Tattoos on the Heart
I love Father Greg Boyle’s book. I love the stories he tells us, the sounds of his voice and those of the homies he shares his life with, and especially the book’s drenched-in-love, grow-your-heart’ness. I think most readers will feel as I do. (Amazon sales and reviews confirm this supposition. )
How something – ironic, painful, what-do-you-expect? – that Tattoos on the Heart came into the world at about the same moment that Homeboy Industries (one of the book’s primary subject) ran into huge financial difficulties. You can read more about Homeboy Industries (and make a donation) .
Father Greg loves the community he lives in (the neighborhood around Dolores Mission Church in East Los Angeles) and he shares his love for each person he tells us about, even those who frustrate him no end. He writes: “You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.”
“Evidence-based outcomes” is the name of the game these days – in Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan’s, Race to the Top and in the way most funders of programs working with youth or in prison demand evaluation. WritersCorps teachers know well how I roll my eyes or rant at all this. So it does my heart special good to read Father Greg’s chapter titled “Success.” He writes: “If our primary concern is results, we will choose to work only with those who give us good ones.” Instead (as Father Greg quotes Mark Torres S.J.) “We see in the homies what they don’t see in themselves, until they do.”