With That Moon Language

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them,

“Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud;

Otherwise,

Someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this,

This great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one

Who lives with a full moon in each eye

That is always saying

With that sweet moon

Language

What every other eye in this world

Is dying to

Hear.

—Hafez

1

God, I Guess

God can get tiny, if we’re not careful. I’m certain we all have an image of God that becomes the touchstone, the controlling principle, to which we return when we stray.

My touchstone image of God comes by way of my friend and spiritual director, Bill Cain, S.J. Years ago he took a break from his own ministry to care for his father as he died of cancer. His father had become a frail man, dependent on Bill to do everything for him. Though he was physically not what he had been, and the disease was wasting him away, his mind remained alert and lively.

In the role reversal common to adult children who care for their dying parents, Bill would put his father to bed and then read him to sleep, exactly as his father had done for him in childhood. Bill would read from some novel, and his father would lie there, staring at his son, smiling. Bill was exhausted from the day’s care and work and would plead with his dad, “Look, here’s the idea. I read to you, you fall asleep.” Bill’s father would impishly apologize and dutifully close his eyes. But this wouldn’t last long. Soon enough, Bill’s father would pop one eye open and smile at his son. Bill would catch him and whine, “Now, come on.” The father would, again, oblige, until he couldn’t anymore, and the other eye would open to catch a glimpse of his son. This went on and on, and after his father’s death, Bill knew that this evening ritual was really a story of a father who just couldn’t take his eyes off his kid. How much more so God? Anthony De Mello writes, “Behold the One beholding you, and smiling.”

God would seem to be too occupied in being unable to take Her eyes off of us to spend any time raising an eyebrow in disapproval. What’s true of Jesus is true for us, and so this voice breaks through the clouds and comes straight at us.

“You are my Beloved, in whom I am wonderfully pleased.” There is not much

“tiny” in that.

* * *

In 1990 the television news program 60 Minutes came to Dolores Mission Church. One of its producers had read a Sunday Los Angeles Times Magazine article about my work with gang members in the housing projects. Mike Wallace, also seeing the piece, wanted to do a report. I was assured that I’d be getting “Good Mike.” These were the days when the running joke was “you know you’re going to have a bad day when Mike Wallace and a 60 Minutes film crew show up at your office.”

Wallace arrived at the poorest parish in Los Angeles in the stretchest of white limousines, stepped out of the car, wearing a flak jacket, covered with pockets, prepared, I suppose, for a journey into the jungle.

For all his initial insensitivity, toward the end of the visit, in a moment unrecorded, Wallace did say to me, “Can I admit something? I came here expecting monsters. But that’s not what I found.”

Later, in a recorded moment, we are sitting in a classroom filled with gang members, all students in our Dolores Mission Alternative School. Wallace points at me and says, “You won’t turn these guys in to the police.” Which seems quite silly to me at the time. I say something lame like, “I didn’t take my vows to the LAPD.” But then Wallace turns to a homie and grills him on this, saying over and over, “He won’t turn you in, will he?” And then he asks the homie, “Why is that? Why do you think he won’t turn you over to the police?” The kid just stares at Mike Wallace, shrugs, nonplussed, and says, “God . . . I guess.”

This is a chapter on God, I guess. Truth be told, the whole book is. Not much in my life makes any sense outside of God. Certainly, a place like Homeboy Industries is all folly and bad business unless the core of the endeavor seeks to imitate the kind of God one ought to believe in. In the end, I am helpless to explain why anyone would accompany those on the margins were it not for some anchored belief that the Ground of all Being thought this was a good idea.

* * *

Rascal is not one to take advice. He can be recalcitrant, defensive, and primed for the fight. Well into his thirties, he’s a survivor. His truck gets filled with scrap metal and with this, somehow, he feeds his kids and manages to stay on this side of eviction. To his credit, he bid prison time and gang-banging good-

bye a long time ago. Rascal sometimes hits me up for funds, and I oblige if I have it and if his attitude doesn’t foul my mood too much. But you can’t tell him anything—except this one day, he actually listens. I am going on about something—can’t remember what but I can see he’s listening. When I’m done, he says simply, “You know, I’m gonna take that advice, and I’m gonna let it marinate,” pointing at his heart, “right here.”

Perhaps we should all marinate in the intimacy of God. Genesis, I suppose, got it right—“In the beginning, God.” Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, also spoke about the task of marinating in the “God who is always greater.”

He writes, “Take care always to keep before your eyes, first, God.” The secret, of course, of the ministry of Jesus, was that God was at the center of it.

Jesus chose to marinate in the God who is always greater than our tiny conception, the God who “loves without measure and without regret.” To anchor yourself in this, to keep always before your eyes this God is to choose to be intoxicated, marinated in the fullness of God. An Algerian Trappist, before his martyrdom, spoke to this fullness: “When you fill my heart, my eyes overflow.”

* * *

Willy crept up on me from the driver’s side. I had just locked the office and was ready to head home at 8:00 p.m.

“Shit, Willy,” I say, “Don’t be doin’ that.”

“ ’ Spensa, G,” he says, “My bad. It’s just . . . well, my stomach’s on échale.

Kick me down with twenty bones, yeah?”

“Dog, my wallet’s on échale, ” I tell him. A “dog” is the one upon whom you can rely—the role-dog, the person who has your back. “But get in. Let’s see if I can trick any funds outta the ATM.”

Willy hops on board. He is a life force of braggadocio and posturing—a thoroughly good soul—but his confidence is outsize, that of a lion wanting you to know he just swallowed a man whole. A gang member, but a peripheral one at best—he wants more to regale you with his exploits than to actually be in the midst of any. In his midtwenties, Willy is a charmer, a quintessential homie con man who’s apt to coax money out of your ATM if you let him. This night, I’m tired and I want to go home.

It’s easier not to resist. The Food 4 Less on Fourth and Soto has the closest ATM. I tell Willy to stay in the car, in case we run into one of Willy’s rivals inside.

“Stay here, dog,” I tell him, “I’ll be right back.”

I’m not ten feet away when I hear a muffled “Hey.”

It’s Willy, and he’s miming, “the keys,” from the passenger seat of my car.

He’s making over-the-top, key-in-the-ignition señales.

“The radio,” he mouths, as he holds a hand, cupping his ear.

I wag a finger, “No, chale.” Then it’s my turn to mime. I hold both my hands together and enunciate exaggeratedly, “Pray.”

Willy sighs and levitates his eyeballs. But he’s putty. He assumes the praying hands pose and looks heavenward— cara santucha. I proceed on my quest to the ATM but feel the need to check in on Willy only ten yards later.

I turn and find him still in the prayer position, seeming to be only half-aware that I’m looking in on him.

I return to the car, twenty dollars in hand, and get in. Something has happened here. Willy is quiet, reflective, and there is a palpable sense of peace in the vehicle. I look at Willy and say, “You prayed, didn’t you?”

He doesn’t look at me. He’s still and quiet. “Yeah, I did.”

I start the car.

“Well, what did God say to you?” I ask him.

“Well, first He said, ‘Shut up and listen.’

