As you wait, the young man sitting next to you runs his hands through his hair, and bending over, he whispers to a friend about his court date. When the toddler next to you spills his food on the floor, his teenage mom looks embarrassed but the receptionist simply smiles, and shortly another Homeboy Industries T-shirted young man comes forward with a mop to clean it up. z

Nearly everyone in the lobby casts anxious glances beyond the glass wall to the office of Father Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest. There sits G-Dog, as he is called by the homies, for whom a long list of people wait. When an exceptionally tough-looking man walks in, Father Greg recognizes him and motions to the receptionist to bring him in immediately. The crowd tries not to watch as this young man slowly unfolds himself and begins weeping. It is as you have been told: “Father Greg will spend as much time with you as you need.” 

Nothing is dark and dingy here. The lobby is full of light with a two-story glass front wall and stairs going up to a charter high school and offices with legal counselors, job placement counselors, 12-step meetings, and classes in job readiness, parenting, anger management, computer job skills and creative writing. A tour guide— usually a young man who was involved in gang violence only a few months before—takes you through the facility, most of which houses Homeboy Bakery, a restaurant called Homegirl Café and a retail store, Homeboy Merchandise. In each of these industries, former gang members who aren’t easily employable elsewhere work alongside others from a rival gang they used to plot to kill. Former “strangers” welcome each other through the vehicle of side-by-side work and they find kinship. Says Hector Verdugo, a former drug dealer who is now the associate executive director, “The love I get from G, I push it forward to someone else. What an honor it is to be here and to work with these beautiful people. We’re all from different barrios and different races, but we’re one big family.” 

Hector says it well. While Homeboy’s mission statement talks about assisting at-risk and former gang-involved youth in becoming contributing members of the community, it is above all a community of people committed to one another. Here these former gang members—the “strangers” in our culture that parents fear their children will become friends with—redirect their lives and find hope for the future. 

Just as strangers in scripture were aliens from outside Israel’s borders, gang members have grown up in a world where real guns are so common that they played with them as toddlers. Many have suffered years of abuse—burned with cigarettes, having their heads immersed in toilets—and all have watched their friends die. Here, young girls don’t dream about a prom dress, but about the dress they will be buried in. They hope they manage to have a child before they die. Indeed, Father Greg himself has buried almost two hundred kids. 

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01.  Kinship

Kinship is at the core of this community of former strangers. Fr. Greg says Homeboy Industries is not a program that can be assessed in terms of success (even though it is lauded as a national model for gang intervention). Effective programs aimed at “them” are not what is needed, suggests Boyle. Instead, we need a radical commitment to reweave the bonds of communion that have been eroded by our insistence on drawing lines that exclude others based on race, class, neighborhood, and gang membership. “The margins don’t get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them,” he writes in his book, Tattoos on the Heart. Those powers “will only be moved to kinship when they observe it. Only when we see a community where the outcast is valued and appreciated.”Boyle, Gregory. Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (New York: Free Press, 2010), 177–178.

Behind Homeboy Industries stands the love and commitment of Dolores Mission. When Fr. Greg was appointed pastor there in 1986, the parents in this poorest parish of Los Angeles continually came to him requesting help for their kids who were in gangs. So together they tried various strategies. None worked as well as “Jobs For a Future” (JFF), a parish-led program that endeavored to find legitimate employment for young people. That’s when Boyle discovered that working with gangs (brokering peace treaties and so on) was not the key. Instead, the key was working with and forming kinship with former gang members. As JFF evolved into Homeboy Industries, Father Greg developed a strategy. As he said Mass and spoke at 25 regional youth camps, jails and prisons every month, he stuck around afterward to hand out a card with his name and phone number on it. He invited young men and women to call him when they got out, offering to hook them up with a job and line them up with a counselor. Homeboy Industries now serves eight thousand youths a year. 

Conversations invited Father Greg to talk about the kinship needed to welcome strangers and outcasts as friends. 

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02.  A Conversation with Father Greg Boyle

Jan Johnson: What is needed to have a welcoming heart? 

Father Greg Boyle: People need to be familiar with their own wounds in order to be hospitable to the wounded. We’re all wounded. It’s a thing we have in common as human beings whether folks know it or not. People who aren’t strangers to themselves and their wounds know how to be hospitable to folks. They can get to a point of acceptance of others, of being in awe in the place of what people have to carry, rather than in judgment of them. 

