WETBACK CHURCH

The chill of it momentarily stops me. In an instant, you begin to doubt and question the price of things. I acknowledge how much better everything is when there is no cost and how I prefer being hoisted on shoulders in acclaim to the disdain of anonymous spray cans.

I arrive at the meeting and tell the gathered women about our hostile visitor during the night.

“I guess I’ll get one of the homies to clean it up later.”

Petra Saldana, a normally quiet member of the group, takes charge.

“You will not clean that up.”

Now, I was new at the parish and my Spanish was spotty. I understood the words she spoke but had difficulty circling in on the sense of it.

“You will not clean this up. If there are people in our community who are disparaged and hated and left out because they are mojados (wetbacks) . . .”

Then she poises herself on the edge of the couch, practically ready to leap to her feet. “Then we shall be proud to call ourselves a wetback church.”

These women didn’t just want to serve the less fortunate, they were anchored in some profound oneness with them and became them.

“That you may be one as the Father and I are one.”

Jesus and Petra are on the same page here. They chose a oneness in kinship and a willingness to live in others’ hearts. Jesus was not a man for others. He was one with others. There is a world of difference in that. Jesus didn’t seek the rights of lepers. He touched the leper even before he got around to curing him.

He didn’t champion the cause of the outcast. He was the outcast. He didn’t fight for improved conditions for the prisoner. He simply said, “I was in prison.”

The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place—with the outcast and those relegated to the

margins.

Once the homeless began to sleep in the church at night, there was always the faintest evidence that they had. Come Sunday morning, we’d foo foo the place as best we could. We would sprinkle I Love My Carpet on the rugs and vacuum like crazy. We’d strategically place potpourri and Air Wick around the church to combat this lingering, pervasive reminder that nearly fifty (and later up to one hundred) men had spent the night there. About the only time we used incense at Dolores Mission was on Sunday morning, before the 7:30 a.m. Mass crowd would arrive. Still, try as we might, the smell remained. The grumbling set in, and people spoke of “churching” elsewhere.

It was at about this time that a man drove by the church and stopped to talk to me. He was Latino, in a nice car, and had arrived at some comfortable life and living. He knew I was the pastor. He waxed nostalgic about having grown up in the projects and pointed to the church and said he had been baptized and made his first communion there.

Then he takes in the scene all around him. Gang members gathered by the bell tower, homeless men and women being fed in great numbers in the parking lot. Folks arriving for the AA and NA meetings and the ESL classes.

It’s a Who’s Who of Everybody Who Was Nobody. Gang member, drug addict, homeless, undocumented. This man sees all this and shakes his head, determined and disgusted, as if to say “tsk tsk.”

“You know,” he says, “This used to be a church.”

I mount my high horse and say, “You know, most people around here think it’s finally a church.”

Then I ride off into the sunset.

Roll credits.

The smell was never overwhelming, just undeniably there. The Jesuits figured that if “we can’t fix it, then we’ll feature it.” So we determined to address the discontent in our homilies one Sunday. Homilies were often dialogic in those days, so one day I begin with, “What’s the church smell like?”

People are mortified, eye contact ceases, women are searching inside their purses for they know not what.

“Come on, now,” I throw back at them, “what’s the church smell like?”

“Huele a patas” (Smells like feet), Don Rafael booms out. He was old and never cared what people thought.

“Excellent. But why does it smell like feet?”

“Cuz many homeless men slept here last night?” says a woman.

“Well, why do we let that happen here?”

“Es nuestro compromiso” (It’s what we’ve committed to do), says another.

“Well, why would anyone commit to do that?”

“Porque es lo que haria Jesús.” (It what’s Jesus would do.)

“Well, then . . . what’s the church smell like now?”

A man stands and bellows, “Huele a nuestro compromiso” (it smells like commitment).

The place cheers.

Guadalupe waves her arms wildly, “Huele a rosas” (smells like roses).

The packed church roars with laughter and a newfound kinship that embraced someone else’s odor as their own. The stink in the church hadn’t changed, only how the folks saw it. The people at Dolores Mission had come to embody Wendell Berry’s injunction: “You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours.”

Scripture scholars contend that the original language of the Beatitudes should not be rendered as “Blessed are the single-hearted” or “Blessed are the peacemakers” or “Blessed are those who struggle for justice.” Greater precision in translation would say, “You’re in the right place if . . . you are single-hearted or work for peace.” The Beatitudes is not a spirituality, after all. It’s a geography. It tells us where to stand.

Compassion isn’t just about feeling the pain of others; it’s about bringing them in toward yourself. If we love what God loves, then, in compassion, margins get erased. “Be compassionate as God is compassionate,” means the dismantling of barriers that exclude.

In Scripture, Jesus is in a house so packed that no one can come through the door anymore. So the people open the roof and lower this paralytic down through it, so Jesus can heal him. The focus of the story is, understandably, the healing of the paralytic. But there is something more significant than that happening here. They’re ripping the roof off the place, and those outside are being let in.

* * *

I met Anthony through legendary Eastside probation officer Mary Ridgway.

“Help this kid,” she pleads over the phone.

Mary told me where I might bump into him, since his last known address was his car, left for dead on Michigan Street.

At nineteen years old, Anthony had been on his own for a while. His parents had disappeared long ago in a maelstrom of heroin and prison time, and he was fending for himself, selling the occasional vial of PCP to buy Big Macs and the occasional Pastrami Madness at Jim’s. He was a tiny fella, and when he spoke,

his voice was puny, reed-thin, and high-pitched. If you closed your eyes, you’d think you were “conversating” (as the homies say) with a twelve-year-old.

One day we’re both leaning up against his “tore up” ranfla, and our conversation is drifting toward the “what do you want to be when you grow up”

theme.

“I want to be a mechanic. Don’t know nothing ’bout cars, really. But I’d like to learn it.”

My mechanic, Dennis, on Brooklyn Avenue, was something of a legend in the barrio.

Dennis could fix any car. A tall, pole-thin, Japanese American in his near sixties, Dennis was a chain smoker. He was not a man of few words—he was a man of no damn words at all. He just smoked. You’d bring your car in, complaining of some noise under the hood, and hand the keys to Dennis, who would stand there with a cigarette dangling from his lips.

