Father Greg Boyle began his Distinguished Speakers talk with an invocation not to God, but to the better selves of the audience that filled the 1,500 seat Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center last month.
“We stand at the margins so that the margins under our feet are erased,” he began, in an understated voice that would strain the audience’s hearing and understanding for the next 90 minutes. “We stand with the demonized so the demonizing will stop. We stand with the disposables so the day will come when we stop throwing people away.
“We go to the margins with kinship as our goal. No kinship, no peace. No kinship, no justice. No kinship, no equality.
“We go to the margins and brace ourselves against those who say it is a waste of time. The place where Jeramiah the prophet said, ‘There will be heard again the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voices of those who sing.’
“This arena is not the place you come to, but the place you go from, so that other voices get heard,” he said, paraphrasing Martin Luther King.
Then Boyle quoted Mother Teresa. “The problem with the world is we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
“Imagine a circle of compassion where no one is outside the circle,” he concluded.
In a church, the faithful would have shouted, “Amen.” At the Redondo Performing Arts Center the response was applause.
Boyle is a Jesuit priest assigned to Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights. The parish serves Aliso Village and two public housing projects. Parishioners include eight gangs.
“I buried my 252nd gang member this past Friday. A boy named Alex who worked for us a number of years ago,” he said.
Shortly after arriving at Dolores Mission in 1988, Boyle learned “Gang members were wreaking havoc in the junior high schools. The schools wouldn’t take them. I said to them, ‘If I find a school for you, will you go. They all said sure.”
“Dolores Mission had a parochial school with kindergarten through 8th grade on the first two floors. The third floor was the nuns’ convent. I asked the nuns if they would move out to make room for junior high gang members. They said sure.”
“Then the homies said, ‘If only we had jobs.” So the women of the parish went in search of felony friendly employers.”
The job placement effort didn’t go well, so Boyle and his parishioners started Homeboy Industries. It included landscaping, maintenance and graffiti removal crews, electronic waste recycling, silkscreening and plumbing.
The plumbing business failed.
“Who would have thought homeowners didn’t want gang members in their homes,” Boyle said.
Homeboy’s free tattoo removal began after a man named Frank came to Homeboys for a job.
“Frank was two days out of Corcoran Prison. He said, “Father, I’m having a tough time finding a job.” ‘F…. the world’ was tattooed in block letters across his forehead.
“A doctor chipped away at Frank’s forehead for an hour a month for several months. Our free tattoo removal program now has three laser machines, 43 volunteer doctors and a waiting list of 3,000 gang members,” Boyle said.
“During the 1992 Rodney King riots, poor neighborhoods erupted everywhere, except in the poorest parish in Los Angeles County. I told a Los Angeles Times’ reporter it was because we had 600 gang members from eight gangs who had to go to work in the morning and didn’t want to torch their own community.
“Nothing stops a bullet like a job.”
“The day after the Times article, movie producer Ray Stark (“Westside Story,” “The Misfits,” “The World of Suzie Wong,”) invited me to his Beverly Hills office and asked, ‘How should I spend my money?’ I said there was an abandoned bakery across from the school. The ovens still work. We could put hair nets on the gang members and they could bake bread. He said, ‘Sure.’
The bakery led to the opening next door of Homegirl Cafe.
“Jim Carey, Jack Black, Jane Fonda,Vice President Biden and most famously Diane Keaton have all eaten there.
“When Keaton visited, she asked her waitress what she recommended. The waitress responded, ‘Wait a minute. I know you.’
Keaton said, ‘Probably not. I just have one of those familiar looking faces.”
“We were locked up together,” the waitress said.
“Oh noble born, remember who you really are,” Boyle said, quoting Buddha.
“If you go to the margin to make a difference, it’s about you. If you go to the margins for them to make you different, it’s about us.
“The word for that is kinship.
“Long lay the world in sin and error pining/till he appeared and the soul felt its worth,” Boyle said, quoting from the Christmas carol “Oh Holy Night.” The rest of the verse reads, “A thrill of hope the weary soul rejoices/For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.”
“Los Angeles has 120,000 gang members. Over the past three decades, 15,000 have walked through our doors,” he said.
After publication of his best selling “Tattoos of the Heart,” and “Barking to the Choir,” Boyle became a sought after public speaker .
“One year, I was invited to speak to 600 social workers in Richmond. The week before the talk, to my horror, I saw I was the only speaker for a session that ran from 9 a.m to 5 p.m.
“So, I invited two homies to come with me, Jose and Andre. They were in their 10th month of our 18 month job training program. I told them, just tell your story. And take your time.
“I had never heard Jose’s story.”
“I guess you could say my mom and I didn’t get along. I was six when she told me, ‘Why don’t you just kill yourself.’”
“The audience gasped,” Boyle recalled. And then laughed when Jose added, “It sounds way worse in Spanish.
“By the time Jose finished the audience had whiplash from all the gasps and laughs,” Boyle said.
“When I was 9, my mom drove me to an orphanage in Baja. She told the man who came to the door, ‘I found this kid.’ I was there for three months before my grandmother rescued me.”
“My mom beat me every day. In elementary school I wore three T-shirts because blood seeped through the first two. The other kids would say ‘Hey fool, it’s 100 degrees.’”
“Jose stopped speaking,” Boyle recalled, “as though staring at a piece of his story only he could see. When he resumed, he said ‘I was ashamed of my wounds. Now I run my fingers over the scars. My wounds are my friends. How can I heal the wounds if I don’t welcome them.”
“A sense of awe came upon everyone,” Boyle said, quoting from the Acts of the Apostles to describe the social workers’ reaction.
“For these talks, I always pick gang rivals who used to shoot at each other and make them share a hotel room, just to mess with them,” he said.
For an appearance at his alma mater Gonzaga University in Seattle, he invited Mario and Enrique.
“I could not have survived a single day of their childhoods. You had to keep your distance from their stories or you’d be scorched,” he said.
“After I did my thing, I invited them back to the stage for questions. A woman, a tall, skinny drink of water, asked Mario, ‘What wisdom would you import to your son and daughter?’ Mario closed his eyes and began to tremble. He wad losing the battle with his tears. Finally, he blurted out, ‘I don’t want my kids to be like me.’”
“The woman rose back to her feet and asked, ‘Why not? You are loving, kind, gentle and wise. I hope your kids turn out to be like you.’”
“Don’t think this is the auditorium you come to. It is the auditorium you go from,” Boyle said. “Go out and create a community of kinship that God would recognize. In this place you say is a wasteland, there will be heard songs of mirth and gladness.”
Boyle explained why he named his company Homeboy Industries, despite ongoing resistance to the name. He said the resistance comes from a misunderstanding of the word.
“Homie is their word for connection. It begins with my homie, my gang. But as the circle gets wider, everyone becomes a homie.
“Mother Teresa said, ‘We draw our family circles too small.’”
“Gang members who come to us say they’ll work with rival gang members, but won’t talk to them. In no time, they are connected by a deeper bond than they ever knew in their gang. Homeboy is the front porch of the house we all want to live in.
“There’s a notion kids join gangs because they are drawn to them. They aren’t drawn. They are fleeing. Only a despondent, traumatized or mentally ill person joins a gang. Everyone who walks in our doors is a 9 or 10 (on the scale of emotionally damaged). All of the women have been sexually abused.”
“A damaged person will damage others. A cherished person will cherish others.”
During the question and answer period Boyle was asked how he defines success.
He responded. “Success is a trap. Mother Theresa said, ‘We are not called to be successful. We are called to be faithful.’ We’re like AA, a place where you get your 98th chance.
“No homie was given more job opportunities than the guy we called Dreamer. He’s smart, with a dangerous sense of humor. He yoyo’d in and out of prison, always gravitating back to drugs and crime. One time after four months in county jail for a probation violation, he wandered back and said, ‘This time it will be different.’
“I called Gary, who has a vending machine company in Alhambra. Two weeks later Dreamer’s back in my office. I think, here we go again. He pulls a paper from his pocket and says, ‘Here’s my first paycheck. My kids aren’t ashamed of me anymore. You know who I have to thank?
I said, ‘No. Who?’
He said, ‘God, of course.’ Then he said, ‘You thought I was going to say you. You’re lucky you didn’t say that out loud, or God would have struck you down.’
“Who is the service provider, and who is the servant?” Boyle asked.
The time had come to take up the collection.
“At a talk in Beverly Hills, a woman asked, ‘What can we do to help? Besides donating money?” Boyle shook his head. The audience laughed.
“We have a $23 million budget. Government covers 5 percent. Every year we need to raise $10 million. And then have to do it all over again. It’s a heavy lift,” he said.
For more about Homeboy industries, visit HomeboyIndustries.org.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky, “the world’s funniest neuroscientist,” will address Distinguished Speaker subscribers on Thursday Feb. 20. He will be followed by “All the President’s Men” co-author and former Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward on Wed., March 18 and former British prime minister David Cameron on Thur. May 14. ER