“So what d’ya do?”

“Come on, G,” he says, “What am I sposed ta do? I shut up and listened.”

I begin to drive him home to the barrio. I’ve never seen Willy like this. He’s quiet and humble—no need to convince me of anything or talk me out of something else.

“So, son, tell me something,” I ask. “How do you see God?”

“God?” he says, “That’s my dog right there.”

“And God?” I ask, “How does God see you?”

Willy doesn’t answer at first. So I turn and watch as he rests his head on the recliner, staring at the ceiling of my car. A tear falls down his cheek. Heart full, eyes overflowing. “God . . . thinks . . . I’m . . . firme.”

To the homies, firme means, “could not be one bit better.”

Not only does God think we’re firme, it is God’s joy to have us marinate in that.

* * *

The poet Kabir asks, “What is God?” Then he answers his own question: “God is the breath inside the breath.”

Willy found his way inside the breath and it was firme.

I came late to this understanding in my own life—helped along by the grace-filled pedagogy of the people of Dolores Mission. I was brought up and educated to give assent to certain propositions. God is love, for example. You concede

“God loves us,” and yet there is this lurking sense that perhaps you aren’t fully part of the “us.” The arms of God reach to embrace, and somehow you feel yourself just outside God’s fingertips.

Then you have no choice but to consider that “God loves me,” yet you spend much of your life unable to shake off what feels like God only embracing you begrudgingly and reluctantly. I suppose, if you insist, God has to love me too.

Then who can explain this next moment, when the utter fullness of God rushes in on you—when you completely know the One in whom “you move and live and have your being,” as St. Paul writes. You see, then, that it has been God’s joy to love you all along. And this is completely new.

Every time one of the Jesuits at Dolores Mission would celebrate a birthday, the same ritual would repeat itself. “You know,” one of the other Jesuits would say to me, for example, “Your birthday is Wednesday. The people are throwing a ‘surprise party’ for you on the Saturday before.” The protests are as predictable as the festivities.

“Oh come on,” I’d say, “Can’t we pass this year?”

“Look,” one of my brothers would say to me, “This party is not for you—it’s for the people.”

And so I am led into the parish hall for some bogus meeting, and I can hear the people “shushing” one another— El Padre ya viene. As I step in the door, lights go on, people shout, mariachis strike themselves up. I am called upon to muster up the same award-winning look of shock from last year. They know that you know. They don’t care. They don’t just love you—it’s their joy to love you.

The poet Rumi writes, “Find the real world, give it endlessly away, grow rich flinging gold to all who ask. Live at the empty heart of paradox. I’ll dance there with you—cheek to cheek.”

Dancing cumbias with the women of Dolores Mission rhymes with God’s own wild desire to dance with each one of us cheek to cheek.

Meister Eckhart says “God is greater than God.” The hope is that our sense of God will grow as expansive as our God is. Each tiny conception gets obliterated as we discover more and more the God who is always greater.

* * *

At Camp Paige, a county detention facility near Glendora, I was getting to know fifteen-year-old Rigo, who was about to make his first communion. The Catholic

volunteers had found him a white shirt and black tie. We still had some fifteen minutes before the other incarcerated youth would join us for Mass in the gym, and I’m asking Rigo the basic stuff about his family and his life. I ask about his father.

“Oh,” he says, “he’s a heroin addict and never really been in my life. Used to always beat my ass. Fact, he’s in prison right now. Barely ever lived with us.”

Then something kind of snaps in him—an image brings him to attention.

“I think I was in the fourth grade,” he begins. “I came home. Sent home in the middle of the day. Got into some pedo at school. Can’t remember what. When I got home, my jefito was there. He was hardly ever there. My dad says, ‘Why they send you home?’ And cuz my dad always beat me, I said, ‘If I tell you, promise you won’t hit me?’ He just said, ‘I’m your father. ’Course I’m not gonna hit you.’ So I told him.”

Rigo is caught short in the telling. He begins to cry, and in moments he’s wailing and rocking back and forth. I put my arm around him. He is inconsolable. When he is able to speak and barely so, he says only, “He beat me with a pipe . . . with . . . a pipe.”

When Rigo composes himself, I ask, “And your mom?” He points some distance from where we are to a tiny woman standing by the gym’s entrance.

“That’s her over there.” He pauses for a beat, “There’s no one like her.”

Again, some slide appears in his mind, and a thought occurs.

“I’ve been locked up for more than a year and a half. She comes to see me every Sunday. You know how many buses she takes every Sunday—to see my sorry ass?”

Then quite unexpectedly he sobs with the same ferocity as before. Again, it takes him some time to reclaim breath and an ability to speak. Then he does, gasping through his tears. “Seven buses. She takes . . . seven . . . buses.

Imagine.”

How, then, to imagine, the expansive heart of this God—greater than God—

who takes seven buses, just to arrive at us. We settle sometimes for less than intimacy with God when all God longs for is this solidarity with us. In Spanish, when you speak of your great friend, you describe the union and kinship as being de uña y mugre—our friendship is like the fingernail and the dirt under it.

Our image of who God is and what’s on God’s mind is more tiny than it is troubled. It trips more on our puny sense of God than over conflicting creedal statements or theological considerations.

The desire of God’s heart is immeasurably larger than our imaginations can conjure. This longing of God’s to give us peace and assurance and a sense of

well-being only awaits our willingness to cooperate with God’s limitless magnanimity.

* * *

“Behold the One beholding you and smiling.” It is precisely because we have such an overactive disapproval gland ourselves that we tend to create God in our own image. It is truly hard for us to see the truth that disapproval does not seem to be part of God’s DNA. God is just too busy loving us to have any time left for disappointment.

* * *

One day I receive a phone call in my office around three in the afternoon. It’s from a twenty-five-year-old homie named Cesar. I have known him for most of his life. I can remember first meeting him when he was a little kid in Pico Gardens during the earthquake of 1987 when the projects had become a tent city.

People lived outside in carpas well past the time of any danger. Cesar was one of the many kids seeking reassurance from me.

“Are we gonna be okay? Is this the end of the world?”

I spent every evening of those two weeks walking the tents, and I always associate Cesar with that period.

He’s calling me today because he has just finished a four-year stint in prison.

Turned out, earthquakes were the least of Cesar’s troubles. He had joined the local gang, since there wasn’t anyone around to “chase his ass” and rein him in.

At this point in his life, Cesar had been locked up more often than not. Cesar and I chitchat on the phone, dispatching the niceties in short order—“It’s good to be out—I’d love to see ya”—then Cesar says, “Let me just cut to the cheese.”

This was not a spin I had heard on this expression before.

“You know, I just got outta the pinta and don’t really have a place to stay.

Right now, I’m staying with a friend in his apartment—here in El Monte—away from the projects and the hood and the homies. Y sabes qué, I don’t got no clothes. My lady she left me, and she burned all my clothes, you know, in some anger toward me, I guess.”

I’m waiting for him to cut to the cheese.

“So I don’t got no clothes,” he says. “Can you help me?”