He’d take the keys, and when you returned the next day, he’d give you your car, purring as it should. No words were exchanged during this entire transaction.

So I go to Dennis to plead my case.

“Look, Dennis,” I say, sitting in his cramped office, truly a smoke-filled room. “Hire this kid Anthony. True enough he doesn’t know anything about cars, but he sure is eager, and I think he could learn stuff.”

Dennis just stares at me, nodding slightly, a long ash hovering at the end of his frajo, deciding whether to jump off the cliff or not. I redouble my efforts. I tell Dennis that this won’t just be one job for one homie but will create a ripple effect of peace in the entire neighborhood. Long drags of silence and a stony stare. I get out my shovel and my top hat and cane. Nobel Peace Prize, will alter the course of history, will change the world as we know it. Nothing. Dennis just fills his lungs with smoke, as I fill the air with earnest pleas. Finally, I just give up and shut up. I’ve done the best I can and I’m ready to call it a day. Then Dennis takes one long last sucking drag on his cigarette and releases it into the air, smoke wafting in front of his face, clouding my view. Once every trace of smoke is let out, he looks at me, and this is the only thing he says that day:

“I will teach him everything I know.”

And so Anthony became a mechanic. He would give me periodic updates.

“I learned how to do a lube job today.”

“I fixed a carburetor all by myself.”

He hands me a photograph one day. There is Anthony, with a broad smile, face smudged with axle grease, workshirt with ANTHONY embroidered proudly on his chest. No question, to look at this face is to know that its owner is a

transformed man. But standing next to him in the picture, with an arm around Anthony (and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth) is Dennis, an equally changed human being. And all because Dennis, one day, decided to rip the roof off the place. Being in the world who God is. The ones on the outside have been let in.

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a covenant between equals. Al Sharpton always says, “We’re all created equal, but we don’t all end up equal.”

Compassion is always, at its most authentic, about a shift from the cramped world of self-preoccupation into a more expansive place of fellowship, of true kinship.

I take Julian and Matteo with me to give a talk in Helena, Montana. They both are “YA babies,” having essentially grown up in Youth Authority facilities.

Kids aren’t meant to grow up there. From different gangs, and each at nineteen years old, they’ve missed a lot of life by being incarcerated the last four to five years. There is the usual panic, among homies, in flying. Two viejitas clinging arm in arm, blessing themselves incessantly, as the plane takes off. Once it does, this God’s-eye view from above thrills them.

We land and there’s snow everywhere.

“I have just one goal for this trip,” Julian says, “and that is to throw a snowball at his ass,” pointing at Matteo. This goal, trust me, was amply met during our three days in Montana. They get their hands on plastic sleds and, in one afternoon, live an entire childhood previously denied them.

Before our talk at the university, we are interviewed by the local paper, and pictures are taken. Julian and Matteo speak movingly after my speech and receive a standing ovation. The packed crowd has so much honor and reverence for what these two abandoned kids have had to carry all their young lives.

There is a Mass that follows and, to my great embarrassment, the chaplain at the university ends the liturgy by inviting the congregation to come forward and lay hands on me for healing of my leukemia. This, as they say, is not my cup of tea. Mortified, I stand there as, one by one, folks come up. Generally, they just lay hands and are silent. Some say things, a blessing or a prayer. Matteo comes up. My head is inclined and eyes closed. He has my head in a vise grip, and he’s trembling and squeezing it with all his might. He leans right into my ear as he does this and can barely speak through his crying.

“All I know,” he whispers, enunciating with special care, “is that . . . I love you . . . so . . . fucking . . . much.”

Now I’m crying.

(The next day he says, “’Spensa for that blessing I gave you. I don’t know how to do ’em.” I assure him it was the best of the bunch.) The following day we begin our return home to Los Angeles. That morning, on the front page of the Helena newspaper, above the fold, is a photograph, in color, of the three of us, four columns wide, standing in the cold, wearing our Homeboy beanies and jackets.

GANG MEMBERS VISIT HELENA WITH A MESSAGE OF HOPE.

The homies can’t believe it, and they squirrel away many copies of the paper.

People in the hotel, at a restaurant, in the airport, greet Matteo and Julian as celebrities. People are stopping them, shaking their hands, congratulating them.

The TSA agents at the airport stop what they’re doing to come around and salute them.

“We give you a lot of credit.”

“Congratulations on your courage.”

The flight attendants make a big deal about “the celebrities on board” as we settle into our seats at the very back of the tiny plane. Matteo and Julian are seated together, and I’m across the aisle. Midtrek, I look over and see Julian, in the window seat, knocked out, asleep with his head leaning on Matteo’s shoulder. Matteo is crying.

“What’s wrong, mijo?”

He has the Montana newspaper resting on his lap. “I just read this article again.” He can’t speak for a second and silently puts his hand over his heart. “I don’t know . . . it really gets to me. Makes me feel like I am somebody.” He cries all the more. I lean across and whisper, “Well, that’s because you are somebody.”

Matteo and Julian had never been inside before. Now a new place of fellowship has been forged, some roof in Montana has been ripped right open, and those outside have been let in. There is a brand-new, palpable sense of solidarity among equals, a beloved community. This is always the fruit of true compassion.

Thomas Merton has his epiphany on the corner of Sixth and Walnut in Lexington, Kentucky. “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs.”

What gets to Matteo, in the end, is the truth of how closely bound we are together, dissolving the myth that we are separate at all.

* * *

The first wedding I ever did was in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It was a humble Quechua couple, and the Mass was in the main Jesuit church in the center of town. Standing room only with Quechua Indians in their absolute finest clothes.

Quechua cholas in brightly colored hoopy skirts and shawls, with tiny bowler hats perched, at a tilt, on top of their pinched-back hair. Men in suits with white collars, unspeakably wide and starched, craning their necks beyond what seems natural. Communion time arrives, and I go to the couple.

They refuse to receive communion. I beg them. They will not budge. I go to the congregation and invite them to receive communion. Not one person comes forward. I beg and plead, but no one steps up. I discover later, with the help of some Jesuit scholastics, that the Indians’ sense of cultural disparagement and toxic shame was total. Since the time of the Conquista, when the Spaniards

“converted” the Indians, they baptized them, but no roofs ever got ripped open.

