2015 Sol Kanee Lecture on Peace and Justice

2015 Sol Kanee Lecture on Peace and Justice
Jobs not Jails: Providing Hope, Training, and Support
to Formerly Gang-Involved and Previously
Incarcerated Men and Women
Father Gregory Boyle, SJ
Founder and Executive Director,
Homeboy Industries
Tuesday, October 6 @ 1:30 pm
Multi-Purpose Room 210, University
Centre, University of Manitoba
Watch the video on the Mauro
Centre YouTube Channel
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1:
Good afternoon. Welcome to today's 2015 Sol Kanee Lecture on Peace and
Justice, an initiative sponsored by the Richardson Foundation, that features
distinguished speakers in peace and justice studies. Welcome to members of
the university community. Welcome to students. Welcome to staff. Welcome to
supporters of the Mauro Centre, to members of the Board of Directors and to all
who contribute their time and energies to make events such as the Sol Kanee
lecture a possibility. Welcome to members of the community. Welcome to the
community of Fort Richmond. Welcome to the community of Winnipeg, the
community of Manitoba and anyone who's from beyond the Manitoba
boundaries. Many of you have traveled very far, many of you might have
struggled to find parking. You may have rearranged your schedules and
otherwise accommodated to be here today, so we very much welcome you.
Welcome to each of you in particular because your very presence attests to the
increasing interest in building global and local communities founded much more
fully on peace principles and the realization of justice. We are very fortunate to
have with us today Father Gregory Boyle, who's the founder of Homeboy
Industries, who's managed to make the long trek from his home in Los Angeles
to be with us here today in Winnipeg. My name is Michelle Glenn and it's my
privilege to act as master of ceremonies today.
As to the format, we will begin today's by hearing a few words from Dr. Chris
Adams, who's the Rector of St. Paul's College and he's also the chair of the
Board of Directors of the Arthur Mauro Centre. After that, we will turn to hear
from Dr. Jay Doering, who's the Vice Provost and the Dean of the Faculty of
Graduate Studies. [00:02:00] Then we will hear from Father Eduardo Para Soto,
who will introduce his fellow Jesuit, Father Boyle and Father Soto is also a
candidate in the peace and justice studies program here at the University of
Manitoba. Finally, we will hear from Father Boyle himself, and after he's made
his remarks, he's kindly agreed to entertain questions for a few minutes.
We'd ask that you hold your questions until he has finished his speaking. We will
conclude with some final remarks from another Ph.D. student, Mrs. Danielle
Felicia, who is also in the peace and justice program here at the University of
Manitoba. Please, if you haven't picked one up, there are brochures that detail
today's lecture, and once again, welcome and with that, I turn to Dr. Chris
Adams.
Christopher:
I hope you aren't confusing this room with the blood donor clinic next door. If
you have blood to donate, that's next door. Good afternoon. My name is
Christopher Adams and as Rector of St. Paul's College and the Chair of the Board
of Directors of the Arthur V. Mauro Centre for Peace and Justice, I want to
welcome all of you to the 12th Annual Sol Kanee Lecture on Peace and Justice,
featuring Father Gregory Boyle, the founder and Executive Director of Homeboy
Industries in Los Angeles.
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At this point in this event, I wish to note that St. Paul's College and the
University of Manitoba's campuses are located on original lands of Anishinabek,
Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Meti
nation. We respect the treaties that were made on these territories. We
acknowledge the harms and mistakes of the past and we dedicate ourselves as a
community to move forward in partnership with indigenous communities in the
spirit of reconciliation and collaboration.
The Sol Kanee lecture series on international peace building is supported by the
generosity received from the Richardson and Sons family of Winnipeg.
[00:04:00] We are grateful for their contribution. As well, we extend our thanks
to the leadership of members of the Winnipeg community, such as Mr. Sol
Kanee, who is an ardent champion of peace building and human rights and for
whom this lecture is named after.
Let us also take a moment to acknowledge the center's benefactor, Dr. Arthur V.
Mauro, who is here with his wife Naomi Levine. Arthur Mauro, along with the
many others who have contributed to the work of the center and of the
students enrolled in Peace and Conflict Studies program, without their support,
we would not be here for this type of a lecture. Together, through all of our
efforts, we have opened the door for greater opportunities to know, understand
and walk the path of peace. I want to know welcome Dr. Jay Doering, the
University of Manitoba Vice Provost of Graduate Education, who will bring
greetings from the University of Manitoba. Dr. Doering?