“Sure, son,” I say, “Look, it’s three now. I’ll pick you up after work, at six o’clock.”

I drive to the apartment at the appointed hour, and I’m surprised to see Cesar standing on the sidewalk waiting for me—I’m used to searching for homies when asked to retrieve them. I guess you might say that Cesar is a scary-looking guy. It’s not just the fact that he’s large and especially, fresh out of prison, newly

“swole” from lifting weights. He exudes menace. So there he is, standing and waiting for me. When he sees it’s me, this huge ex-con does this bouncing up and down, yippy-skippy, happy-to-see-ya, hand-clapping gleeful jig.

He flies into my car and throws his arms around me. “When I saw you right now, G, I got aaaallllll happy!”

There was some essence to him that hadn’t changed from that child wanting to know that the world was safe from earthquakes.

We go to JCPenney, and I tell him he can buy two hundred dollars’ worth of clothes. In no time, his arms are filled with the essentials, and we both are standing in a considerable line to pay for it all. All the other customers are staring at Cesar. Not only is he menacing, but he seems to have lost his volume knob. People can’t help but turn and look, though they all take great pains to pretend they’re not listening.

“Hey,” he says, in what you might call a loud-ass voice, “See dat couple over there?”

I am not the only one turning and looking. The entire check-out line shifts.

Cesar points to a young couple with a tiny son.

“Well, I walk up to that guy and I look at him and I say, ‘Hey, don’t I know you?’ And his ruca grabs the morrito and holds him and shakes her head and says, ‘NO, WE DON’T KNOW YOU!’ all panickeada así. Then the vato looks at me like he’s gonna have a damn paro cardiaco, and he shakes his head, ‘NO, I DON’T KNOW YOU.’ Then I look at him more closer, and I say, ‘Oh, my bad, I thought you were somebody else.’ And they get aaaaallllll relaxed when I say that.” He takes a breath. “I mean, damn, G . . . do I look that scary?”

I shake my head no and say, “Yeah, pretty much, dog.”

The customers can’t help themselves, and we all laugh.

I drop Cesar off at his friend’s apartment. He becomes quiet and vulnerable, as frightened as a child displaced by shifting ground.

“I just don’t want to go back. La neta, I’m scared.”

“Look, son,” I say to him, “Who’s got a better heart than you? And God is at the center of that great, big ol’ heart. Hang on to that, dog—cuz you have what the world wants. So, what can go wrong?”

We say our good-byes, and as I watch him walk away alone, I find his gentleness and disarming sweet soul a kind of elixir, soothing my own doubts and calling me to fearlessness.

At three o’clock in the morning, the phone rings. It’s Cesar. He says what every homie says when they call in the middle of the night, “Did I wake you?”

I always think Why no, I was just waiting and hoping that you’d call.

Cesar is sober, and it’s urgent that he talk to me.

“I gotta ask you a question. You know how I’ve always seen you as my father

—ever since I was a little kid? Well, I hafta ask you a question.”

Now Cesar pauses, and the gravity of it all makes his voice waver and crumble, “Have I . . . been . . . your son?”

“Oh, hell, yeah,” I say.

“Whew,” Cesar exhales, “I thought so.”

Now his voice becomes enmeshed in a cadence of gentle sobbing. “Then . . . I will be . . . your son. And you . . . will be my father. And nothing will separate us, right?”

“That’s right.”

In this early morning call Cesar did not discover that he has a father. He discovered that he is a son worth having. The voice broke through the clouds of his terror and the crippling mess of his own history, and he felt himself beloved.

God, wonderfully pleased in him, is where God wanted Cesar to reside.

Jesus, in Matthew’s gospel, says, “How narrow is the gate that leads to life.”

Mistakenly, I think, we’ve come to believe that this is about restriction. The way is narrow. But it really wants us to see that narrowness is the way.

St. Hedwig writes, “All is narrow for me, I feel so vast.” It’s about funneling ourselves into a central place. Our choice is not to focus on the narrow, but to narrow our focus. The gate that leads to life is not about restriction at all. It is about an entry into the expansive. There is a vastness in knowing you’re a son/daughter worth having. We see our plentitude in God’s own expansive view of us, and we marinate in this.

* * *

In March of 2004, Scrappy walks into our office and, I’m not proud to admit it, my heart sinks. From the perch of my own glass-enclosed office, I can see Scrappy talking to Marcos, the receptionist, who is also from Scrappy’s gang.

He is apparently signing up to see me. I haven’t seen Scrappy in ten years, since he’s been incarcerated all that time, but even before that, I’m not sure if he’s ever set foot in my office. My heart is in some lower register. Let’s just say Scrappy and I have never been on good terms. I first met him in the summer of 1984. I was newly ordained at Dolores Mission. He was fifteen years old, and his probation officer assigned him to the church to complete his hours of

community service. The chip located on his shoulder was the size of a Pontiac.

“I don’t have to listen to you.” “I don’t have to do what you say.”

Some five years later, I am standing in front of a packed church, preaching at the funeral of one of Scrappy’s homeboys. “If you love Cuko and want to honor his memory,” I say to the congregation, “then you will work for peace and love your enemies.” Immediately, Scrappy stands up and moves out of his pew and into the center aisle. All eyes are on him. I stop speaking. The eternal scowl I had come to know in that summer of 1984 is fixed on me as he walks straight ahead. We stand face-to-face, he mad-dogs me with some intensity, then turns and exits the church by the side door.

Three years later, I’m riding my bike, as I would in those days, “patrolling”

the projects at night. I enter Scrappy’s barrio, and there is a commotion. The homies have formed a circle and clearly two of their rank are “goin’ head up.” I break through the mob and, indeed, find Scrappy throwing down with one of his own homies. I discover later that the beef was over some jaina (girl). I stop the fight, and Scrappy reaches into the front waist of his pants and pulls out a gun that he waves around wildly. The crowd seems to be more horrified than I am.

There are great gasps and pleas,

“Hey, dog, damn, put the gun away.”

“Don’t disrespect G.”

Scrappy steadies the gun right at me and grunts a half laugh, “Shiiittt, I’ll shoot his ass too.”

Are you getting a sense of what our relationship was like?

So years later when I see him enter my office, it takes me a moment, but I locate my heart, hiding in Filene’s basement, and Marcos intercoms me:

“Scrappy’s here.” Then his voice gets squeaky and tentative. “Ya wanna see him?” Marcos knew enough that this would be in some doubt. “ ’Course, send him in.”

Scrappy is not a large fellow, but there is no fat in his midsize build. His hair is slicked back and his moustache is understated. He hugs me only because not to would be too awkward. We have, after all, known each other for twenty years.

He sits and wastes no time.

“Look, let’s just be honest with each other and talk man to man. You know that I’ve never disrespected you.”

I figure, why not, I’m gonna go for it.

“Well, how ’bout the time you walked out on my homily at Cuko’s funeral? . . . or the time you pulled a cuete out on me?”

Scrappy looks genuinely perplexed by what I’ve just said and cocks and scrunches his face like a confused beagle.

“Yeah, well . . . besides that,” he says.

Then we do something we never have in our two decades of knowing each other. We laugh. But really, truly laugh—head-resting-on-my-desk laughter. We carry on until this runs its course, and then Scrappy settles into the core of his being, beyond the bravado of his chingón status in his gang.

“I have spent the last twenty years building a reputation for myself . . . and now . . . I regret . . . that I even have one.”

And then in another first, he cries. But really, truly cries. He is doubled over, and the rocking seems to soothe the release of this great ache. When the wailing stops and he comes up for air, he daubs his eyes and runs his sleeve across his nose. He finally makes eye contact.

“Now what do I do? I know how to sell drugs. I know how to gangbang. I know how to shank fools in prison. I don’t know how to change the oil in my car. I know how to drive, but I don’t know how to park. And I don’t know how to wash my clothes except in the sink of a cell.”

I hire him that day, and he begins work the next morning on our graffiti crew.

Scrappy discovered, as Scripture has it, “that where he is standing is holy ground.” He found the narrow gate that leads to life. God’s voice was not of restriction, to “shape up or ship out.” Scrappy found himself in the center of vastness and right in the expansive heart of God. The sacred place toward which God had nudged Scrappy all his life is not to be arrived at, but discovered.

Scrappy did not knock on the door so God would notice him. No need for doors at all. Scrappy was already inside.

* * *

God seems to be an unwilling participant in our efforts to pigeonhole Him. The minute we think we’ve arrived at the most expansive sense of who God is, “this Great, Wild God,” as the poet Hafez writes, breaks through the claustrophobia of our own articulation, and things get large again. Richard Rohr writes in Everything Belongs that nothing of our humanity is to be discarded. God’s unwieldy love, which cannot be contained by our words, wants to accept all that we are and sees our humanity as the privileged place to encounter this magnanimous love. No part of our hardwiring or our messy selves is to be disparaged. Where we stand, in all our mistakes and imperfection, is holy ground. It is where God has chosen to be intimate with us and not in any way but this. Scrappy’s moment of truth was not in recognizing what a disappointment he’s been all these years. It came in realizing that God had been beholding him and smiling for all this time, unable to look anywhere else. It is certainly true

that you can’t judge a book by its cover, nor can you judge a book by its first chapter—even if that chapter is twenty years long. When the vastness of God meets the restriction of our own humanity, words can’t hold it. The best we can do is find the moments that rhyme with this expansive heart of God.

Shortly after I was ordained, I spent a year in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It was a gracious time that changed me forever. My Spanish was quite poor, and the year was to be filled with language study and ministry. I could celebrate the Eucharist in Spanish (after a summer at Dolores Mission), but I was a slave to the missal for some time to come. Early on, I began to minister to a community named Temporal, which had been without a priest for a long time. A few weeks into my time there, I was approached by a group of health workers who asked me to celebrate Mass in Tirani. This was a Quechua community located high above Cochabamba, whose indigenous folks harvested flowers for market. It was common to see campesinos making the long trek from Tirani with a huge weight of flowers tied to their backs. Like beasts of burden, they were doubled over all the way to town.

The health workers explain that the Quechua Indians in Tirani have not seen a priest in a decade, so they ask me to celebrate the Mass in Spanish, and one of the workers would preach in Quechua. (Everyone there speaks Quechua, with only the men able to defend themselves in Spanish.) The workers pick me up at the bottom of the hill at one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. I hop into the back of the open-air truck with the others, and we climb to the top of the mountain.

Midtrek, I decide to do an inventory of the contents of my backpack. I have brought everything I need but a missalette. I have not the words. At this point in my early priesthood, I couldn’t wing Mass in English. The thought of doing so in Spanish was preposterous. I do have a Spanish Bible, so I frantically flip through the pages, trying to find any passages that sound like the words of consecration.

“Take this and eat.”

I locate any part of the New Testament that has Jesus kicking it at a table and eating. Soon, my body is introducing me to the marvels of flop sweat—and I haven’t even arrived at Tirani yet. I am red in the face and stingy hot.

We pull into a huge, open-air landing, a field cleared of all crops, and many hundreds of Quechua Indians have gathered and set themselves down around this table, our altar. I hobble and fake my way through the liturgy of the Word, aided by the health workers, who read everything in Quechua. After the gentleman preaches, it is my turn to carry the ball. I’m like someone who’s been in a major car accident. I can’t remember a thing.

I know only that I have a crib sheet with some notes I have made, with stolen scriptural quotations, all the while lifting the bread and wine whenever I run out

of things to say. It would be hard to imagine this Mass going worse.

When it is over, I am left spent and humiliated. I am wandering adrift, trying to gather my shattered self back together again, when a female health worker walks an ancient Quechua woman up to me.

“She hasn’t gone to confession in ten years.”

She leaves her with me, and the viejita unloads a decade’s worth of sins in a singsongy and rapid-fire Quechua. I just nod like a menso waiting for a pause that might indicate she’s finished. The woman’s got some pulmones on her and doesn’t seem to need to take a breath. She goes on for about a half hour. Finally she does stop, and I manage to communicate some penance and give her my memorized absolution. She walks away, and I turn to discover that I have been abandoned. The field where we celebrated Mass has been vacated. Inexplicably, even the truck and the health workers are gone. I am alone at the top of this mountain, stuck, not only without a ride, but in stultifying humiliation. I am convinced that a worse priest has never visited this place or walked this earth.

With my backpack snug on my shoulder and spirit deflated, I begin to make the long walk down the mountain and back to town. But before I leave the makeshift soccer field that had been our cathedral, an old Quechua campesino, seemingly out of nowhere, makes his way to me. He appears ancient, but I suspect his body has been weathered by work and the burden of an Indian’s life.

As he nears me, I see he is wearing tethered wool pants, with a white buttoned shirt, greatly frayed at the collar. He has a rope for a belt. His suit coat is coarse and worn. He has a fedora, toughened by the years. He is wearing huaraches, and his feet are caked with Bolivian mud. Any place that a human face can have wrinkles and creases, he has them. He is at least a foot shorter than I am, and he stands right in front of me and says, “Tatai.”

This is Quechua for Padrecito, a word packed with cariño, affection, and a charming intimacy. He looks up at me, with penetrating, weary eyes and says,

“Tatai, gracias por haber venido” (Thanks for coming).

I think of something to say, but nothing comes to me. Which is just as well, because before I can speak, the old campesino reaches into the pockets of his suit coat and retrieves two fistfuls of multicolored rose petals. He’s on the tips of his toes and gestures that I might assist with the inclination of my head. And so he drops the petals over my head, and I’m without words. He digs into his pockets again and manages two more fistfuls of petals. He does this again and again, and the store of red, pink, and yellow rose petals seems infinite. I just stand there and let him do this, staring at my own huaraches, now moistened with my tears, covered with rose petals. Finally, he takes his leave and I’m left there, alone, with only the bright aroma of roses.

For all the many times I would return to Tirani and see the same villagers, over and over, I never saw this old campesino again.

God, I guess, is more expansive than every image we think rhymes with God.

