Fr. Greg Boyle, S.J.
May 25, 2004
Robert Deahl
To introduce our morning speaker, we welcome to the podium Maureen McCann Waldron of Creighton University's Collaborative Ministry Office. Maureen was also the principle coordinator of Heartland Delta III at Creighton, so we here at Marquette certainly follow humbly in her footsteps. Welcome, Maureen!
Maureen McCann Waldron
Fr. Greg Boyle is a very challenging person. Don't misunderstand, he is engaging company, he's an intent listener, he is a superb storyteller. But his life is about challenging people. In his work with at-risk and gang involved youth in the poorest neighborhood of Los Angeles, Greg challenges the young women and men he affectionately calls his "homies" to see themselves as valued and loved human beings, not the discards of life they so often believe they are. He challenges the L.A. police and other social structures when he feels they are missing the chance to see his homies as real people, deserving of dignity. And he challenges us simply by the way he lives his life. He does not allow us to disconnect him into some category of sainthood or other ways of separateness. But he shows us that each one of us is called to live the Gospel. Not just by serving people who are poor and outcast, but by befriending them and learning from them. He has said more than once, "The day won't ever come when I have more courage, when I am closer to God, or am more noble than the kids who come in looking for help."
Greg is well known across the country, and when he fought cancer last year, it was not only frightening to his homies, but was covered by new outlets from L.A. to New York. He made many, many people happy with the news that he is in remission. He's been honored across the country and this past Sunday was given an honorary degree by John Carroll University. In the citation, John Carroll poet, George Bilgere writes, "Maybe Nietzsche was right, maybe the only true Christian died on the cross. But that doesn't stop you from asking yourself, what would Jesus do when a spatter of gunfire, gang-fire, wakes you in the night. I guess Jesus would ride through the barrio on a bicycle at 3 a.m., so at least when the squad cars don't arrive, there's a lone priest for a mother to turn to. Anyway, that's what you do."
I met Greg several years ago and was entranced, as so many are, by his obvious love for the people he serves, his passion for their dignity, his fighting for their humanity, and his deep, unwavering love of them. It is my great honor and privilege to welcome Fr. Gregory Boyle of the Society of Jesus.
Fr. Greg Boyle, S.J.
Maureen is one of the "cookie moms." We were talking about this earlier. I think there are about four of you here. Every month (this has been going on for about a year) Maureen and some other mothers from Creighton send this huge box of cookies to my office. The truth be told, the homies don't know where Nebraska is, you know. They're not good on geography. Yesterday I called when I had arrived here, I called my office and a home-girl who answers the phone, Lupe, she says, "Where are you know?" I said, "I'm in Milwaukee." She goes, "Is that another country?" I said, "Some would say that, yes."
But, the day before I left, (I went to Berkley and then I went to Carroll) we had a meeting with my staff and I was in this office which is all glass and can overlook the floor and I see that the mailman comes with this huge box that just arrived. And so Gus the receptionist walks to where I'm at this meeting and he just looks in the window like kind of a puppy. And all he mouths to me is "Omaha." And so I go, "All right." Which means, "Go ahead and open it." So it was this feeding frenzy of homies. It was the Pavlovian Omaha Box. Anyway, that actually sort of touches on the theme that I'll get to which is creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize that, and it happens between Omaha and this poor barrio in east L.A.
I have three very specific disclaimers. First, I am an expert on nothing. I work with gang members-- street gangs -- and apparently Howard Gray thought that made me eminently suited to speak with you this morning. The second one is, if you're from Carroll and if you're from Xavier, any resemblance to some of the things I say this morning to a speaker at your Alpha Sigma Nu event or at your Commencement is just coincidental. And I feel like I can never live up to titles. Titles are sort of given to you, you know, "Here's the title of your talk" and you kind of say, "Yeah, I'll touch on justice and I'll give a swipe to compassion," but I feel wholly inadequate to really address the title as it's written there. But there is a vision that holds us together that connects work with gangs in east L.A. and in all your universities, and it is like the logo of the leaf with the vein that runs through it, coursing through this leaf. It's a vision that connects us. It's Ignatian. It's an Ignatian way of seeing things. The prophet Habakkuk writes, "The vision still has its time, it presses on to fulfillment, and it will not disappoint, and if it delays we wait for it." It's a vision that we feel unshakably certain in following.