This was to be their place—outside of communion—forever.

Maybe we call this the opposite of God.

* * *

I had a three-state set of speaking gigs and brought two older homies, rivals, Memo and Miguel, to help me do it. We were in Atlanta, DC, and finally Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. After our last talk in the morning at the college, we meet a man named John who tells us of his ministry in Pritchard, Alabama, and invites us to go visit his community. We take two hours to drive and walk around in what I think is about the poorest place I’ve ever seen in the United States. Hovels and burned-out shacks and lots of people living in what people ought not to live in.

Memo and Miguel are positively bug-eyed as they walk around, meet people, and see a kind of poverty quite different than the one they know.

We return to the house where we’re staying and have half an hour to pack before leaving for the airport and our return home. We all dispatch to our own rooms, and I throw my suitcase together. I look up, and Memo is standing in my doorway, crying. He is a very big man, had been a shot caller for his barrio, and has done things in and out of prison for which he feels great shame—harm as harm. The depth of his core wound is quite something to behold. Torture, unrivalled betrayal, chilling abandonment—there is little terror of which Memo would be unfamiliar.

He’s weeping as he stands in my doorway, and I ask him what’s happening.

“That visit, to Pritchard—I don’t know, it got to me. It got inside of me. I mean [and he’s crying a great deal here] how do we let people live like this?”

He pauses, then, “G, I don’t know what’s happening to me, but it’s big. It’s like, for the first time in my life, I feel, I don’t know, what’s the word . . . I feel compassion for what other people suffer.”

Outcast. Victim and victimizer. Sheep without a shepherd. Memo finds his core wound and joins it to the Pritchard core wound. Entrails, involving the bowels, the deepest place in Memo finds solidarity in the starkest wound of others. Compassion is God. The pain of others having a purchase on his life.

Memo would return, with other homies, to Pritchard many times. A beloved community of equals has been fostered and forged there, and the roofs just keep getting ripped off. Soon enough, there won’t be anyone left outside.

4

Water, Oil, Flame

I suppose that the number of homies I’ve baptized over the decades is in the thousands. Gang members find themselves locked up and get around to doing things their parents didn’t arrange for them. Homies are always walking up to me at Homeboy Industries or on the streets or in a jail, saying, “Remember? You baptized me!”

The moment of a homie’s baptism can be an awakening, like the clearing of a new path. You can tell it’s the gang member’s declaration that life will thereafter look different because of this pronouncement and its symbols. Consequently, the moment of baptism is charged with import and nerves.

One day at Juvenile Hall, I am introduced to a kid I am to baptize. I have never met him, but he knows who I am. He is saucer-eyed and panicky and bouncing slightly up and down. I shake his hand.

“I’m proud to be the one baptizing you,” I say.

He tears up a bit and won’t let go of my hand and my eyes. “Clockwise,” he says.

I always tell those to be baptized that they have little to do and should leave all the heavy lifting to me.

I tell this one homie, before his baptism at a probation camp, “All you have to say is your name when I ask for it. Then I’ll ask, ‘What do you ask of God’s church?’ and you just say, ‘Baptism.’ ”

When the moment arrives at the beginning of the rite, I can tell this kid is in trouble. He’s hyperventilating, and his constant jig suggests he didn’t visit the men’s room before.

“What is your name?” I ask, and the kid booms back at me,

“JOSE LOPEZ.”

“And what do you ask of God’s church, Jose?”

He stands erect, and his whole being wants to get this one right. “I WANT

TO BE A BAPTIST.”

I suggest he walk down the hall to the Protestant service.

Once, as I am about to baptize a kid at a probation camp, I ask him to incline his head over this huge pan of water, and he looks at me with shock and loudly asks, “You gonna WET me?”

“Uh, well, yeah . . . sorta the idea.”

On a Saturday in 1996 I am set to baptize George at Camp Munz. He delays doing this with the other priests because he only wants me to do it. He also wants to schedule the event to follow his successful passing of the GED exam.

He sees it as something of a twofer celebration. I actually know seventeen-year-old George and his nineteen-year-old brother, Cisco. Both are gang members from a barrio in the projects, but I have only really come to know George over his nine-month stint in this camp. I have watched him move gradually from his hardened posturing to being a man in possession of himself and his gifts. Taken out of the environment that keeps him unsettled and crazed, not surprisingly, he begins to thrive at Camp Munz. Now he is nearly unrecognizable. The hard vato with his gangster pose has morphed into a thoughtful, measured man, aware of gifts and talents previously obscured by the unreasonable demands of his gang life.

The Friday night before George’s baptism, Cisco, George’s brother, is walking home before midnight when the quiet is shattered, as it so often is in his neighborhood, by gunshots. Some rivals creep up and open fire, and Cisco falls in the middle of St. Louis Street, half a block from his apartment. He is killed instantly. His girlfriend, Annel, nearly eight months pregnant with their first child, runs outside. She cradles Cisco in her arms and lap, rocking him as if to sleep, and her screams syncopate with every motion forward. She continues this until the paramedics pry him away from her arms.

I don’t sleep much that night. It occurs to me to cancel my presence at the Mass the next morning at Camp Munz to be with Cisco’s grieving family. But then I remember George and his baptism.

When I arrive before Mass, with all the empty chairs in place in the mess hall, there is George standing by himself, holding his newly acquired GED certificate.

He heads toward me, waving his GED and beaming. We hug each other. He is in a borrowed, ironed, crisp white shirt and a thin black tie. His pants are the regular, camp-issue camouflage, green and brown. I am desvelado, completely wiped out, yet trying to keep my excitement at pace with George’s.

At the beginning of Mass, with the mess hall now packed, I ask him, “What is your name?”

“George Martinez,” he says, with an overflow of confidence.

“And, George, what do you ask of God’s church?”

“Baptism,” he says with a steady, barely contained smile.

It is the most difficult baptism of my life. For as I pour water over George’s head: “Father . . . Son . . . Spirit,” I know I will walk George outside alone after and tell him what happened.

As I do, and I put my arm around him, I whisper gently as we walk out onto the baseball field, “George, your brother Cisco was killed last night.”

I can feel all the air leave his body as he heaves a sigh that finds itself a sob in an instant. We land on a bench. His face seeks refuge in his open palms, and he sobs quietly. Most notable is what isn’t present in his rocking and gentle wailing.

I’ve been in this place before many times. There is always flailing and rage and promises to avenge things. There is none of this in George. It is as if the commitment he has just made in water, oil, and flame has taken hold and his grief is pure and true and more resembles the heartbreak of God. George seems to offer proof of the efficacy of this thing we call sacrament, and he manages to hold all the complexity of this great sadness, right here, on this bench, in his tender weeping. I had previously asked him in the baptismal rite, after outlining the contours of faith and the commitment “to live as though this truth was true.”

“Do you clearly understand what you are doing?”

And he pauses, and he revs himself up in a gathering of self and soul and says, “Yes, I do.”

And, yes, he does. In the monastic tradition, the highest form of sanctity is to live in hell and not lose hope. George clings to his hope and his faith and his GED certificate and chooses to march, resilient, into his future.

What is the delivery system for resilience? In part, it’s the loving, caring adult who pays attention. It’s the community of unconditional love, representing the very “no matter whatness” of God. They say that an educated inmate will not reoffend. This is not because an education assures that this guy will get hired somewhere. It is because his view is larger and more educated, so that he can be rejected at ninety-three job interviews and still not give up. He’s acquired resilience.

Sometimes resilience arrives in the moment you discover your own unshakeable goodness. Poet Galway Kinnell writes, “Sometimes it’s necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.”

And when that happens, we begin to foster tenderness for our own human predicament. A spacious and undefended heart finds room for everything you are

and carves space for everybody else.

* * *

I had a twenty-three-year-old homie named Miguel working for me on our graffiti crew. As with a great many of our workers, I had met him years earlier while he was detained. He was an extremely nice kid, whose pleasantness was made all the more remarkable by the fact that he had been completely abandoned by his family. Prior to their rejection of him, they had mistreated, abused, and scarred him plenty. He calls me one New Year’s Day. “Happy New Year, G.”

“Hey, that’s very thoughtful of ya, dog,” I say. “You know, Miguel, I was thinkin’ of ya—you know, on Christmas. So, whad ya do for Christmas?” I asked knowing that he had no family to welcome him in.

“Oh, you know, I was just right here,” meaning his tiny little apartment, where he lives alone.

“All by yourself?” I ask.

“Oh no,” he quickly says, “I invited homies from the crew—you know, vatos like me who didn’t had no place to go for Christmas.”

He names the five homies who came over—all former enemies from rival gangs.

“Really,” I tell him, “that sure was nice of you.”

But he’s got me revved and curious now. “So,” I ask him, “what did you do?”

“Well,” he says, “you’re not gonna believe this . . . but . . . I cooked a turkey.”

You can feel his pride right through the phone.

“Wow, you did? Well, how did you prepare it?”

“You know,” he says, “Ghetto-style.”

I tell him that I’m not really familiar with this recipe.

He’s more than happy to give up his secret. “Yeah, well, you just rub it with a gang a’ butter, throw a bunch a’ salt and pepper on it, squeeze a couple of limones over it and put it in the oven. It tasted proper.”

I said, “Wow, that’s impressive. What else did you have besides the turkey?”

“Just that. Just turkey,” he says. His voice tapers to a hush. “Yeah. The six of us, we just sat there, staring at the oven, waiting for the turkey to be done.”

One would be hard-pressed to imagine something more sacred and ordinary than these six orphans staring at an oven together. It is the entire law and the prophets, all in one moment, right there, in this humble, holy kitchen.

Not long after this, I give Miguel a ride home after work. I had long been curious about Miguel’s own certain resilience. When we arrive at his apartment, I say, “Can I ask you a question? How do you do it? I mean, given all that

you’ve been through—all the pain and stuff you’ve suffered—how are you like the way you are?”

I genuinely want to know and Miguel has his answer at the ready. “You know, I always suspected that there was something of goodness in me, but I just couldn’t find it. Until one day,”—he quiets a bit—“one day, I discovered it here, in my heart. I found it . . . goodness. And ever since that day, I have always known who I was.” He pauses, caught short by his own truth, (reteaching loveliness) and turns and looks at me. “And now, nothing can touch me.”

The poet writes, “Someone fills the cup in front of us, we taste only sacredness.” And the world will throw at us what it will, and we cling to our own sacredness, and nothing can touch us. But as I mentioned earlier, there is a lethal absence of hope in the gang member. There is a failure to conjure up the necessary image that can catapult you into your future. In fact, gang members form an exclusive club of young people who plan their funerals and not their futures.

In the late ’80s we had a dance at the parish hall for young folks (soon the intensity of gang strife would make such dances a thing of the past).

A sixteen-year-old homegirl named Terry, a natural beauty and the object of every homie’s longing, was dressed in this magnificent, short, bright red dress.

She greets me at the door, where I provide security. She is radiant, and the toughness often on display in the streets has been left at home. I tell her how gorgeous she looks.

“Promise me something, G,” she says, giddy and enlivened by all the compliments she’s getting. “Promise me, that I get buried in this dress.”

I’m instantly imagining the ridiculous snapshot of an old woman, at repose in her coffin, in a dress like this. But Terry envisions no such old woman.

An equally young homegirl bounds into my office one day to tell me she’s pregnant. I suppose my face telegraphed, a little too clearly, a decided downsizing of my heart. Before I can say whatever I was going to say, she holds out her hand, as if to impede the words.

“I just want to have a kid before I die.”

I’m thinking, How does a sixteen-year-old get off thinking that she won’t see eighteen? It is one of the explanations for teen pregnancies in the barrio. If you don’t believe you will reach eighteen, then you accelerate the whole process, and you become a mother well before you’re ready.

In my earliest days, when gang violence had me burying more young people than old folks, I would often isolate the kid who had just viewed his dead homeboy in the casket. Maybe he’s off by himself, crying and avoiding his camaradas. I figure perhaps I can speak a word to jostle him from his

entrenched vow to seek revenge. Perhaps this is the vulnerable moment, a window cracked open to me. I would almost always say something like, “I never want to see you lying in a coffin at sixteen” or whatever his age is. When I first did this, I always expected the same response. “Yeah—that makes two of us. I don’t want to die.” What was initially startling grew predictable as I buried more kids. For this vulnerable one would always say the same thing, with little variation. “Why not—you gotta die sometime.” This is the language of the despondent, for whom both hope and one’s own sacredness are entirely foreign.

I remain always curious about the presence (or lack thereof) of the fathers in the lives of the homies. In the soul of nearly every homie I know there is a hole that’s in the shape of his dad. Homeboy Industries is always trying to create the moment of what psychologists call the “sustenance of that first attachment.” It is an offering (better late than never) of that parent-child bond that tells the fatherless that they’re lovable.

The Japanese speak of a concept called amae, living in a deep sense of being cherished, of raising kids lovingly. I had asked one of my workers, David, about his father. David was not long released from camp, still on probation, and was cleaning the office after school as one of our part-timers.

“Oh,” he says, monotone in place, accustomed as he was to answering this question, “he walked out on us.” Then he shakes up the dial tone of his voice and wants to go deeper, truer than he has before.

“In fact the day he chose to walk out on us was my sixth birthday.” There is a death behind his eyes that he can’t mask. “We had a cake y todo, but I wouldn’t let them cut it. I waited for my jefito to come home. I waited and waited.

Nighttime came. He never did.”

He pauses here for what I presume will be the moment for him to cry, but there is only dryness and a rage you can measure, the needle bouncing to its farthest edge.

“I cried till I was nine.”

I wait for some emotional creaking here. Nothing.

“I don’t cry anymore. I just hate him.” The great encounter with the “father wound” is every homeboy’s homework.

“When I was ten years old, I walked in on my dad, and he had a needle in his arm, all dazed. He looked at me and said, ‘Take a good look. This will be you one day.’ ”

Another says, “My dad would fuck us up. I mean, fuck . . . us . . . up. You know, if we didn’t massage his feet right or bring his wallet fast enough. I decided one day, ‘I don’t want to become him.’ ”

Still another, “I wish I never knew his name—wish I had never seen his face.”

There is a wound that needs excavating before that “first attachment” can attach itself elsewhere.

* * *

Natalie came to work in our organization after keeping up a fairly regular correspondence with me over her years of incarceration. Through placement, juvenile hall, probation camp, and jail, she always let me know where she was, and I had never seen her “on the outs” until she finally walked through my door.

Natalie was a runaway, a gang member, a regular drug user, and had two kids who had never been raised by her.

Once, while a group of us were approaching Pepperdine University, Natalie pointed down toward the beach and started to get excited. “Oooh—down there—

I was in a summer camp there. Yeah, it was a camp for bad kids.” Her parents were in and out but mainly out of her life since they all had arrived from Cuba.

“Yeah, we came on the Mariel Boatlift. You know, when Castro sent all the bad people here.”

Her time working at our place has been pocked by moments of incarceration, suspensions for getting high, and even a handful of terminations for fighting.

There was also a moment when I asked her not to come into the office—she would pick too many beefs with people. It was easier to get a call and then meet her at Jim’s Burgers across the street. She was a handful to say the very least.

She was one of the countless “what if” kids. What if she had actually been parented? What if she was surrounded by love and as much attention as a kid needs? What if she just had a stable place to rest her head?

I was on the road, somewhere in another time zone, giving a talk, and I had this vivid dream about Natalie. In some hotel lobby before giving a keynote address, I knew I had to locate her before it was my time to go on.

I catch her on her cell.

“Hey, kiddo, I had a dream about you last night.”

“Oh no,”—dread filling her voice—“is it bad?” (All homies think dreams are omens and predictors of bad things to come.)

“No, no,” I assure her, “It was a firme dream.” I tell her that in the dream I am in this small club, not unlike a tiny comedy club, with small tables and a stage with a microphone. The emcee approaches the mike and quiets the crowd.

“Ladies and gentlemen, to sing for you this evening, Ms. Natalie Urritia.”

The boos are spontaneous and full. The crowd turns on me, for some reason.

“What the hell’s goin’ on?” they ask me. “You know she can’t sing worth shit—

stop her.”

I shrug and say nothing. I remember feeling nervous for her, but I don’t intervene. The spotlight follows a gorgeous Natalie as she makes her way to the microphone. She is petite and fair skinned. She’s in a dazzling, bejeweled dress, long and slinky. There seems to be no confidence in her at all, and the crowd all but throws things at her—howling and derisive. The music begins.

“And you start to sing, kiddo, and it’s the most beautiful thing you ever heard in your life. It straight out shuts every damn body up. The crowd is silent, and our mouths are open. And none of us can believe this is you singing. But it’s stunning—takes your breath away.” I stop talking and she’s silent.

“And . . . then I woke up.”

There is such a hush you would have thought she had left me long ago.

“You’re crying aren’t you?”

“ ’Course,” she squeaks.

And the soul quickens at hearing what it didn’t know it already knew.

Kathleen Norris writes, “If holding your ground is what you are called to most days, it helps to know your ground.”

Resilience is born by grounding yourself in your own loveliness, hitting notes you thought were way out of your range.

* * *

Gangs are bastions of conditional love—one false move, and you find yourself outside. Slights are remembered, errors in judgment held against you forever. If a homie doesn’t step up to the plate, perform the required duty, he can be relegated to “no good” status. This is a state from which it is hard to recover.

Homeboy Industries seeks to be a community of unconditional love. Community will always trump gang any day.

Derek Walcott writes, “Either I am a nobody or I am a nation.”

Our place at Homeboy is this touchstone of resilience. You discover your true self in this “nation.” Homies who used to work at Homeboy always return on their days off or on their lunch break. A homie said to me once, “I just came by to get my fix.”

“Of what?” I ask him.

“Love,” he says.

Everyone is just looking to be told that who he or she is is right and true and wholly acceptable. No need to tinker and tweak. Exactly right.

* * *

I am working at my desk one day, eyes poring over something. You know how you can feel when two eyeballs are staring at you. I look up and it’s Danny. He’s a short, chubby ten-year-old who lives in the projects and is one of the fixtures around the office. A goofy, likable kid who does not do well in school. He seems to have purloined this oversize sketch pad, nearly as large as he is. He has it resting on his arched knee, and in his right hand is a pencil. He’s sketching me.

He works furiously on this drawing and then positions his pencil, held up at me, as if to size up the subject of his portrait. This is a technique he has retrieved, no doubt, from cartoons. He works on the portrait and then stops and holds his thumb and pencil at me to, again, capture my essence. This cracks me up. It is completely charming and funny. So I laugh.

Danny gets quite annoyed, “Don’t move,” he says, with not a little bit of menace.

Well, this makes me laugh all the more to think it makes any damn difference if I move. I’m howling a lot now. Danny turns steely on me, not the least bit amused. He becomes a clench-toothed Clint Eastwood. “I said, ‘Don’t move.’ ”

I freeze. I stop laughing, and he finishes his portrait.

Danny rips the sheet and lays the thing on my desk, revealing his obra de arte. And there in the middle of this huge piece of paper, about the size of a grapefruit, is me, I guess. Apparently, I’ve been beat down with the proverbial ugly stick. It is Picasso on his worst day. My glasses are crooked, my eyes not at all where they should be. My face is generally woppy-jawed, and it is an unrecognizable mess. I’m kind of speechless. “Uh, wow, Danny, um . . . this is me?”

“Yep,” he says, standing proudly in front of my desk, awaiting a fuller verdict.

“Wow, I hardly know what to say . . . I mean . . . it’s . . . uh . . . very interesting.” Danny looks a little miffed. “Well, whad ya spect. YA MOVED.”

We squirm in the face of our sacredness, and a true community screams a collective “don’t move.” The admonition not to move is nothing less than God’s own satisfaction at the sacredness, the loveliness that’s there in each one—

despite what seems to be a shape that’s less than perfect.

* * *

Though he’d run away from home at thirteen, I only met Andres at nineteen after he had overstayed his welcome in various houses around town. Running away

had seemed like the only reasonable thing to do. His mom, seeing in Andres the picture of his father, the man who had walked out on her, funneled all of her rage and disdain right at this kid. He became this male Cinderella, slavishly mopping the floors and bathroom of the bar she owned and the small apartment they shared. She didn’t exactly abuse him. She tortured him. Putting cigarettes out on him, holding his head in the toilet until he nearly drowned. Andres was removed many times from the home by Child Protectors and just as routinely returned to her care.

Once he ran away, he aligned his misery with likely camaradas in a local gang—all hanging on for dear life and sharing the tight confines of their orphan island. When I met him, he was feeling the pressure to “move outta the homie’s pad.”

We had a shelter for women and children at the time, Casa Miguel Pro, nestled atop the elementary school, in what was the Dolores Mission convent.

We had an extra room, and I gave it to Andres. Before long, he was employed, someone had donated a “tore up ranfla,” so he had wheels for work, and he generally began to thrive.

Andres was one of those interviewed by Mike Wallace. Since I was to do tertianship—a yearlong break of reflection, prayer, long retreat, and ministry required of all Jesuits before they take final vows—and leave for a time after my tour as pastor, Mike asks Andres, now twenty-one, “You know, Father Greg says you’re a success story. And he’s leaving. I mean, are you going to continue on this path of success after Father Greg leaves?” Before Andres can address the question, Wallace inexplicably hunkers closer to Andres, seeking some inside-track camaraderie he frankly hasn’t earned, and says, “You know, you’d really have to be an asshole not to continue on this path of success.” Andres perks like a lion who hears someone coming. “What you call me?” Mike shifts in his metal folding chair like someone had just turned its heating element to high.

“Um, well, it’s just a figure of speech; I mean, I’m not calling you that. It’s just . . . well . . . ONE . . . would have to be an asshole . . .”

Andres is trembling at this point, his linebacker body wanting to go in eight directions at once. “There is only one person who can call me that . . . and that’s Father Greg . . . not my family, not even my homies . . . but certainly not some rich white boy like you.” Andres rips the microphone off his shirt and pounds his way to the side exit of the church where the interview was taking place. Mike’s nervous aides pounce on my office. “Andres is mad.” When I locate him, he won’t let his ire be tamed. “I was gonna toss him up, G. I was gonna . . . straight out . . . toss him up.” Let’s face it, who among us hasn’t wanted to “toss up”

Mike Wallace?

Andres was alive, vibrant, and thriving as never before, and for the first time ever, there was a lightness to his being. He was proud of himself.

One day we bump into each other in the church parking lot.

“Ya know, I’m thinkin’a callin’ my jefita.

“You sure?” I caution. After all, it had been more than five years since he had spoken with her.

“Well, yeah,” he says, “I mean, she is the only mom I got.”

I be-my-guest him toward my office, and I leave him. Not five minutes later, Andres is standing by my side again, looking stricken. This is what the woman who brought Andres into the world chose to say to her son, after not having spoken with or seen him for more than five years. This and only this.

“Tú eres basura.” (You are garbage.)

Now I’m stricken, barely able to hollow out a place in my own heart for such a thing as this. Andres’s eyes glisten in the midday sun.

“You didn’t believe her, did you?”

“Nah . . . I forgave her.”

Years and years later, Andres plops in one of the chairs in my office, car in the shop (he’d been through many vehicles since that first bucket) and he’s bussing it. He wanted to stop by and kick it before taking the bus home to his simple apartment. I offer to drive him home to Montebello.

“Would you mind, G, if we can swing by Ralph’s so I can get some stuff? I mean, since I got a ride and all.”

We pull into Ralph’s, and I watch, always several steps behind, as Andres grabs a shopping cart and commandeers it down aisles of produce and canned goods. When I catch up with him, he says, “Tuesdays are the sales—that’s the day to shop.” I’m astonished at his assurance and utter familiarity with this place. He knows where to go. He knows what to get. He turns, I’m out of breath keeping up. He’s in a confiding mood.

“Ya know, ya gotta be very careful in these big supermarkets.”

“You do?” I say, leaning in to catch his drift.

“Oh, hell yeah.”

Andres sizes up the aisle to see if there are spies. “It’s that elevator music they be playing.” He’s whispering and pointing above. “It confuses you. Ya buy shit you don’t need.”

Home sweet home in his own skin. A man who has decided to walk in his own footsteps. God eternally satisfied with all his sacredness. Andres, a temple on high, a holy of holies, right there, on aisle 5.

Don’t move.

* * *

I was praising a homie for one thing or another on the phone, and he just wouldn’t have it. “You know,” he insists, “I still have my blemishes.” We still have to put our Western minds in a headlock and wrestle them to the ground. We think “blemishes” are shortcomings. We think our continually gnarly hardwired responses are not just proof of our humanity but (somehow) of our unworthiness.

Homies are particularly culpable here. In an acute gangster version of the Stockholm syndrome, homies identify with, and grow attached to, their weaknesses and difficulties and burdens. You hope, in the light of this, to shift their attention and allegiance to their own basic goodness. You show them the bright blue sky of their sacredness, and they are transfixed only by the ominous clouds. You stand there with them and encourage them to stare above and wait twenty minutes.

“You are the sky,” as Pema Chödrön would insist. “Everything else, it’s just weather.”

* * *

It would not be uncommon to ask Fabian how he’s doing and then hear him respond, “I’m feeling zestfully clean, thank you.” It may go without saying that I have never encountered a homie quite like Fabian. Few homeboys are able to incorporate in conversation, “Pip, pip, cheerio” or belittle your obvious response to something with, “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

Fabian, now in his late twenties and married with three kids, worked for years at Homeboy Industries. Now he has a well-paying job and is as decent a human being as I know. He’s just so uniquely a person like no other. He can, from memory, do the entire “shrimp montage” from Forrest Gump. He has also memorized every story from my talks.

Once I called him from Palm Springs, seconds before I was to “go on” and I was stumped. I couldn’t remember the exact wording on something. He didn’t even have to think about it, he handed the phrasing right to me.

His childhood was a dense mix of gangster father, mentally ill mother, and no one ever really in their cinco sentidos—always high, all the time. When he was ten or so, his mother was beating him with her high heel, when he sought refuge in the closet. She commenced to beat on Fabian’s brother, Michael, and when his brother’s screaming stopped, he peeked out of the closet and saw that his mother had wrapped a wire hanger around his neck, and he was turning blue. Fabian flew to her and body-slammed and wrestled her to the ground. Consequently, no

one would have been surprised if Fabian had taken up permanent residence in some state-run, locked-down facility.

But somehow, by a mysterious and gracious turn of some steering wheel, Fabian found other coordinates and navigated his way out of the treacherous waters where others perished.

His brand of humor is so smart and odd that one occasionally suspects that some alien has taken possession of this homeboy. Traveling in DC to speak in front of a congressional subcommittee, Fabian and Felipe, an enemy from his gang’s worst rival, were kicking it upstairs at my brother Paul’s house, watching Gremlins.

Paul and his wife, Joy, and I were sipping beers after a long day. Fabian, nineteen at the time, came down the stairs to get sodas for himself and Felipe.

He goes directly to the refrigerator, making himself at home, but stops when he sees us.

“Can I have a beer?”

“No.”

Fabian reaches in to get his Cokes. Then stops.

“It would mean a lot to me.”

“Nope.”

He digs deeper into the fridge and then pulls himself out of there.

“I would cherish this moment?”

I ask you, who talks like this?

Just recently, we were on the phone. He is forever calling and checking in and the conversations rapidly dissolve into a swirling sink of silliness.

I am ready to deal with all the people lined up to see me in my office, so I try to extricate myself from Fabian’s clutches.

“Well,” I say to him, “it will be my great pleasure to hang up on your ass right now.”

He feigns “Why I never . . .” huffiness.

Then, “Well, it will be MY great pleasure to be HUNGEN up by you.”

“Good comeback,” I tell him.

Fabian was spectacular at building good and enduring friendships with his

“enemies” at Homeboy. His tenderness knew no equal, really. He would visit an enemy undergoing brutal chemotherapy and supply him with videos to distract him from the ordeal. He’d do reconnaissance of the hospital area to make sure that none of his enemies were also visiting at the same time.

His enemies wouldn’t understand. Once, Fabian was stuck in the backseat of a car filled with his homeboys who were giving him a ride home.

“Hey, look,” one of them screams in the car, “that’s that fool, Froggy.” The alarmist in the car is pointing at an enemy walking by himself on First Street.

“Let’s bomb on his ass.”

The car pulls over, and Fabian works his magic. “Kick back, you guys. That’s my primo.

Serio, he’s your cousin?”

“Yeah—my tia’s son.”

And the car swerves back into merging traffic. Froggy was an enemy Fabian had come to know from our office. They are not related.

I just don’t know how Fabian managed it.

With more mystery than I can explain away, Fabian locked on to the singularity of that love that melts you. It doesn’t melt who you are, but who you are not. Turns out he wasn’t all the abuse he endured. He was something else, astonishing and glorious.

* * *

For two decades I’ve been working with gang members, and, on occasion, it occurs to people to present me with some award or another. I’ve gotten a number of these over the years—a bronze lion, a crystal “catchyvatchy,” a plaque, or framed acknowledgement. (Especially in recent years, with a cancer diagnosis, you start getting “lifetime achievement awards”—if you know what I mean.) I’ve never kept one of these.

I always give them to one of the homies. Usually there is a fancy dinner at some Beverly Hills hotel. They give me a table, and I fill it with half homies and half ladies from the projects. They are dressed in their absolute finery. The women in dresses they wore at their daughters’ quinceañeras, the homies in perfectly ironed Ben Davis pants and large, untucked plaid shirts. Gangster standard issue. They become intrigued by the amount of silverware at their place settings. “What’s this fork for?” They invariably ask the waiter for Tapatío hot sauce. When the gourmet arugula and pear balsamic vinegar salad arrives, they dive in, and someone weighs in, “This shit tastes nasty.”

Someone always says this.

After the event, I drive everyone home, knowing that the last homie I drop off is the one to whom I’ll give the award. (Once, I gave a magnificent ornate plaque to a homie, and he said, “Wow—this is great. And when you kick rocks, I’ll sell it on eBay and make a grip a’ feria [money].”

