“Father Gregory Boyle’s Power of Extravagant Tenderness – Insights to Mull Over” written by Susan Rodgers

Father Gregory Boyle’s Power of Extravagant Tenderness – Insights to Mull Over

Two summers ago, faculty, retired faculty, and staff at the College of the Holy Cross here in town were invited to join an informal four-weeklong reading group based on the Jesuit activist Father Greg Boyle’s book The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness (2021, Avid Reader Press). As the co-facilitator of First Baptist Church-Worcester’s Social Justice Action Group (and also as a retired Holy Cross anthropology professor who studies refugee resettlement), I am always in the market for new insights into making social justice plans into concrete social justice actions, so I joined this discussion group to see what I could learn. The remarkable book our small group read, over lunches, week by week, has much to teach progressive-minded Protestants at FBC.

Gregory Boyle, S.J. (Society of Jesus, the Jesuits) is the founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, a rule-breaking, Gospel-based social business that offers formerly incarcerated Latino men, former gang members, the chance to train for a “legitimate” paying job through work in one of their mini-industries (a café, a bakery, electronic recycling, catering, silk screening and embroidery, a farmer’s market and more. See homeboyindustries.org for more details).

The men are often covered in tattoos, which Homeboy Industries can remove so that the men won’t keep getting rejected in job interviews around L.A. They got these tattoos in prison, to which they were often consigned for illegal drug offenses or domestic violence. Many have long histories of hard drug addictions. Boyle saw both their imprisonment and their problems with violence and with heroin, meth, cocaine, and so on as traces of their unjust marginalization from mainstream U.S. society. They had been cast out, but Boyle saw them as full of human worth and promise – surely, as members of Jesus’s beloved community. He designed Homeboy Industries and all its educational and empowerment aspects as ways to aid the men to see their own inherent, totally beautiful worth, and to leave their self-hatred (and often, their negative, depressive mindsets) behind as they entered into new lives. Indeed, resurrected ones. Young Latina women are now part of Homeboy Industries’ purview as well, if they wish to apply; many of them have also been caught up in the U.S. and California’s ‘carceral state,’ of repeated ‘crimes,’ and repeated imprisonments and repeated entanglements with dangerous drugs. The “whole language” image of Boyle’s book title refers to something that one of the participants once said of another, who was talking on the phone with a relative in the Russian language. Many of the homeboys are former gang members, as mentioned, and apparently this other guy was from a Russian immigrant family that had some ties to gangs. The two had been cellmates, and the Latino man, Mario, was always being amazed by his buddy: “’Watcha…we were locked up together in County. Cellies. And he’d go out every night and talk to his mom on the pay phone. He talked…. Russian…with her.” Then Mario gathers the energy just a bit. “Damn, G…. he spoke… the WHOLE language” (p. xv).

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Boyle goes on, “Mario meant fluency when he said the ‘whole language.’ I wish to suggest the same here. We are on the lookout for a fuller expression and a wider frame within which to view things. Allow the extravagant tenderness of God to wash over us” (p. xv). And perhaps come to see or at least to glimpse the Kingdom of God out there on the horizon of possibility, for all, for even the most reviled and marginalized among us. Boyle critiques the “partial views” of narrow-minded, dualistic-thought sorts of religion that seek blame or get locked into cycles of shaming actions. He sees a God of unfailing, limitless love and tenderness. And, “Homeboy [Industries] doesn’t want to simply point something out. We want to point the way. Not just a solution, but a sign. It points the way to the power of transformation; the holiness of second chances; a commitment to demonize no one; and the power and possibility of redemption” (p. xvii).

Now, that is a Resurrection that even I can believe in.

Father G does not hesitate to critique sanctimonious varieties of religion or limited, dried-out conceptualizations of God. He writes, “The Tender One is unbelievable in lots of ways that don’t occur to us” (p. 4). Or, he implies, don’t occur to some formal churches that are uncomfortable with ambiguity. Doyle writes (p. 4-5), “At one time or another, we all had a version of God that was rigid. But the depth of our own experience tells us that our idea of God wants to be fluid and evolving. As we grow, we learn to steer clear of the wrong God. We ‘break the jar’ and it radically challenges our way of seeing reality. Consequently, a change in our conception of God can transform the character of our culture.” This seems to be what Fr. G is doing in writing all these books (The Whole Language is third in a trilogy of volumes). He goes on, “If our God makes us feel unworthy and in debt, wrong God. If God frightens us, wrong God. If God is endlessly disappointed in us, wrong God. A man I knew, after being fired from his job, said, ‘It’s a good thing I believe in God, who says, ‘Vengeance will be mine.’ Uh-oh. Wrong God” (p. 4). The God of tenderness and tender mercies “says ‘You got this’ more than ‘Do that’” (p. 4). Father G and Homeboy Industries in general insist that their participants quit all dangerous drugs and avoid family violence, especially toward mothers and children but beyond that, they are extravagantly accepting of the homeboys and homegirls, seeing them as ones who are on the way to coming home to themselves.

Therefore, as Doyle writes repeatedly, no one is irredeemable. All are beloved of God. And, in Doyle’s reading of the Gospels of Mark, Luke, and Matthew, Jesus really does not talk very much about sins (p. 31) and “I’m not sure he’d say he died for them” (p. 31). A Puritan divine in colonial-era Massachusetts Father Doyle is not. Father D also writes that Jesus always sought to relate directly to individuals, seeking them out, looking them in the face. So too, we should listen to individuals’ stories; avoid silly, harmful stereotypes. Do not see former gang members as threats.

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This viewpoint leads to his open-hearted acceptance of people on the LGBTQ continuum. He relates a story: one time he was the featured speaker in an upscale country club in middle America. He was eating dinner with a husband and wife in their forties after his lecture. The wife said she had a dilemma: a close friend was getting married and had invited her to the wedding. But, the friend was a lesbian. Should the woman accept the invitation and go to the wedding, even though such sanctified weddings are against formal church teachings. Doyle asked his dinner companion, ‘What would Jesus do?’

“There is no hesitation. ‘He’d go to the wedding.’ Even the husband nods.”

Doyle goes on, “’When you think about it,’ I tell them, ‘that was all Jesus did in his earthly ministry: he went – to lesbian weddings” (p. 128). Jesus consistently embodied a radical, joyful, off-base inclusiveness, one that churches in history have so often distanced themselves from. With Homeboy Industries and with subversive conversations like this one, Father G is trying to get back to the Jesus of the Gospels and to push our American culture in that same transcendent direction.

Read The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness. It is a stay-up-all-night book.