And the vision is really about communicating three things, I think, to our students: God, who they are in God's eyes, and something about justice. In terms of God, we want to present the Ignatian sense of the God who's always greater, larger than our ability to pigeonhole God, God who loves us without measure, and without regret. The God, in fact, whose joy it is to love us. The God who has this laser-beam singular love that we seem to be unable to distract Him through our own disappointment. That's the God we want our students to live from and have that God at the center of their lives. The second thing is we want to tell our students who we think they are in God's eyes. That they are, in fact, the shape of God's heart. That they are, in fact, exactly what God had in mind when God made them. And so it's our privilege to watch them inhabit that truth, to become that truth, and then to be sent into the world, resilient in that world that finds that truth quite hostile. And then justice -- we want to kind of speak to justice in a way that's compelling. We want to promote justice and we want to do the faith that does justice. But I feel a particular way about justice. I don't think you seek justice, I think justice is in fact about something else.
My own experience working with gangs has always kind of underscored that for me. There are a lot of entities, in Los Angeles in particular, that want to focus on gang violence in particular, if we could just sort of focus on that. But gang violence is about something else. It's a symptom. It points beyond itself. It's the cough that tells you you're allergic to your cat. The cat is the problem; the cough is but the indicator. Same thing with gang violence. It points beyond itself to a series of things that, because we neglect to address them correctly, the symptom rages out of control. And the problems are the same and have been: permanent underclass (we haven't addressed that correctly), the weight of these economic stressors that really affect the functioning of families. There is a lethal absence of hope in a community like mine, and that has only everything to do with the presence of gang violence. And of course, in our country there's this ever widening gap between, and a disparity between, the haves and the have-nots, in terms of access to those things that enhance the quality of our lives: access to education, access to medical care, access to opportunities in general. Those are the problems, gang violence tells you you're not dealing with those problems.
In the same way, injustice is about something else. The trick is to find the something else. An example I always use comes from a psychiatrist named Gilligan who writes in a book called Violence. He says in the 19th century these doctors were kind of staring at these diseases over here quite vexing. They applied everything they knew to apply to them: hospitals, vaccines, medicine, and nothing seemed to work. And quite inadvertently over here somebody started to address the sewer system and the water supply and suddenly these diseases over here disappeared. It turned out that they were about something else. I think that's how that works in our universities when we seek to address and speak about injustice. It's about something else. It's not about something we address head-on. It's we look underneath it, what undergirds it. And that's what we're asked to do. This is what I think undergirds, what I think is the issue. I think Mother Theresa got this right. Her diagnosis of the world's ills I think was quite correct. She says, "We've just simply forgotten that we belong to each other."
It's about kinship, it's about changing the goal. The goal is really creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. You know, you see bumper stickers that say "No justice, no peace." What I'm suggesting to you this morning is "No kinship, no justice." It's about kinship. We talk about trying to produce graduates who are men and women for others. And I'm not suggesting that you get liquid paper and start to white out your stationery or chip off the words from your cornerstone. But that's not the goal. It's not about service in the end, it's about service at the beginning. Being men and women for others is simply the beginning, it is not the goal. Our goal is to create a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. And if that was our goal, then we would not be promoting justice, we would be celebrating it.