Jay:
Thank you, Chris. It is a pleasure indeed for me to bring greetings on behalf of
the President's office. I'd like to pick up on some of Dr. Adams' comments and
roll things back a little bit. I'd like to start by recognizing a few of the significant
events that effectively have us all here today. To do that, we go back to 2001,
when Dr. Arthur Mauro made a significant donation to St. Paul's College to
create the Mauro Centre for Peace of Justice. From there, we gave rise to the
Ph.D. program in Peace and Conflict Studies that was started by Dr. Sean Burn
and Dr. Jessica Senehi.
Their program's gone on to pick up additional faculty members, Dr. Maureen
Flaherty and Dr. Hamdesa Tuso, and is now the academic home to more than 75
graduate students, a not insignificant program. [00:06:00] Last but not least, as
Dr. Adams has indicated, is Sol Kanee himself for his leadership and his vision. It
only goes to show that if you wrap all these things up, great things happen when
we all pull and work together.
I believe that the best is probably yet to come. Winnipeg is now home to the
Museum for Human Rights. The University of Manitoba is embarking on a
Master's in Human Rights graduate program and the University of Manitoba is
home to the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation. We're on the
precipice of something probably much more significant than we're currently
looking at. I would suggest that a global social justice spotlight is very succinctly
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focusing in on Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba, which takes me to
today's Sol Kanee lecture. Father Greg, I'm going to avoid the Father Boyle thing
because that just gets you in trouble.
One of the characteristics of Homeboy Industries is its website and the quote of
the day on the website, and earlier today, someone asked Father Greg for a
quote and I was going to slip him the one that I'd written down that I took off
the website when I went through weeks and weeks of quotes that are still up on
their website. The one that I liked was, "The measure of our compassion lies not
in our service to others but in our willingness to see ourselves connected to
them." The measure of our compassion lies not in our service to others but in
our willingness to see ourselves connected to them.
Think about it. Father Greg, welcome to the University of Manitoba. [00:08:00]
Congratulations on being this year's Sol Kanee lecturer. We're so pleased you're
here.
Father Eduardo:
The first time that I heard about Father Greg was here in Winnipeg. Even though
I became a Jesuit 17 years ago, I never heard about him until talking to an exoffender and gang-related friend who told me about him coming to Canada. He
talked with excitement that I quickly bought his book, Tattoos on the Heart, to
read about this man that sparked so much enthusiasm in my fellow friend, who
now sadly is again incarcerated for home invasion. I have to confess that I have
some [inaudible 00:08:48] against Jesuits in the United States, well not only in
the United States.
I was caught in the black and white mindset, or prestigious academics
supporting well established universities and education centers, or
troublemakers sent to the rural South, former third world, unsuitable neither
here nor there. All of them were bearing the benefit of the doubt of their good
intentions. That is also a Jesuit rule. My mindset was completely teared down
when I read his book. I discovered in the pages of Tattoos on the Heart a man
able to open up possibilities and get rid of conflict and violence through his
fierce appropriation of the reality that surrounds him.
His experience brought myself from a space of opposites and frustration to a
space of hope. According to his website, Father Greg [00:10:00] was born in Los
Angeles, one of eight children. After attending and graduating from St. Brendan
School and Loyola High School, he entered the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, and
was ordained priest in 1984. He received his BA in English from Gonzaga
University and MA in English from Loyola Marymount University and Master of
Divinity from the Western School of Theology, and a Sacred Theology Master's
Degree from the Jesuits School of Theology.
Father Greg taught at Loyola High School and worked with Christian Base
Communities in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Instead of going to Santa Clara University
to teach, he was appointed in 1986 as a pastor of Dolores Mission in the Boyle
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Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. This neighborhood, if you look at the
website of the LA Police, have 800,000 population and 5.62 square miles, among
the highest densities of the City of Los Angeles, faced activity of 24 violent
gangs, even though he said that in the parish, were only 8.
At the parish, Father Greg and many community members developed positive
alternatives to address the escalating problems and unmet needs of ganginvolved youth. These efforts included establishing of an elementary school, a
day care program, and finding legitimate employment for gang people. In 1992,
as a response to the civil unrest in Los Angeles, Father Greg launched the first
social enterprise business, Homeboy Bakery. The mission of Homeboy's model
of social enterprise is to create an environment that provides training, work
experience and allow opportunity for rival gang members to work side by side.
