates his utter inability to change anyone. I'm impressed with his trust in God to change these kids, and his belief that his role is simply to be a faithful, loving presence in the neighborhood, offering a better way.

I enjoyed the book all the way through, but I especially appreciated the second-to-last chapter, in which Boyle addresses the problem of success. Anyone involved in ministry or non-profit work among the poor knows the tension between faithfulness and success. The two aren’t necessarily the same thing. Boyle demonstrates that for those truly interested in serving the ones everyone else has given up on, faithfulness is what’s required:

Jesus was always too busy being faithful to worry about success. I’m not opposed to success; I just think we should accept it only if it is a by-product of our fidelity. If our primary concern is results, we will choose to work only with those who give us good ones...

Funders sometimes say, “We don’t fund efforts; we fund outcomes.” We all hear this and think how sensible, practical, realistic, hard-nosed, and clear-eyed it is. But maybe Jesus doesn’t know why we’re nodding so vigorously. Without wanting to, we sometimes allow our preference for the poor to morph into a preference for the well-behaved and the most likely to succeed, even if you get better outcomes when you work with those folks. If success is our engine, we sidestep the difficult and belligerent and eventually abandon “the slow work of God.”

Here’s a video interview Boyle gave on Calvin College’s Inner Compass television program: