Extremely Short Excerpt: Greg Boyle’s War With Irrelevance

The first wedding I ever did was in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It was a humble Quechua couple, and the Mass was in the main Jesuit church in the center of town. Standing room only with Quechua Indians in their absolute finest clothes. Quechua cholas in brightly colored hoopy skirts and shawls, with tiny bowler hats perched at a tilt, on top of their pinched-back hair. Men in suits with white collars, unspeakably wide and starched, craning their necks beyond what seems natural. Communion times arrives, and I go to the couple.

They refuse to receive communion. I beg them. They will not budge. I go the congregation and invite them to receive communion. Not one person comes forward. I beg and plead, but no one steps up. I discover later, with the help of some Jesuit scholastics, that the Indians’ sense of cultural disparagement and toxic shame was total. Since the time of the Conquista, when the Spaniards “converted” the Indians, they baptized them, but no roofs ever got ripped open. This was to be their place — outside of communion — forever.

Maybe we call this the opposite of God.

— Gregory Boyle, from Tattoos on the Heart

Yesterday, Greg Boyle’s Homeboy Diner opened on the second floor of Los Angeles City Hall. Where else? Boyle would probably ask. The marginalization of the Indians he first met in Bolivia changed something inside the young priest. When he returned to Los Angeles thirty years ago, and found himself assigned to a parish with the highest concentration of gang activity in the city, he recognized the “toxic shame” of the Quechua in the homies.

Consider Boyle a man with a great eraser slung over his broad shoulders, rubbing at the margins keeping people (and their voices) in open-air isolation. His book, recently out in paperback, documents thirty years of work with the gangland homies of East Los Angeles. The book’s questions, however, are for the reader as much for the homie. Why is the world relevant to us, and vice versa? Who helps us? How do we help ourselves? A Jesuit priest, Boyle doesn’t look upstairs for answers. He looks people in the face.

Boyle is widely read, and cites a wide range of philosophers and poets in his book. In the end, it is about consciousness. Consciousness as a podium with one topic up for discussion: relevance. Everyday we confront life with slight adjustments, alterations and patches to what we believe matters. Depression, it would seem, occurs when this internal dialectic fails and the platform tips. The abyss does the rest. A singular insight in Boyle’s book is that the homies — and it seems to be truer the more menacing they appear to be — are catastrophically depressed. With second or third generation gang members, the platform was tipped from day one. The trauma is disastrous. Greg Boyle’s efforts amount to the work of a coast guard after a hurricane.

Find Tattoos on the Heart at your local bookstore, then visit their web site to order the book. Or visit Homeboy Industries directly.