When I get to the last house with the last homie, I say, “Hey, dog, you’re my hero—look where you’ve been and where you are now. So, I want you to

have . . . this bronze lion.”

I tell him that I’ll come visit it from time to time.

I had been invited to receive some award from the Education Department at Loyola Marymount University. I had a speaking engagement up north at the same time, so I asked if I could send one of my workers to receive it on my behalf (knowing that I would have him keep the award afterward).

The LMU people agreed, and I selected Elias to accept my premio. Elias was eighteen years old, working at Homeboy Silkscreen, and had traded in his gang past for fatherhood and gainful employment. Given the horror show that was his family, environment, and the number of obstacles on his road along the way, his success was all the more astonishing.

“Could you go to this event and accept this award on my behalf,” I ask him.

He’s taken aback by the honor, “ ’Course I will.”

“Oh, by the way,” I continue, “Ya gotta give a little acceptance speech.” His eyes widen. “WHAT?”

I tell him to relax, to write a couple of paragraphs, and he’ll be fine. I tell him that Cara Gould, one of our senior staff at the time (and among the most skilled at working with homies I’ve ever seen), will take him to LMU.

I hear later that the trip to the awards evening is Panic Central. Elias wants to leap from the moving car. This is how nervous he is. “Cara, I can’t do it. I can’t speak in front of these people.”

Cara tries to calm him some. “Look,” she says, “they always say that if you’re nervous speaking in front of people, just imagine your entire audience is stark naked.”

Elias turns on her. “I CAN’T DO THAT—I’d be staring the whole time.”

Once they get to the auditorium, things move from bad to worse. The place is packed. Standing room only. Flop sweat dots Elias’s forehead. The emcee says,

“Accepting the award on behalf of Father Greg Boyle is Elias Montes.”

The crowd claps warmly as Elias awkwardly makes his way to the podium, bathed in a spotlight. He’s trembling as he holds the yellow lined paper on which he’s written his speech. It’s not much of a speech, really. There is no poetry, only the unmistakable testimony of this kid standing there—transformed and astonishing. The audience seems to get this on the first bounce. He gets to the end with a big finish. “Because Father Greg and Homeboy Industries believed in me, I decided to believe in myself. And the best way I can think of payin’ ’em back is by changing my life. And that’s exactly what I’ve decided to do. Thank you.”

The auditorium erupts in applause. They truly go nuts. They are on their feet and people are crying and shouting. Folks are locating their Kleenex and will not

stop clapping. Elias finds his seat. Cara is standing next to him, crying a great deal, but so is the man on the other side of Elias. The ovation continues, and Elias is quite oblivious to it all. Finally, he leans into Cara, who is still standing and applauding with the others, and whispers, “Damn, they’re sure clappin’ a lot for G.”

Cara crouches toward him, “Oye, menso, they’re not clappin’ for G—they’re clappin’ for YOU.”

Elias straightens as if connected to a power plant.

“NUH-UH,” he says.

“Yeah, huh,” Cara says. “They are clapping for you.”

And so, an entire room of total strangers hands Elias back to himself and says in no uncertain terms, “Don’t move.”

* * *

Jason’s appearance in my office was a first. Though I had known him most of his life, he was an expert at resisting my offers of help. In the interim, Jason had done his share of dirt for his gang. He would rather be employed selling crack than in anything else. He was cemented in his resistance to me. And yet there he was, that day, in my office.

Y ese milagro? ”—“I can’t believe you’re here,” I say.

Jason was uncharacteristically quiet, humble in the face of whatever it was that was happening to him. I wish I could flesh out more why and how Jason managed to show up in my office that day. It’s all quite mysterious to me. With my ear to the ground, I knew only his total commitment to his barrio and drug-dealing and general criminality. I couldn’t draw a straight line between the fact of his appearance in my office that day and some pivotal, recent moment in the past. I still could only see the goofy kid I had met fifteen years earlier, who had no recourse but to let the streets raise him.

I send him to one of our job developers who in turn sends him to a job interview that very day. Not two hours later, he’s back, brimming with excitement.

He stands in the doorway of my office, “I GOT THE JOB!”

“That’s great,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says, “The manager said I fit the description.”

He’s got me here. “Well, I suppose,” I say, “if you’re America’s Most Wanted, he might have said, ‘fit the description.’ Or did he say, you ‘met the qualifications’?”

Jason convulses, giggles, and slaps his forehead. “Yeah, dat one—‘met the qualifications’—sheesh—what was I thinkin’ ‘fit the description’—stooopid.”

Jason dropped by often after that. To just get “his fix,” I suppose. Hoping to get an even better job, he’d get help with his résumé. More often than not, he’d just check in with me. This seemed easy for him, no longer saddled with the shame of his previous “knucklehead” existence, he held his head high and could face me. He could gaze at himself in the mirror and not move. It had been a long time (if ever) since he was able to do that.

“I finally realized why I was out there so long,” he tells me in one of his visits, referring to his gangbanging and drug-dealing.

“Yeah, I can see why now. It’s just, I was so fuckin’ angry all the time.”

And of course why wouldn’t he be? Both parents were heroin addicts, and he was left to raise himself—which kids are meant not to be good at.

“And now,” he says, “I just let it all go—the anger, I mean.”

In one of his drop-bys on a Wednesday, I ask him, “So, are we all set for your daughter’s baptism on Saturday?”

“Oh yeah,” he says, “I bought the dress yesterday. She’s gonna look beautiful.”

The next morning, on the way to a job interview for a better position, Jason was gunned down. Someone drove by and saw him and perhaps all his past had become present again. I buried him a week later and baptized his daughter at his funeral Mass. Water, oil, flame.

I landed on the gospel that I wanted to use at his liturgy. Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.” I like even more what Jesus doesn’t say. He does not say,

“One day, if you are more perfect and try really hard, you’ll be light.” He doesn’t say “If you play by the rules, cross your T’s and dot your I’s, then maybe you’ll become light.” No. He says, straight out, “You are light.” It is the truth of who you are, waiting only for you to discover it. So, for God’s sake, don’t move.

No need to contort yourself to be anything other than who you are. Jason was who he was. He made a lot of mistakes, he was not perfect, and his rage called the shots for a goodly chunk of his life. And he was the light of the world. He fit the description.

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