No kinship, no justice. I felt this so much in my life, moving from wanting to be a man for others and wanting to be of service and wanting to do some good, and now I find myself in a whole other place twenty years later, working in a community where I'm so privileged to work. It's about belonging, it's about kinship, it's about relationship, it's about mutuality with the poor. I've never felt this more keenly than this past year. A year ago, as Maureen mentioned, I was diagnosed with leukemia and went through a whole period of chemotherapy. I didn't lose too much hair because God had sort of taken care of that prior to that. And I would come into my office every day weakened, but I showed up every day. My ministry changed for six months. I had to simply receive what people needed to say to me. I just simply received thousands of letters from folks locked up in prison from all over the state of California. And I would just have to receive homies. I remember a homie named Grumpy, a six-foot four, no neck, standing right in front of me at my desk, big tears in his eyes, and he says, "What do I have that you need?" meaning organs... Um, I didn't need any, but I think we'll agree it's the thought that counts! And I remember I get a voicemail message from this home-girl named China who I've known forever and she leaves this message on my voicemail, "Now it's our turn to take care of you." Very sweet.
I had this little 14 year old homie named Louie. Little gang member comes plops himself down in my office and very kind of uncomfortable... "I hear you have leukemia." And I said, "Yeah, I do." There was this awkward kind of uncomfortable silence. "My cat had leukemia." "Yeah?" "She died." "I'm sorry to hear that Louie." Awfully glad you stopped by. My favorite one was a homie called me not long ago, from jail, collect. His name is Loco and he was trying to console me and he says, "What's up with this leukemia anyway?" and I say, "Well, it's cancer, it's in the blood. My white count's too high." He goes, "Aaahh, them doctors. They don't be knowin' nothing." I go, "What do you mean?" "Hello! Of course your white count's high... You white!" I've stopped seeing my doctor and I just accepted more collect calls from jail.
Several months ago, a homie named Carlos shows up in my office and he had just been released from Corcoran State Prison. He'd been locked up for ten years, since he was fourteen. And he said that I had met him at juvenile hall, but I didn't recognize him. I certainly wouldn't recognize.... His arms were covered with tattoos, his neck was blackened with tattoos, he head shaved (which is sort of typical Latino gang members), covered with alarming tattoos. And most alarming was the presence of two prominent devil's horns tattooed on his forehead. And he looks at me and he says, "You know, I am having a hard time finding a job." And I suggested maybe we could put our heads together on this one. And he says, "You know, I've never worked in my life." And I say, "Well you're lucky day starts tomorrow."
So this was a Monday afternoon. I sent him to work on Tuesday at our Homeboy silkscreen factory, which is our biggest business. We have all these enemy gang members who work side by side with each other, nearly a thousand gang members have passed through there since '98. So I send him there and on Wednesday I'm just curious how he's doing, so I call the silkscreen factory and I say, "Hey, bring the new guy, Carlos (the devil's horns guy), bring him to the phone." And so he comes to the phone and I said, "Hey, dawg. How's it feel to be working?" He goes, "It feels proper." Which is sort of a gangster term, "proper". "I'm holding my head up high. In fact I'm like that guy on the commercial. You know the one who walks up to total strangers and says, 'I just lowered my cholesterol.' Yeah, that's me!" So it kind of shoots over... "I'm sorry I don't quite..." He goes, "Yeah, yesterday after work I'm tired and I'm dirty and I'm sitting in the back of the bus. I could not help myself. I kept turning to people on the bus, total strangers, "I'm just coming back from my first day at work!" "Just got back. First day on the job." And of course I'm imagining the people on the bus. You know, maybe their thinking, "Who the hell would hire this guy?" and maybe mothers are clutching their kids closer to themselves, and maybe somebody looks at him and thinks, "What a waste of a good job."
