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 I’ve 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 God’s
‘jurisdiction’—and 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, Children’s 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 Boyle’s 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 Boyle’s 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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Introduction Dolores Mission and Homeboy Industries
Chapter Four Water, Oil, Flame
To the Homies and the Homegirls
“This day . . . with me . . . paradise.”
—Luke 23:43
I suppose I’ve 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. I’m 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 doesn’t want to be. It’s not a memoir of my past twenty plus years working with gang members. There is no narrative chronology that I’ll 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 Fremon’s 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 Celeste’s book, and have been deeply moved by it.
Most say it’s 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: we’re just trying to learn how to bear the beams of love.
A note on how I’ve chosen to proceed. In virtually every instance, I have changed the names of the young men and women whose stories fill these pages, with the exception of anecdotes in which the name is the subject of the story. I have also foregone mentioning any specific gang by its name. Too much heartache, pain, and death have been visited upon our communities to elevate these groupings to any possible fame these pages could bring them. Everything in this book happened, as best as I can recall. I apologize, antemano, if I have left out some detail, person, or subtle contour that those familiar with these stories would have included.
I was born and raised in the “gang capital of the world,” Los Angeles, California, just west of the area where I have spent nearly a quarter of a century in ministry. I had two wonderful parents, five sisters and two brothers, lived comfortably, went to Catholic private schools, and always had jobs once I was of an age to work. Disneyland was not the “Happiest Place on Earth”; my home on Norton Avenue was. As a teenager, though, I would not have known a gang member if one came up and, as they say, “hit me upside the head.” I would not have been able to find a gang if you’d sent me on a scavenger hunt to locate one.
It is safe to declare that as a teenager growing up in LA, it would have been impossible for me to join a gang. That is a fact. That fact, however, does not
make me morally superior to the young men and women you will meet in this book. Quite the opposite. I have come to see with greater clarity that the day simply won’t come when I am more noble, have more courage, or am closer to God than the folks whose lives fill these pages.
In Africa they say “a person becomes a person through other people.” There can be no doubt that the homies have returned me to myself. I’ve learned, with their patient guidance, to worship Christ as He lives in them. It’s easy to echo Gerard Manley Hopkins here, “For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.”
Once, after dealing with a particularly exasperating homie named Sharkey, I switch my strategy and decide to catch him in the act of doing the right thing. I can see I have been too harsh and exacting with him, and he is, after all, trying the best he can. I tell him how heroic he is and how the courage he now exhibits in transforming his life far surpasses the hollow “bravery” of his barrio past. I tell him that he is a giant among men. I mean it. Sharkey seems to be thrown off balance by all this and silently stares at me. Then he says, “Damn, G . . . I’m gonna tattoo that on my heart.”
In finding a home for these stories in this modest effort, I hope, likewise, to tattoo those mentioned here on our collective heart. Though this book does not concern itself with solving the gang problem, it does aspire to broaden the parameters of our kinship. It hopes not only to put a human face on the gang member, but to recognize our own wounds in the broken lives and daunting struggles of the men and women in these parables.
Our common human hospitality longs to find room for those who are left out.
It’s just who we are if allowed to foster something different, something more greatly resembling what God had in mind. Perhaps, together, we can teach each other how to bear the beams of love, persons becoming persons, right before our eyes. Returned to ourselves.