How much greater is the God we have than the one we think we have. More than anything else, the truth of God seems to be about a joy that is a foreigner to disappointment and disapproval. This joy just doesn’t know what we’re talking about when we focus on the restriction of not measuring up. This joy, God’s joy, is like a bunch of women lined up in the parish hall on your birthday, wanting only to dance with you—cheek to cheek. “First things, recognizably first,” as Daniel Berrigan says. The God, who is greater than God, has only one thing on Her mind, and that is to drop, endlessly, rose petals on our heads. Behold the One who can’t take His eyes off of you.

Marinate in the vastness of that.

2

Dis-Grace

Most of the Masses I do in the probation camps take place on Saturday morning. Then I race home for an afternoon of baptisms, weddings, and quinceañeras at Dolores Mission. These usually start at one or two in the afternoon. I have a narrow window of half an hour one day between my morning Masses in the camps and my one o’clock baptism, so I stop by the office and go through the day’s mail. I’m not there fifteen minutes, when this woman in her thirties walks through the door. I immediately glance at the clock hanging on the wall. I check how much time I have left before the baptism and am already lamenting that I most probably won’t get to all the mail.

I find out later that the woman’s name is Carmen. She’s a recognizable figure on First Street, and yet this is her first visit to Homeboy. Today is the moment she chooses. Carmen is a heroin addict, a gang member, street person, occasional prostitute, and a champion peleonera. She’s often defiantly storming down the street, usually shouting at someone. She’s a real gritona, hollering at the men inside the Mitla Bar as she stumbles out to the sidewalk. I’ve heard her a number of times, arguing loudly on the pay phone with relatives or friends,

“Daaammmnnn, JUST LET ME STAY TONIGHT.”

Now I have seven minutes until my baptism. Carmen is a dusty blond, which couldn’t be the color God originally gave her. She’s attractive but so worn, by heroin and street life. She plops herself into one of the chairs in my office and cuts the fat out of her introductory remarks.

“I need help,” she launches right in, brash and something of a “no-shit-sister.”

“Oooooohhh,” she says, “I been ta like fifty rehabs. I’m known all over . . .

nationwide.”

She smiles. Her eyes wander around my office, and she studies all the photographs hanging there. She multitasks, and her inspection of the place doesn’t derail her stream-of-consciousness rambling. The family will arrive for the baptism in five minutes.

“I went to Catholic school all my life. Fact, I graduated from high school even. Fact, right after graduation, is when I started to use heroin.” Carmen enters some kind of trance at this point, and her speech slows to deliberate and halting.

“And I . . . have been trying to stop . . . since . . . the moment I began.”

Then I watch as Carmen tilts her head back until it meets the wall. She stares at the ceiling, and in an instant her eyes become these two ponds, water rising to meet their edges, swollen banks, spilling over. Then, for the first time really, she looks at me, and straightens.

“I . . . am . . . a . . . disgrace.”

Suddenly, her shame meets mine. For when Carmen walked through that door, I had mistaken her for an interruption.

Author John Bradshaw claims that shame is at the root of all addictions. This would certainly seem to be true with the gang addiction. In the face of all this, the call is to allow the painful shame of others to have a purchase on our lives.

Not to fix the pain but to feel it. Beldon Lane, the theologian, writes: “Divine love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty and all embarrassment into laughter.”

Yet, there is a palpable sense of disgrace strapped like an oxygen tank onto the back of every homie I know. In a letter from prison, a gang member writes,

“people see me like less.” This is hard to get through and penetrate. “You’re no good.” “You live in the projects.” “Your mom’s a basehead.” “Your dad’s a tecato.” “You’re wearing the same clothes today that you wore yesterday.”

I had a little project kid in my office, who, someone told me, had regularly been late for school and missing class. So I bring this to his attention.

“I hear you’ve been late for school a lot.”

He cries immediately, “I don’t got that much clothes.”

He had so internalized the fact that he didn’t have clean clothes (or enough of them) that it infected his very sense of self.

I knew an inmate, Lefty, at Folsom State Prison, whose father would, when Lefty was a child, get drunk and beat his mom. One Saturday night Lefty’s father beat his mother so badly that the next day she had to be led around by his sisters, as if she were blind. Both of her eyes were swollen shut.

On Sunday, Lefty’s father and brothers are sitting on the couch, watching a football game. Lefty calmly goes into his parents’ bedroom, retrieves a gun from his father’s bedstand, and walks out to the living room. Lefty places himself in

front of the television. His father and brothers push themselves as far back into the couch as possible, horrified. Lefty points the gun at his father and says, “You are my father, and I love you. If you ever hit my mother again . . . I . . . will . . .

kill you.”

Lefty was nine years old. He didn’t kill his father, then (or ever). And yet, part of the spirit dies a little each time it’s asked to carry more than its weight in terror, violence, and betrayal. “By the tender mercy of God,” Scripture has it,

“the dawn from on high will break upon us to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death to guide our feet in the way of peace.” How do those who “sit in darkness” find the light?

The poet Shelley writes, “To love and bear, to hope till hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”

How does one hang in there with folks, patiently taking from the wreck of a lifetime of internalized shame, a sense that God finds them (us) wholly acceptable?

Part of the problem is that, at its core, we tend to think that shame and sin, if you will, happen to someone else. My shame can’t meet Carmen’s unless I dispel that notion. I remember a woman who came to Mass every day at Dolores Mission, and during the time of petitionary prayer she always said the same thing: “Por los pecadores, para que ELLOS . . . ” (For sinners, so that THEY . . .) It was never “sinners, we.” It seemed outside of who she was. Yet, it’s precisely within the contour of one’s shame that one is summoned to wholeness. “Even there, even there,” Psalm 39 tells us—even in the darkest place, we are known—

yes, even there. My own falsely self-assertive and harmful, unfree ego gets drawn into the expansive heart of God. It is precisely in the light of God’s vastness and acceptance of me that I can accept the harm I do for what it is.

There is a longing in us all to be God-enthralled. So enthralled that to those hunkered down in their disgrace, in the shadow of death, we become transparent messengers of God’s own tender mercy. We want to be seized by that same tenderness; we want to bear the largeness of God.

* * *

I hate the Fourth of July. In my barrio, it lasts two whole months. All of June and all of July. The place is Beirut for sixty days—fireworks, firecrackers, sticks of dynamite. Endless and annoying. On one Tuesday morning, during this season, I’m in my office, and suddenly there is the rat-a-tat-tat of successive firecrakers whose source seems to be the bathroom off the kitchen area. The din is astounding, and, of course, I’m madder’n hell. By the time I get there, a

homegirl, Candy, is a banshee, screaming in the máscara of the alleged culprit, Danny.

“How dare you disrespect G’s office like that?”

“Who are you to tell me something?” he roars back. At nineteen years old, he’s a runt half Candy’s size, but he’s certainly not going to “let himself.” I can smell the sulfur of the firecrackers wafting out of the bathroom as I peel these two apart and lead Danny out to the parking lot.