The prophet Isaiah writes, "In this place of which you say it is a waste there will be heard again the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voices of those who sing." Jesus wanted only one thing: to make those voices heard, make those voices sing. So he chose to do a singular thing, he chose to stand with them, to stand with those on the margins, those whose dignity has been denied. He chose to stand with the easily despised and the readily left out. He stands with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. He chooses to stand with those whose burdens are more than they can bear. He stands with exactly those folks whom the world and the prevailing culture aggressively shames and humiliates, that's where he stands. In fact, that is his strategy. We look in the meditation on the two standards and the strategy is clear: poverty, humiliation, and humility. But it's also primarily about location. It's where Jesus chooses to stand. The
Now I think this is about the most controversial thing about Jesus. Jesus was an equal opportunity pisser-offer. The left couldn't take him and the right couldn't stand him, and it was all because of the same thing, he stood with those folks. The left looked at him and said, "What the hell are you doing? Where's the revolution? Where's the ten-point plan? Don't just stand there, do something. Why aren't you struggling to free the slaves?" Jesus didn't take the right stand on issues. He just chose to stand in the right place. He didn't say, "Let's fight against this mistreatment of the leper." He was the leper. He didn't say, "Let's try to improve the condition of the prisoner." He said, "I was in prison." This pissed the left off. And the right had no time for him either. He wasn't interested in their wedge issues or their constitutional amendments. He was not interested in their judgment and their way of striking a high moral distance between "us" and "them." There was no "them" for Jesus. And they had no time for him. His strategy was simple. I will stand with them. So Jesus stands with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. Jesus was not a man for others. He was one with others and there is a world of difference in that. He enjoyed this kinship, this relationship, this mutuality. No kinship, no justice.
Dorothy Day, who is a hero of mine, took to task the folks who ministered to the slaves. "What a waste of time," she said. "Why weren't you struggling, why weren't they struggling to abolish slavery?" And she's a hero of mine, but I disagree with her. I think slavery got abolished simply because there were folks who chose to stand with the slave. It is the strategy of Jesus. There's an ancient saying of the Greeks, "There will be no justice until the uninjured are as indignant as the injured." It's about kinship and connection. It's about standing against forgetting that we belong to each other. I knew a homie (I call him a homie but he was really a kid, he was never from a gang). His name was Ronnie and he grew up in our office. He was working in our office every summer. His older brother, Angel, was a gang member, but he wasn't. Angel worked with us at the silkscreen factory. In fact, Ronnie joined the Marines. Went to Afghanistan at nineteen, shortly after 9/11. He came home, was just visiting his girlfriend late at night, and he was outside the kitchen door and his mother, Solidad, could hear from inside some gang members were asking him the most provocative question in the barrio, which is, "Where are you from?" (What gang do you pledge your allegiance?). And he didn't say anything. All she could hear was gunfire and she ran out and Ronnie died in Solidad's arms.
For six months she wore black, quit her job, never left the house. And finally, after six months Angel sits her down on a Sunday morning and says, "Look, you have to stop this. You have three kids, other kids. You have to stop." And so she decided. She threw the black clothes away, she fixed her hair, and for the first time in six months, she put on makeup. And at three o'clock that afternoon Angel's on the front porch eating a sandwich, and three gang members are chasing an enemy gang member down the block, and the kid escapes. And they're huffing and puffing standing in front of the house and Angel sees them he turns to come into the house because he is an enemy to them. They open up fire and they kill Angel on the front porch of his house.
By the time I got there, Solidad had no use for a handkerchief or Kleenex. She was sobbing into a bath towel. And my arms were too short to reach around this grief. Well I saw her two months ago in the street. "How ya doin' kiddo?" She looked at me and she said, "I love my two kids who are alive, I hurt for the two that are gone." Then her eyes well up with tears (and I think she was embarrassed to say this part) "The hurt wins... the hurt wins."
Last month, she was in the hospital; her heart was beating too quickly. She's in the emergency room at White Memorial. Doctors are attending to her. Suddenly the paramedics rush in a gurney and on the gurney is a sixteen year-old gang member, multiple gunshot wounds, and they sidle him up right next to Solidad. They don't close the curtain. Doctors converge on this kid. She turns and she sees his face and she recognizes him as surely a member of the gang that most certainly killed her two sons. When she relayed this to me later, she said, "All I could think of what my friends would say: 'Don't you wish him death?'" Suddenly one of the doctors starts to yell, "We're losing him... We are losing him!" And she said to me, "I began to cry and cry and prayed harder then I've ever prayed in my life. 'Please let him live.' I don't want his mother to suffer what I have."
