Hi Friends,

I see that Hanukkah begins on Christmas Day and this has led me to wonder about whether movie theater ticket sales on December 25 will significantly drop. I’m thinking about pointless stuff because it’s Friday as I work on this Sunday post, and I want my mind off the drama of a possible government shutdown. [I thought I typed ‘shutdown,’ but that autocorrected to ‘s**t down’—I’ll just leave that there.] I don’t want to think of an unelected shadow president. Not at least until after the new year.

I mentioned previously that I understand why people who have had traumatic spiritual experiences have become atheists. This is not a thing I worry about because I don’t believe in a hell or any sort or eternal punishment (I don’t believe in reincarnation until we get it right, etc.). But I also know people who want to be empowered by taking back their spiritual lives and beliefs from the abusers. And since this is the week of Christmas, I want to share two books about people whose faith is centered in love and reconciliation. Today, I finished reading one and listening to the other. They reminded me of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol when the ghost of Marley admonishes Scrooge: “Mankind was my business!”

Cherished Belonging

A bit of background on Gregory Boyle and Tattoos on the Heart:

Father Gregory Boyle is the Los Angeles Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries and Homegirl Café. He received the Medal of Freedom this year. He has also received the California Peace Prize and been inducted into the California Hall of Fame. Back in 2010, I was so taken by his first book, Tattoos on the Heart, that I bought copies for my relatives for Christmas and wrote this review:

Their motto: Nothing stops a bullet like a job.

Father Boyle—“G-dog” as he is known by his homies—acts in a way that is very much centered in his faith (Catholicism) as a Christian, but is also so unusual that his story makes a startling read. And here’s why: he believes that every individual has equal value in society. And unlike most of us, he doesn’t just say it. He truly believes it. For Father Greg, there are no throw-away people. He never stops caring—and so the subtitle of this book—The Power of Boundless Compassion—is apt. When I say that his compassion is amazing, I know that the word ‘amazing’ is so overused that you may not understand what I mean. But I think it is the right word—I’m filled with wonder at the life of this man.

Father Greg’s stories of gang bangers leaves us to wonder—Am I really a good person or have I just been sheltered from the things that would make me bad? When you read what many of the ‘homies’ in this book have gone through, you’ll wonder how they ever made it out to a normal, productive life. And you will wonder at the life of ‘G-dog’—who, in the twenty-five or so years that he has been working with LA gang members, has helped so many out of the gang life only to bury them later, when they are shot in drive-bys or targeted. Father Greg has buried almost 200 gang or former gang members. And yet, he keeps the faith.

Father Greg tells the reader that centering one’s life on love will get a person through the worst. Gangsters often tell him that they don’t want people to ‘mistake their kindness for weakness.’ But as Boyle shows, “sooner or later, we all discover that kindness is the only strength there is.”

Even with boundless love, a person needs a real sense of humor to find joy in this life, and Father Greg has it. Many of his anecdotes about dealing with young men and women are really funny. My favorite is when he writes about gangsters reading aloud and replacing words they don’t know with words they do. Thus in Bible passages referring to the ‘Gentiles,’ they use the word ‘genitals.’ Father Greg says this really livens up the public readings!

Yes, you will laugh—and you’ll cry, quite a bit. But do read this book. It will remind you that saints have a beginning as real human being.

The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times

Cherished Belonging is Father Greg’s fourth book. Again, he looks at how love (“Cherishing is love fully engaged. Cherishing is tenderness in action.”) is our job, how it is active, and how it resolves troubles. And again, I am amazed at his capacity for cherishing, his ability to walk the walk of genuine Christian calling. What I mean is that I only dream of being so fully accepting of others. Like many people, I’ve sometimes felt that unconditional love is beyond human capacity. But no—Father Greg’s life and work disprove that. He doesn’t see anyone as ‘the other’ and everyone involved in Homeboy Industries learns that lesson. Former gang rivals who once might have wanted to shoot one another on the street now work side by side.

If it feels like people in the U.S. have forgotten the roots of Christianity, Father Greg’s worldview is an antidote for the Christian nationalism blues. This also means that many purported people of faith will not agree with the “two unwavering principles” of Homeboy Industries:

* Everyone is unshakably good (no exceptions)

* We belong to each other (no exceptions)

He repeatedly makes the point that God’s power lies not in rescuing us, but in loving us. While he refers to Jesus often, he also sometimes uses the pronoun ‘She’ in reference to God and chides the Church for continuing “to prevent women from full inclusion.” He seems to have no concern with upsetting religious literalists:

At a house where I was leading a weekend retreat, the first reading was a story of Abraham and Isaac. It begins, “God put Abraham to the test.” I opened my homily by telling the congregation that life provides us with endless “tests,” but not once has the God of love ever thrown one our way. Not ever. “And besides,” I told them, “any father who hears God tell him to kill his son is mentally ill.” They applauded, which surprised me. I proceeded, then, to preach on the transfiguration.

If conservatives really want to feel outrage, they will find their dose in reading about Father Greg’s defense of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—all gay men who sometimes dress in “mock wimples worn by nuns in 1954”—for their “considerable service and charitable works.”

Boyle’s God is the God of second chances (and third and fourth…). Reading about his metaphysics made me think of the idea of ‘turning the other cheek’—that this might not mean what I’ve always thought it meant (be a punching bag) but rather is just another way of saying forgive seven x seventy times. But there is an important progress to this that doesn’t include allowing people to take advantage of others. For example, at Homeboy, if people test positive for drugs or have other relapses, they are sent out and told, “Come back to us when you’re ready [sober, etc.].” This understanding of human relationships extends to all people. Of Donald Trump, Father Greg says that no mentally well person would be that malignant narcissist and sociopath, so we have to feel for him in his mental illness. But he also notes that a person that ill should not be handed the Presidency of the United States. (Oops!)

Father Greg’s writing style is epigrammatic. It reminds me of Ralph Waldo Emerson in that you can pull quotes, sentences from within the same paragraph, that encapsulate different ideas. (“People don’t become homeless because they run out of money…They become homeless because they run out of relationships.”) As in past books, Father Greg tells anecdotes about the former gang members who have been helped at Homeboy. There are some “I’m not crying, you’re crying” moments once again, but there are some laugh out loud stories as well. When Father Greg went to Washington D.C. to receive the Medal of Freedom this year:

A homie sends me a congratulatory text: “I heard you got a presidential pardon … or some s**t like that.” A home girl, Ivy, stands in for me at a luncheon talk at which she says, “Father Greg couldn’t be here today because he’s at the White House being knighted.”

If you love language, you’ll enjoy some of the words Homeboy workers make up to suit the circumstance. A few favorites:

”I feel belongance.”

When Steve Avalon’s encounters a homie who manipulates, he calls him a “shenanigizer.”

Undivided

I listened to Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church by Hahrie Han. If you read my earlier post about the book Circle of Hope, you know that I was wondering if a church that engages in work to bridge racial divides—one that openly discusses racism and the question of how the church can make racial equality part of their mission—can survive. The Circle of Hope did not. Though leaders came apart over their differences, they continued to do good work elsewhere.

I was intrigued by the publisher’s blurb that suggested the megachurch Crossroads had succeeded in combating racial injustice and managed to hold together.

Crossroads is a racially mixed but majority white evangelical megachurch in Cincinnati. In 2016, it was a critical force in helping to pass a ballot initiative for universal preschool, providing early childhood education for the poorest, mostly Black, constituents. Author and political scientist Hahrie Han investigates how this happened in an area that voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

Han finds that Crossroads Pastor Chuck Mingo begins the work of combating racial injus...