Helper of ‘Homeboys’ tells crowd at Saint Cross in Hermosa Beach of need for ‘kinship’
Father Gregory Boyle addresses a packed crowd at Saint Cross Episcopal Church last week in an event arranged by Pages bookstore. Photo
Father Gregory Boyle recalled an intervention worker who once asked of hardened gang members, “How do you reach them?” Boyle, a Jesuit priest who has spent decades ministering to some of Los Angeles’ most downtrodden, had heard variations on the question before. All such queries, he said, had the same problem: a failure “to see ourselves in them.”
“We don’t go to the margins to make a difference,” Boyle told a packed crowd at Saint Cross Episcopal Church Wednesday night. “We go so that the folks on the margins can make us different.”
Boyle is the former pastor of Dolores Mission Church in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles and the founder of Homeboy Industries, a nonprofit that provides job training, tattoo removal and other services for former gang members and those newly released from prison. The Los Angeles-based group helps more than 10,000 people per year, and also runs the popular bakery-restaurant Homegirl Cafe. He spoke Wednesday evening at an event arranged by Pages, the Manhattan Beach bookstore, in support of his latest book “Barking to the Choir.” Boyle’s last book, “Tattoos on the Heart,” spent years on bestseller lists.
Pages co-owner Margot Farris said that the store initially planned to host Boyle at its Manhattan storefront. But the response was overwhelming, and they found an alternate venue in Saint Cross.
“We sold out in about five minutes,” Farris told the crowd. “And we’re so excited that it’s here. It seems like the perfect place.”
Scott Wood, head of the Center for Restorative Justice at Loyola Law School, introduced Boyle. Wood described a trip he took last year to a women’s prison in Guatemala with Hermosa resident Lorri Perreault. Every woman at the prison had read “Tattoos on the Heart,” and they were enraptured with the ideas of the Jesuit priest. At an event with the inmates, Wood mentioned that he knew Boyle personally, stoking their interest even more.
“Feeling like a rockstar, I jumped up and said, ‘Yes, I know father Greg, and I’m going to bring him here to visit!’” Wood recounted.
Of course, no such visit had been arranged. And shortly after his ecstatic pronouncement, Wood’s wife pulled him aside and said, “Are you insane?” But Wood returned, Boyle happily in tow, a few months later.
Boyle’s subject for the evening was kinship, describing it as “God’s highest hope.” He told the audience that a willingness to erase the barriers that separate people from one another — including the distinction between gang members and civilians — was necessary for moral goods like peace, justice and equality to take root.
“That can’t happen unless there is some undergirding sense that we are connected to one another,” he said.
Kinship, Boyle said, can involve asking difficult things of people, including forgiving those who have done terrible things. Boyle, an opponent of the death penalty, brought up the case of Dylann Roof, who in 2015 killed nine people in a mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina. He said that the decision to condemn Roof to death was a reflection of “the God we’ve settled for.” Contrast that moment, Boyle said, with the gathering of congregation members, just a week after the shooting, to tell the in-custody Roof that they forgave him: “Everybody on the planet knew we were standing in the presence of the God we actually have.”
Boyle’s faith in humanity and refusal to view anyone as evil came because, not in spite, of his service with gang members. He related several stories of those whom he had met and now worked for him, men and women who were scorned by society for their tattooed visages and checkered pasts. Spending time with them, Boyle said, almost always revealed difficult upbringings filled with violence and abuse. He declared the idea that kids join gangs because they want to belong to something “a myth.”
“No kid is seeking something when he joins a gang. Every kid is fleeing something,” he said.
The perception of gang members as beyond redemption, Boyle said, goes back to the distance we allow to persist between each other. One of those he helped went by the name “Dreamer.” Dreamer had been in and out of prison, struggled with drugs, and came and went from Boyle’s program. One day he sat down across from Boyle, pleading his desire to go straight. So Boyle called a friend who ran a vending machine company, and the friend said Dreamer could start the next day. A few weeks later, Dreamer was again in front of Boyle’s desk. This time, he was not in trouble; he was there to show off his paycheck. Dreamer beamed with pride, and Boyle said he could not help but feel uplifted too.
“In that situation, who is the service provider? And who is the service recipient?”