Kinship, connection, no distance whatsoever between us. Exactly what God had in mind. And Jesus calls us to that vision in a simple way. He says, "That you may be one, as God and Jesus are one, that you may be one." It's not about getting along, it's about kinship. Jesus with God imagines the circle of compassion and then he imagines that no one is standing outside of it. And so he makes a beeline there to stand with them until they're welcomed in. In fact, Ignatius doesn't use the word community; he favors the word union. Just as Jesus does. And in this kinship we are called to fullness and joy, not hardship, not herniating difficulty. We're not being asked to do more as if we're not doing enough. We're not being asked to do the harder thing, we're being asked to do the expansive thing. What can we do in our universities that most resembles God's expansive heart? It's about joy.
There's a homie that works for me named Robert and he works in our graffiti removal crew. And he's twenty years old and completely rejected by his family. Terrific kid. Well, he calls me on New Years Day and he says, "Happy New Years!" And he happened to catch me at home and I said, "Hey that's... thank you. That's very nice of you." Our office had been closed for Christmas and I said, "I was thinkin' about you. What'd you do on Christmas?" He said, "Oh, I was just right here." And he lives in a crummy little apartment. And I said, "By yourself?" "No, I invited five homies from the graffiti crew." And I said, "Wow, that's great" (and it turned out they were enemies, enemy gang members.) I said, "Really, what did you do?" He goes, "You're not gonna believe this. I cooked a turkey!" I said, "Really, wow! I'm impressed. Um, how did you prepare it?" He goes, "Well, you know, ghetto style." I said, "Well I don't think I'm familiar with that recipe." And he said, "Yeah, you take the turkey, rub it with butter, you put it with a bunch of salt and pepper and you squeeze two limones (two lemons) you put it in the oven. It tasted proper." I said, "Wow, that's impressive. What else did you have besides the turkey?" "Just turkey, that's it. Just turkey. Yeah, the six of us just stared at the oven. Waitin' for the turkey to be done. Did I mention it tasted proper?" "Yeah, you did."
Exactly what God had in mind. A location of kinship, Eucharist, sacred and ordinary. We know God in this union. In this mutuality with the poor. It's a privileged location. And it depends on where we choose to stand. Ignatius had one educational ideal for our universities. Touch the hearts of your students. Make them available to God's own compassion. Help them feel their hearts broken by the very thing that breaks the heart of God. For compassion can never coexist with judgment, because it is judgment that creates the distance. And distance is the antithesis of kinship. Judgment creates this over-againstness which prevents us from really achieving kinship. And that's the goal.
In my office (it's a huge headquarters) about thirty folks work there, principally gang members, I have a bird's eye view of the office, and I can see through the glass as homies come in. Nearly a thousand gang members and felons and recently released from prison walk in to our office looking to talk to one of our job developers (we have four of them) or work in one of our five businesses where enemies work together, receive counseling services, we give gift cards for $200 to J.C. Penny so they can get clothes for the job interview. Just this past year, we removed 1,000 tattoos right on the premises (we have our own laser machine and about ten doctors who donate their time) everything is free of charge. So some of you who may be regretting right now, your "We are Marquette" tattoo, I just ask you to see me afterward.