Normally, I’d want to throttle this kid and give him, as they say, “what for.” I manage something I rarely can. I morph into Mother Teresa and Gandhi.

“How ya doin?” I gently speak to Danny, on the hot asphalt of the parking lot.

“I DIDN’T DID IT!” Danny gives me both barrels, in perfect homie grammar. “I DID’NT . . . DID IT!”

“I know,” I say, in full agere contra mode, going against every grain in my being. “I know, I know. But I’m worried about ya,” I say, as quiet as I can be.

“How ya doin?”

“Okay.”

“Did you eat anything today?”

“No.”

I give him five dollars.

“Why don’t you go across the street to Jim’s and get something to eat.”

Danny starts to walk away and mumbles loud enough to be heard, “Even though you don’t believe me.” I call him back.

“Danny, if you tell me you didn’t do it, mijo, then . . . that’s all I need.”

Danny stands in the hot July sun and begins to weep. Cornered by shame and disgrace, he acquiesces to a vastness not mine.

Author and psychiatrist James Gilligan writes that the self cannot survive without love, and the self, starved of love, dies. The absence of self-love is shame, “just as cold is the absence of warmth.” Disgrace obscuring the sun.

Guilt, of course, is feeling bad about one’s actions, but shame is feeling bad about oneself. Failure, embarrassment, weakness, overwhelming worthlessness, and feeling disgracefully “less than”—all permeating the marrow of the soul.

Mother Teresa told a roomful of lepers once how loved by God they were and a “gift to the rest of us.” Interrupting her, an old leper raises his hand, and she calls on him. “Could you repeat that again? It did me good. So, would you mind . . . just saying it again.”

Franciscan Richard Rohr writes that “the Lord comes to us disguised as ourselves.”

We’ve come to believe that we grow into this. The only thing we know about Jesus “growing up” is that he “grew in age, wisdom and favor with God.” But do

we really grow in favor with God? Did Jesus become increasingly more favorable to God, or did he just discover, over time, that he was wholly favorable?

* * *

Lula grew up in our office. He’s in his early twenties now and has a son. He was ten when he first wandered in. I’d met him in Aliso Village at the annual Easter egg hunt. This was no White House lawn affair, just something thrown together very last minute by the ladies of the parish, but the kids seemed to have a good time. Lula was a skinny kid, who looked straight out of the Third World, undernourished, filthy. He was standing by himself, and no one seemed to include him or pay him much attention, except when they’d steal his eggs.

“My name is Luis, but everybody calls me Lula,” he said.

I remember this a week later, when I pull up to an intersection and see him entering the crosswalk alone, his walk clumsy and self-conscious. I roll down my window and catch his attention. “Hey, Lula.”

You would have thought I had electrocuted him. His whole body spasms with delight to be known, to be called, to hear his name uttered out loud. For his entire trip through the crosswalk, Lula kept turning back and looking at me, smiling.

Lula didn’t do well in school. He was “special ed” throughout and famously a slowpoke. It was often the third bounce before he got what you were talking about. He didn’t know how to tell time until Lupe Mosqueda, a member of our staff, taught him using a paper plate with movable hands. He was probably fifteen when he learned the concept of time.

All of us at Homeboy taught him to remember his birthday. Until he was fourteen, he had no clue. Once he walked into the office wearing one of those red ribbons given at school to commemorate one thing or another.

“Hey, Lula,” I ask him, “What’s the ribbon for?”

He stares intently at it and thinks for a goodly amount of time.

“FOR FREE DRUGS,” he says.

“Well, Lula,” I help, “maybe it stands for . . . Drug-Free Week?”

“Yeah,” he says, “Dat one.”

When he was seventeen, he was included in a youth group trip to Washington, D.C. Someone subsidized his trip. While there, he finds a pay phone on the Mall and calls the Homeboy toll-free number.

“I’M CALLIN’ FROM THE MEMORIAL,” he shouts.

“WHICH MEMORIAL, LULA?” I shout back, over the din of his background noise.

Lula pauses a really long time, because, I suspect, he doesn’t actually know.

“THE PENNY GUY,” he shouts.

“You mean the Lincoln Memorial?” I say.

“YEAH,” he concedes, “DAT ONE.”

When Lula first started to come to the office, shortly after I met him, he’d make a beeline to my office and just sit there. He was not much of a conversationalist.

One day, when Lula passed by all the other desks and staff members to get to my office, several called him back. “Lula, you come back here.” “Hey, where do you think you’re going?” They proceeded to explain to Lula the whole “what are we, chopped liver?” concept, that it was rude to walk past folks without greeting them. They suggested he try it again. Lula goes to the front door, exuberant at the mere idea that folks would actually want to be greeted by him. He walks in again and in a singsongy, lilting voice, nearly approximating Gregorian Chant says, “HELLLOOOO, EVERYYYYBOOODDY!”

He would enter our office for the next five years with this exact same greeting.

Lula came from a huge family, and he was attention deficient, except in our office. Everyone lavished Lula with care he didn’t get otherwise.

Ten-year-old Lula walks into my office one day and stands in the doorway. I suppose he’s kept from fully entering by the fact that we are in the midst of a meeting with the job developers. He’s positioned at the entrance and holds up a piece of paper, smiling broadly and doing a dance not unlike one that indicates the need for a restroom. I can see from where I sit that it’s a report card. That Lula, who does so poorly in school, would be ecstatic about his grades, is cause to halt the meeting.

“You come on over here, Lula.” I wave him in, and he navigates the adults who are sitting in his way. He hands me the report card and stands by my side, resting his elbow on my shoulder. His glee cannot be contained. I glance across the piece of paper in front of me and locate the subjects. F, F, F, F, F, F. All Fs and nothing but damn Fs. I think, Why’s he so excited to show me this thing? I am frantically perusing every inch of this report card to find something, anything, for which to praise Lula. I find it.

Absences: 0.

“Lula, nice goin’, mijo, you didn’t miss a day (I’m thinking, a lot a good it did ya)—you didn’t miss a day.”

I high-five him as he starts to leave the office.

One of our job developers, John Tostado, stops Lula right there.

“Hey, Lula, how would you like to win five dollars?”

Lula indicates that he’d like this just fine.

“So here’s the deal,” John says, as he removes a crisp, new five-dollar bill from his wallet. “If you can answer this question correctly, the five dollars are yours.”

Lula starts to giggle, and you can practically see him readying for battle. He actually limbers up and shakes himself out. For Lula, this is the College Bowl.

“All right, Lula, here’s the question,” John begins, his voice the moral equivalent of a drum roll.

“How . . . old . . . was . . . I . . . when I was . . . your age?”

Lula contorts his face and pounds his small fist against his forehead, herniating himself to come up with the right answer. All of us in the room hold our collective breath. A moment comes when you actually can see the light bulb above Lula’s head ding “on.”

“TEN YEARS OLD,” Lula belts out.

High fives abound, and Lula is handed his cash prize. He walks to the door and holds up the booty with his two hands.

“That was easy,” he says.

Simone Weil was right: “Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world, but people capable of giving them their attention.”