 

JJ: What can you tell introverts about surviving energy-wise—even embracing—a welcoming, hospitable life? 

GB: I think I am an introvert. Still, [working with the homies] doesn’t drain me. To be here and deal with folks can be tiring, but not draining or depleting. 

 

JJ: How are “tiring” and “draining” different? 

GB: “Tiring” means that at the end of the day you want to go to bed, but it doesn’t sap your soul. I don’t think I’ve ever found being here to be arduous. It’s a daily delighting. It gives you energy. You need to rest every once in a while. It’s a gift and grace. It’s heartbreaking and engaging—all those things at the same time. 

That’s all part of the great gift of how this place operates. If it were just burying kids, nobody could sustain it. It’s the whole process—hilarious, heartbreaking, messy, discouraging, heartwarming—all on the same day. I wouldn’t trade my life for anybody’s. I get to watch the homies work and learn to inhabit the truth of who they are right before my eyes. I get to have that all day long and all on the same day. 

 

JJ: Thinking of kinship, you say there’s a world of difference between serving others and being one with them. Let’s say our readers have caught themselves merely serving. What can they do to move toward the oneness of kinship?  

GB: In service, there’s still a high moral distance, a service-provider with a service-recipient. You want to bridge that, to get to where it’s about mutuality. It comes from a mindset. Let’s say you come to volunteer at a place like Homeboy and you ask, “What will I do here?” We tell volunteers, “None of us cares what you do here; we only hope that something will happen to you.” Let it begin relationally before it moves to task. So we say, “Sit down with this guy and tutor him for driver-training class. See what happens.” 

The minute you shift to that [formational] kind of understanding, then it’s a different ball game. It’s not about superiority or inferiority; it’s not about being underprivileged or hyper-privileged. It’s about “us.” It happens if you allow yourself to be formed by being with people, to be affected by what’s happening. You’re allowing something to happen within you rather than being task-oriented and accomplish things. 

 

JJ: Does kinship imply reciprocity? 

GB: Kinship is about mutuality. Reciprocity says, you give me this, and I give you that. Mutuality is kinship where things are relational. Nobody is superior to anybody. That’s what happens in society, especially with our population [former gang members]. 

People say, “I make good choices with my life but these guys made bad choices.” At that level, then it’s about superiority and inferiority. But kinship has nothing to do with that. It’s about how not all choices are created equal. One guy grows up in gang-capital world but I grew up with many advantages. You can’t even compare our lives because he has so much more to carry. 

 

JJ: Are there times when a homie or two has met your needs? 

GB: All the time. In the book [Tattoos on the Heart], I tell about when our second graffiti worker was killed. I was so consoled by a few who were waiting for me when I got back from the hospital and everyone else had left. They were attentive to meet my needs. They were concerned and compassionate. They think that way and ask, “How are you feeling?” 

 

JJ: Welcoming the stranger often involves community. Would you say a little about how your work with former gang members involves several layers of community: the young men and women themselves now a part of Homeboy family, Dolores Mission parishioners, your Jesuit community? 

GB: We’re all a part of the formation of a community of kinship—DM and Homeboy—wanting to illuminate the dark corners of the empty, hollow gang life. Community trumps gang. We want to replace it with community. Community is the only thing that is compelling enough to replace a gang. 

It’s a sense of belonging and feeling that you’re a part of something here. It’s real. It’s not fake. The gang milieu feels like it’s real but it isn’t. It’s hollow, empty. It’s not about anything. Here, we really have your back. I always tell them that the difference between your neighborhood and this place is that we have your back. The gang doesn’t. 

 

JJ: How would you summarize kinship in light of “welcoming the stranger”? 

GB: Kinship is the movement toward awe, In the early Christian community, “an awe came upon everyone” [Acts 4:43]. That’s what you hope for. You hope that people will be moved toward awe. A movement towards awe is a movement away from judgment. Away from thinking, Don’t they know the difference between right and wrong? Why aren’t they pulling themselves up by their bootstraps? We are in awe of what people have to carry, how disproportionate things are, the things people go through, how they overcome. You think, There but for the grace of God I could go.