So I'm sitting at my office and I see this guy walk in and his name is Magoo, I've known him for twenty years. And I'm telling you, to be honest I'm not proud of this, my heart just sank. Took the elevator to the basement. I was just instantly depressed. I hadn't seen him in seven years; he'd been in prison. He's what police officers occasionally call a "spoon." He gets out, he stirs things up, always has. I've known him for twenty years. My heart just sank. "Oh, no. Oh my God, here we go." I just know how something like his presence will create havoc again. To give you some idea of what our relationship was like, years ago I was saying mass, a funeral mass for one of his homies, a kid named Hector. I'm standing right in front of the pews, in the aisle there, and I'm talking about peace and "let's not seek revenge," or whatever it was I was saying. And suddenly Magoo gets up from the pew; he walks to the center aisle. I stop speaking, everyone's watching. And he walks right up to me, mad-dogs me, and walks out of church. I remember another time, late at night I'm in the projects late at night on my bike, I see Magoo with all his homies from East L.A. Dukes, he's fighting one of his own homies (turns out over some lady) and I break up the fight, and as I pull them apart Magoo reaches into his pants pocket and he pulls out a gun! Now I'm horrified but no one's more horrified then his own homies. They lean into him and say, "Hey, Magoo. Put the gun away. I mean, don't disrespect 'G.'" And he looks at me with total distain and he goes, "I'll shoot his ass too." I'm happy to say he didn't. My ass is intact. But this is to give you an idea of what our relationship was like.
So they buzz me on the intercom, "Magoo's here to see you." I think they could tell too, like "Oh, God." He comes in and I give him a kinda perfunctory "Abrazo." He sits down, he goes, "I know, I know exactly what you're thinking. 'Uh oh. Trouble!'" I'm going, "No!" (that's exactly what I was thinking.) And he sits there and he goes, "Ya know, I have spent twenty years building a reputation for myself, and now I regret that I even have one." And he put his head in his hands and he totally surprised me, he sobbed and sobbed. And it took him a while to contain himself. And finally he did, he wiped away his tears and he said, "Now what do I do? I know how to gang bang. I know how to stick people in jail. I know how to sell drugs. I don't know how to change the oil in my car. I know how to drive. I don't know how to park. And I don't know how to wash my clothes except in the sink of my cell." And my shame meets his, because when he walked in that room that day, I had mistaken him for the sum total of his rap sheet.
I hired him. But judgment can't coexist with compassion. In Luke's Gospel, Jesus does not feel compassion as an occasional emotion that rises to the surface like anger or a neurotic feeling. Compassion is the wallpaper of Jesus' soul. It is the air he is breathing. I remember teaching at Folsom Prison, teaching "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor. It was Theological Themes in American Short Fiction and it's about the grandmother who always strikes a high moral distance. She's pure judgment until she encounters the misfit, this escapee from prison. And she finally touches him and says, "Why, you're my son." It's a beautiful testimony of kinship. And we're talking and discussing it and the prisoners there are using interchangeably, I thought, the words empathy, sympathy, and compassion. So I said, "Let's define our terms." And they said sympathy is when my homeboy's mother dies and I say, 'Hey, sorry to hear about your mom.' And I say, "Good, what's empathy?" Another guy says, "Oh, empathy is when my mom died, too, so I go to him and I say, 'Hey, sorry to hear about your mom. You know my mom died not that long ago, too. I know what you're goin' through.'" I said, "Now what's compassion?" There was silence for a long time. I said, "Come on, come on." Finally one old guy raised his hand. He said, "Oh, compassion. That's a completely different thing. Compassion is Jesus."
To be a Christian then, is to be in solidarity, to find supreme joy in this compassionate kinship with each other -- in this mutuality with those on the margins. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach says that the measure of Jesuit universities is "not what our students do, but who they become." And I want to turn that on it's head a little bit. I don't want to talk about our graduates; I want to talk about our institutions. I think the measure of our Jesuit universities is what our institutions, not what they do, but what they become. How do our institutions become centers of kinship? Not how we announce the message, but how do our places become the message? I have some examples for you and they don't exactly explain it as rhyme with what I'm trying to get at.
A number of years ago when I was in regency at Loyola High School in Los Angeles it was a school situated in a very poor barrio, and a couple of us got together and we said, "What if we were to open this place wide open to the community?" You know, we had been a fortress at that point. And we went and undercover we went and asked a bunch of... did an assessment, went to the different parishes surrounding Loyola High School and said, 'what would you like us to do if we opened our place to you?' and everybody said the same thing: "Teach us how to speak English."