You could add to that, the need to pull the “favor” right out of you, so that you don’t try to grow in favor but recognize that you have always been wholly favorable.

Homies have been “outside” for so long they forget there is an inside. Their sense of isolation is suffocating, and they are quick to throw in the towel. One day, a very sad kid stumbles into my office and collapses into a chair. A homie with kids and other adult worries before he’s able to handle them, he just gives up.

“That’s it. I’m moving.”

“Where ya movin’ to?”

“Mars.”

“Mars?”

“Yeah. This planet is tired of my ass already.”

A homie trying to put words to this particular pain writes, “My spirit is so sore. It hurts to be me.”

On occasion, I will do an intake on a homie who comes into our office looking for one of our services: tattoo removal, job placement, counseling, etc. If

I had a dollar for every time the following happens, I could close down my development office.

I have the intake form, and I’m interviewing the homie seated in front of me.

“How old are you?”

And the homie says, “Me?”

And I’m thinking, No, what’s your dog’s age? We are the only ones in the room, and he says, “Me?”

“Well, yes, you.”

“Oh, I’m eighteen.”

“Do you have a driver’s license?”

“Me?”

(Again, I think, No, I was wondering if your grandmother is still driving. )

“Yes, you.”

“No, I don’t have a license.”

The toxicity gets so internalized that it obliterates the “me.” You couldn’t possibly have interest in knowing things about “me.” Sure you’re not talking about somebody else—who happens not to be in the room?

All throughout Scripture and history, the principal suffering of the poor is not that they can’t pay their rent on time or that they are three dollars short of a package of Pampers.

As Jesus scholar Marcus Borg points out, the principal suffering of the poor is shame and disgrace. It is a toxic shame—a global sense of failure of the whole self. This shame can seep so deep down. I asked a homie once, after Mass at a probation camp, if he had any brothers and sisters.

“Yeah,” he says, “I have one brother and one sister,” and then he’s quick to add, with emphasis, “but THEY’RE GOOD.”

“Oh,” I tell him, “and that would make YOU . . .?”

“Here,” he says, “locked up.”

“And THAT would make you . . .?” I try again.

“Bad,” he says.

Homies seem to live in the zip code of the eternally disappointing, and need a change of address. To this end, one hopes (against all human inclination) to model not the “one false move” God but the “no matter whatness” of God. You seek to imitate the kind of God you believe in, where disappointment is, well, Greek to Him. You strive to live the black spiritual that says, “God looks beyond our fault and sees our need.”

Before this can take hold in gang members, they strut around in protective shells of posturing, which stunts their real and complete selves.

* * *

Often after Mass at the camps, kids will line up to talk one-on-one. The volunteers sometimes invite the minors to confession, but usually the kids just want to talk, be heard, get a blessing. At Camp Afflerbaugh, I’m seated on a bench outside in a baseball field, and one by one, the homies come over to talk briefly. This day, there’s quite a lineup. The next kid approaching, I can tell, is all swagger and pose. His walk is chingon in its highest gear. His head bobs, side-to-side, to make sure all eyes are riveted. He sits down, we shake hands, but he seems unable to shake the scowl etched across his face.

“What’s your name? I ask him.

“SNIPER,” he sneers.

“Okay, look (I had been down this block before), I have a feeling you didn’t pop outta your mom and she took one look at your ass and said, ‘Sniper.’ So, come on, dog, what’s your name?”

“Gonzalez,” he relents a little.

“Okay now, son, I know the staff here will call you by your last name. I’m not down with that. Tell me, mijo, what’s your mom call you?”

“Cabrón.”

There is even the slightest flicker of innocence in his answer.

Oye, no cabe duda. But, son, I’m looking for birth certificate here.”

The kid softens. I can tell it’s happening. But there is embarrassment and a newfound vulnerability.

“Napoleón,” he manages to squeak out, pronouncing it in Spanish.

“Wow,” I say, “That’s a fine, noble, historic name. But I’m almost positive that when your jefita calls you, she doesn’t use the whole nine yardas. Come on, mijito, do you have an apodo? What’s your mom call you?”

Then I watch him go to some far, distant place—a location he has not visited in some time. His voice, body language, and whole being are taking on a new shape—right before my eyes.

“Sometimes,”—his voice so quiet, I lean in—“sometimes . . . when my mom’s not mad at me . . . she calls me . . . Napito.”

I watched this kid move, transformed, from Sniper to Gonzalez to Cabrón to Napoleón to Napito. We all just want to be called by the name our mom uses when she’s not pissed off at us.

Names are important. After all, the main occupation of most gang members most of the time is the writing of their names on walls. I recall on my first day of teaching at Loyola High School in Los Angeles in 1979, I was scared poopless about the prospect. With my arms filled with books, juggling the necessary cup

of coffee, I walk to my first class. I stop in the doorway of a veteran teacher, Donna Wanland. She’s at her desk, reading the morning Times.

“It’s my first day of teaching,” I say to her, “Give me some advice.”

She doesn’t turn from her paper but holds out her right hand, displaying two fingers.

“Two things,” she says, “One: know all their names by tomorrow. Two: It’s more important that they know you than that they know what ya know.”

Good advice. I followed it and I think it served me in good stead. I remembered it when I arrived at Dolores Mission. Once I had made the decision to not be a slave to my office, I wandered the projects, often approaching (uninvited) the various groupings of gang members, which spotted every corner and crevice of the housing developments. The reception was almost always chilly. (This changed only after I began to visit homies from the community who were locked up or wounded in the hospital.)

There was one kid in particular everyone knew as Cricket. To say that he would “give me the cold shoulder” would impugn shoulders. Cricket, fifteen years old, would walk away when I approached and would return to the bola (I noticed) once I left. I investigated and discovered his name was William.

One day I walk up to this group of gang members, with Cricket among them, and he doesn’t disappear on me. I shake hands with all of them, and when I get to Cricket, he actually lets me shake his hand.

“William,” I say to him, “How you doin’? It’s good to see ya.”

William says nothing. But as I walk away (I always made a point of not staying very long), I can hear William in a very breathy, age-appropriate voice, say to the others, “Hey, the priest knows my name.”

“I have called you by your name. You are mine,” is how Isaiah gets God to articulate this truth. Who doesn’t want to be called by name, known? The

“knowing” and the “naming” seem to get at what Anne Lamott calls our “inner sense of disfigurement.”

As misshapen as we feel ourselves to be, attention from another reminds us of our true shape in God.

I give credit for most of my gray hairs to a kid named Speedy. He was a thrill seeker in the world of project gangbanging. And I don’t mean that in a good way. He was Evel Knievel, pulling off near-death-defying stunts—creeping into enemy territory, just so that he could, as it were, stick his thumbs in his ears, loll his tongue, and say “neener neener neener” at a bola of vatos that hated him in a big way. More than a few times, I’d see him attempt one of these “stick your head in the lion’s mouth” moments, and I’d “chase his ass” back to his barrio,

screaming at him, red-faced, saying things my mother never taught me. “Are you fucking out of your mind? Do you want to get killed?”