So my job was to go to the President of the school and they kept kind of pushing my and I'd say 'well, the timing is not right to ask him.' (he was an intimidating character).' Until one I was at lunch, just the two of us, and he was ranting and raving and very upset by the fact that at that time Jesuit scholastics were being sent to all these exotic places like China and all these Third World countries. "By God, we have poor right here!" Yes, Lord. Thank you. This was my window of opportunity; he couldn't say 'no' so we opened up the place. We invited many Jesuits from all over the country and lots came.
And we opened the place and we had seven hundred students that first summer. The second summer we repeated it, fourteen hundred students. And yes it changed me to teach there and yes it maybe it changed the folks to be taught there. It changed the place to have this happen there. The institution became something. It didn't proclaim a message. It had become the message. It was a center of kinship. At Delores Mission we declared sanctuary in 1988 -- after a five-week period of discernment the people decided, so we opened our doors to the undocumented homeless. Got a lot of press at the time and I remember once somebody had written in black spray paint on the steps, "Wetback Church." And I went to a meeting of women in the projects, at a communidade de base meeting and I told them that they wrote iglesia mojada. I said, "Well, we'll get some homies to clean it up." And a woman named Petra said, "No you won't. (In Spanish she told me.) You're gonna keep that on there. If one person in our community is left out or marginated or isolated because they're undocumented we shall be proud to call ourselves a 'wetback church."
Once I was driving, riding my bike to the parish, and when I got there at seven o'clock on a summer night it was this sea of humanity. It was just chaotic. There were 300 people being served meals, homeless folks, many who lived in our church every night. There were NA meeting and AA meetings so there were drug addicts and alcoholics and there were about fifty gang members just kickin' it there on the church parking lot. There were hundreds of people coming for ESL classes. It was a who's who. Everybody who was nobody was gathered there. And a car pulls up with a middle-aged Chicano who was... stops me and he says, "Are you the priest here?" and I said, "Yeah" and he kind of waxes nostalgic. He points to the projects and he says, "I grew up there." He points to Delores Mission Elementary School, "Grades 1-8, I went there." Point to the church and says, "First communion, baptized, confirmation there." And then he gets to his punch line. He says, "You know, this used to be a church." And of course I saddled my high-horse and I said, "You know the people here think 'it's finally a church.'"
There comes a moment when you look at your universities and that place and that time when you can say, "It's finally a Jesuit university." How do we become centers of kinship? How do we create moments of reverse immersion? It's not enough to just send our students out to Appalachia or to Latin America (all this stuff is really good). It's sort of the dynamic interplay where Jesus says, "If you love those who love you, big wow" (which I believe is the original Greek). But notice what Jesus doesn't say. He doesn't say stop loving those who love you, he doesn't disparage loving the people who love you, He just says "Big wow. Everybody does that."
He's not calling you to do the harder thing, he's calling us to do the expansive thing. And so he says right after that, "Love your enemies." Not because that's more difficult, but because that most resembles the kind of God we have. What if our universities reversed their immersion? What if they opened the places up? What if they became centers of kinship?
Mike Kennedy, who's the pastor at Delores Mission and my superior in every sense of that word, started this thing years ago where he just invited all the parents who had kids who are locked up and they come to Delores Mission and they are featured at the 10:30 mass and they share their testimonies. And the fact that they come there changes us. Last Wednesday I had a birthday, 50 years old, and they always have a party for you at Delores Mission. And I think it was because it was 50 and because I think people still think it may be my last birthday so they have this huge thing. And so I go there and they said... Mike just said, "Show up and do mass at six." Well the place was packed out into the street. Then we had a big huge dinner in the church parking lot, and mariachis and everything. I mention that for this reason, who was there? Women from the parish, thousands of little kids, many old people, homeless men who sleep in the church, a myriad of gang members (mostly all enemies), west side donors. It was exactly what God had in mind. It was a community of kinship and God would have recognized it. With a decided lack of self-consciousness people were just dancing gumbias into the night, with homeless and with homies and with crazy street people. And it was exactly what God had in mind. And because we've allowed that to happen at our place, it's changed the place. People in L.A. don't look at Delores Mission and wait for us to proclaim a message, because Delores Mission has become that message. No kinship, no justice.
Last story. Our place is just filled with homies and is chaotic, but from three to five you get little kids who come in from middle-school, junior high, Roosevelt High School, and we brace ourselves because they just bug and they're on the computers, but there are lots of appropriate adults who lavish attention on them and who ask what they learned in school today, that kind of thing. They're always askin' "Do you have $5, I'll wash the windows for ya for five bucks." There're windows all over the place, we have the cleanest windows in the city. Whenever someone from our staff is gonna go to Office Depot and buy supplies, the kids run to the door of the car and they wait there, they want to go anywhere. I remember once, a twelve-year-old kid named Beto leaning on the front of my desk, "Hey G, are you going anywhere?" I said, "No." "Can I go with ya?" The destination seems not as important as the going with.
A funny kid, his English was not his strong suit, it was not his first language. I speak Spanish, but he insisted on never speaking Spanish with me, he love trying to operate without the benefit of a net sometimes. And he would hear these expressions on TV or radio that he loved the sound of them coming off his tongue. Once, I think he had heard this from a Pollo Loco commercial or something, and he comes in and says, "Hey G, you know what you are?" And I said, "No." "You're the real deal." You know at a dollar ninety-nine. And this became this routine between the two of us, who could catch each other, who could say 'real deal' first, it's silly. And I'd see him, "Well Beto, you know why that is?" "No, why?" "Because you're the real deal." Ooh, and I'd catch him and he'd catch me. A precocious kid, once he came to me and he said, "hey G, can I have twenty dollars? I wanna take my lady to the movies." I go, "My God, your lady? How old are you?" "Twelve." "Twelve? How old is your lady?" "Sixteen." "My God, sixteen." He goes, "Yeah, but she's short." "Here's twenty dollars, be sure to have a good time."
On a Sunday night Beto is playing with his cousin Jesse in the housing projects and they don't have school the next day (it's a Monday holiday) so they're out a little bit late, about nine, and two gang members are standing in front of a dumpster smoking cigarettes. And Jessie and Beto are running around. A van comes into the projects with two gang members and they see these two guys standing in front of the dumpster and they open up fire. One of the gang members drops. Every kid in the projects knows that when you hear gunfire you move. You hunker down behind a car. You scurry behind the dumpster. But for some reason Beto didn't move. And because he neglected to move, a very large caliber bullet entered his side, traveled through and exited, destroying every organ in its path. Some weeks later, the emergency room doctor told me, "In all my years, I've never seen such a high caliber bullet, so huge that the sheer reverberation of it traveling through Beto's body rendered him paralyzed, thought it never touched his spine."
So I rushed to the Emergency Room and I sit there with his grandmother as they do a seven-hour surgery and little Beto survives. But in the hour, in the post-op, in the ICU, I stand at the window and I watch as many doctors and nurses converge upon him and beat on his heart, and beg and plead his heart to cooperate. And this little heart just can't do it, and so he dies. Now he was twelve years old, but he was exactly what God had in mind when God made him. He was the real deal.
Here's the hard part. So were the two kids in the van. Exactly what God had in mind. But they didn't know kinship. No one stood with them. No one welcomed them in. And that had devastating effect on their life. And the world looks at them and says, "It is a waste of our time to stand there.' "But in this place of which you say it is a waste, there will be heard again the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness. The voices of those who sing." We send our students out to make those voices heard. And we send them from centers of kinship so that we won't ever forget that we belong to each other. For the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and it will not disappoint. And if it delays, we wait for it.
Thank you very much.