One afternoon I am in the sacristy at Dolores Mission, and per usual I’m late for the 5 p.m. Mass. My glances out to the body of the church catch viejitas looking at their watches, shrugging at one another. I’m vesting as fast as I can.

Speedy enters the side door. He’s a lanky guy at seventeen, rail thin but taut from, no doubt, being pursued by enemies all the time. He slides his two elbows on the Formica countertop and perches his chin on his fists. I’m flipping through books to find the readings.

“You know, G,” he begins, “I don’t really care if I live or die.”

I’m embarrassed to admit, all I’m thinking of are the three old ladies who’ve been waiting for twenty minutes for la misa to start.

“Look, dog,” I tell him, throwing a Guatemalan stole over my head, “I have to do Mass right now. It’s gonna have to do for the moment, for you to know, that I care whether you live or die.”

Speedy weighs this on some internal scale and things balance.

“Okay,” he says, and I think the equivalent of Whew.

Three hours later, I’m sitting at my desk. In my pastor days, I kept the front door of the parish office open—giving you a clear shot of my inner office and my desk. Speedy appears, and his mood seems elevated; he dives right in.

“Look, I don’t want you to get red at what I’m about to tell you.”

This, of course, begins the reddening process for me.

“Whad ya do?” I ask, as he stands at the side of my desk, ready to rabbit jump out of my office if my red face turns explosive.

“Well . . . I walked Karla home.”

Red face at morning, sailor take warning. I’m pissed. Karla is a very cute homegirl that Speedy is currently “sprung on,” and she lives in the midst of Speedy’s worst enemies. To walk her home was to endanger both their lives. It was unconscionable and irresponsible, and my face was flammable.

I don’t get a chance to put words to my displeasure, because Speedy rapid-fires the rest of the story to me. He deposits Karla in her second-story apartment, and as he is descending the stairs, he encounters eight members of the dreaded rival gang. They aren’t displeased to see him. They’re salivating.

They chase him and throw whatever they can at him—rocks, sticks, empty bottles of 40 ouncers. (Had this story happened five years later, they would have had guns.) He eludes them, leaving them in the project dust. They don’t call him Speedy for nothing.

As he nears First Street and can see the relative safety of his barrio across the street, he bumps into Yolanda, a woman active in the parish. She knows enough

to know that Speedy should not be where he currently is. She summons him.

“Ven, mijo. Qué estás haciendo aqui?”

Speedy, out of breath and panting, lowers his head.

“Sabes qué, mijo,” she says, “Te digo una cosa. If anything happened to you, it would break my heart in two.” She barely knows him. “You know I’ve seen you playing with your nephew in the park. What a good tio you are. I’ve also seen you feed the homeless at the church. What a generous and good thing that is.”

Then she returns to her earlier refrain, with even more resolve soaked in it.

Pero, te digo una cosa, if anything happened to you, it would break my heart in two. Now, vete a la casa.

Speedy arrives at my office, out of breath from this encounter with a nearly perfect stranger.

He looks at me and smiles after the telling of his tale.

“You know,” he says, tapping his heart with his finger, “that shit made me feel good.”

Of course, it did. But what could be tinier in the scope of human relations than the tender mercy of this stranger, rubbing salve on the wounds of this kid’s hopeless heart? You can almost hear the armor fall away and clank to the ground.

Not long after this, things started to change for Speedy—largely because he wanted them to. As Richard Rohr would say, he had decided to “live his way into a new way of thinking.”

He married his, if not childhood sweetheart, his teenage one, Claudia. They moved away from the projects, and Speedy began work in an oil refinery in Richmond, California. They began a family and now have three kids, an older daughter and two boys. When Claudia had her first child, it was the summer of the movie Free Willy. And since she was so tiny and preposterously pregnant,

“Willy” became my nickname for her. I called her on her birthday once.

“Happy Birthday, Willy,” I tell her when she answers the phone.

“G, you remembered.”

“So,” I ask her, “What’s your ruco got planned for you tonight?”

“Oh.” She gets quiet. “You know, money’s tight . . . and, well . . . we’re just gonna stay home tonight.”

“WHAT?! No me digas,” choosing to exaggerate wildly. “Oye, put that cheap codo on the phone.”

Speedy steps up to the receiver.

“I can’t believe you, dog,” I start in on him, “I mean you can’t squirrel away twenty bones to just take her out and eat, by candlelight, tú sabes, whispering in

her ear, ‘ mi vida, mi reina, mi cielo, mi todo? Qué gacho, right there.’ ”

Speedy thinks for half a beat.

“Damn,” he says, “I bought her ass roses, what more she want?”

I can visualize Claudia, laughing and hugging “her man.” The two of them, falling into each other’s arms, holding on against the darkness and witnessing together, real light, real peace.

Speedy hailed from a family broken in all the usual ways. As a kid, he had to navigate alcoholism, fighting, estrangement, and inappropriateness on top of dysfunction stacked high onto sadness. As he’s built a life for his own family, he’s negotiated the landmines that were regularly detonated during his childhood.

One day he’s in town and invites me to dinner. “I’ll even pay,” he says.

At the restaurant, we talk about his job, his return to school, his greater responsibility, and his newfound leadership role at the oil refinery. I ask about down time and what he does on Sunday.

“Well,”—he’s ready to go into detail—“we begin with Mass. Then we head off to Mimi’s Café. The kids can order whatever they want. We always go there.

Then, we go to Barnes and Noble. Every Sunday, for two hours. Now, you know my cheap ass is not gonna buy any books. No, everyone picks out a book, and we all go to our separate corners. They be havin’ comfortable chairs at Barnes and Noble. Then, when time’s up, we put the books back. We don’t sweat it.

We’ll be back next Sunday—pick up right where we left off.”

I laugh and am both charmed and astonished.

“You know, the kids did beg me to buy the new Harry Potter book,” he continues, “so, what the hell, I broke down and bought it. Now, you know what we do every night? I sit in my recliner. We turn off the TV. And my three kids read Harry Potter, out loud. First, my oldest, my daughter, she reads a whole page. Then she hands it to my son, and he reads a paragraph. Then the baby, with help from the other two, reads a sentence—but barely. And it gets passed back, you know, page, paragraph, sentence. And I,” he starts to buckle and his voice trembles, “I . . . just close my eyes, sitting in my recliner . . . listening to my kids . . . read . . . out loud.”

Speedy puts his hand up to his eyes, tearful, and is as surprised as I am where this story has taken him. I reach over, beyond his plate of a half-eaten steak, and grab his arm.

“You’ve got a good life,” I tell him. The tears arrive now in their fullness, unencumbered and welcome, even.

“Yeah,”—he looks at me—“yeah . . . I do.”

Out of the wreck of our disfigured, misshapen selves, so darkened by shame and disgrace, indeed the Lord comes to us disguised as ourselves. And we don’t grow into this—we just learn to pay better attention. The “no matter whatness”

of God dissolves the toxicity of shame and fills us with tender mercy. Favorable, finally, and called by name—by the one your mom uses when she’s not pissed off.

3