The success of the bakery created the groundwork for additional social
enterprise [00:12:00] businesses. Today, Homeboy Industry's non-profit
economic development enterprises include Homeboy Bakery, Homeboy
Silkscreen and Embroidery, Homeboy, Homegirl Merchandise, Homegirl Café
and Catering, Homeboy Farmers' Market and Homebody Dinner at Los Angeles
City Hall.
As Executive Director of Homeboy Industries and an acknowledgment as expert
on gangs and intervention approaches, Father Boyle is an internationally
renowned speaker. He has given commencement addresses at numerous
universities as well as spoken at conferences for teachers, social workers,
criminal justice workers and others about the importance of adult attention,
guidance and unconditional love in preventing youth from joining gangs.
Father Greg and several Homeys were featured speakers at many places, such
as the Whitehouse Conference on Youth in 2005 and in 2009, he was a member
of a 10-person California delegation to President Clinton's Summit on Children
in Philadelphia.
Father Greg is also a consultant to youth service and governmental agencies,
policymakers and employers. This is the activity that brought Father G to
Winnipeg 2 years ago. I had the opportunity not only to go to the conference
where he spoke, but also to share some free time as a fellow Jesuit and see the
profound commitment to boundless compassion rooted in his own upbringing.
The love, tears and hope that the book gave to me, and for sure to many other
of its readers, were real in his person. Also, I could see with my own eyes that
hope has an address in 130 Bruno Street in Los Angeles, California. I had the
privilege of visiting this awesome place [00:14:00] and being guided by one of
the Homeys, Gabriel, who explained to me the different programs they have,
the tattoo removal, the employment services, the case management, the legal
and educational services, mental health services and work training programs.
The list of awards of this man is impressive and you can look at on their website,
a lot. California Peace Prize granted by California Wellness Foundation, Life
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Achievement Award, Bon Appetit Award. He has a Bon Appetit too. Father Greg
also won the New York Times Bestselling book, Tattoos on the Heart, the Power
of Boundless Compassion, received in 2010 the Southern California Indie Book
Service Association as non-fiction book award, and was named as one of the
best books in 2010 by Publisher Weekly. The Best Debut Author also was
awarded and also winner of the 2011 Penn Center USA Literary Award for
Creative Non-fiction.
Homeboy Industries, now located in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, is
recognized at the largest gang intervention and reentry program in the world,
and has become an international model. Today, I am very happy as you all
noticed, to introduce to all of you the great, this great man that is making a
difference in the world, in deeds and words. Please give a round of applause to
the guest speaker of the 12th Annual Sol Kanee Lecture on Peace and Justice,
Father Gregory Boyle.
Father Gregory:
Thank you. I'm always sort of a basket case after this because a couple
[00:16:00] of those kids are gone. It just gets to me, maybe it's a little homesick
too. Anyway, it's a real privilege to be with all of you and what an honor to have
been here. People in Winnipeg are so good. I feel a little bit concerned because I
spoke of, well we had conversations or very simulating conversation with
students in the Peace and Conflict Studies program and that was so stimulating
and then yesterday morning, I had an opportunity to speak with a lot of folks
and community members, and then as Eduardo mentioned, 2 years ago, I spoke
at the Viscount Hotel to a whole bunch of people so I apologize if you've heard
some of my stuff before it happens.
Once, I was invited to speak at a foster grandparent gathering, a huge gathering
in Southern California. I had spoken at it the summer before, same people. I
don't know why they invited me two summers in a row but there you have it.
Afterwards, this grandmother came up to me and a foster grandmother and
she, I think she liked to talk. She had big tears in her eyes and she grabbed both
my hands and she said, "I heard you last year. It never gets better."
I was kind of hoping she misspoke there but anyway, it's the privilege of my life
for 30 years to have worked with gang members and the day will never come
when I have more courage or I am more noble or I'm closer to God than these
folks. [00:18:00] If people like Louis Perez, who was texting me this morning, he
helps run the place, been a heroin addict, gang member, shot caller, prisoner,
tattooed and now he runs the place, one of the several, and he's become
something of a public speaker in his own right. We went out to dinner not long
ago and he was giving me tips on how to speak publicly and he said, "You know,
you have to pepper your talk with self-defecating humor." I said, "Yeah, no shit."
So, brace yourselves. What brings you here in the afternoon when you could be
doing other things? It's a kind of a vision of wanting the world to look differently
than it currently looks. All of us have a vision that undergirds what we do every
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day. The prophet Habakkuk writes the vision still has its time, presses on to
fulfillment and it will not disappoint and if it delays, wait for it, but none of us
want to wait around ‘Quedarse con los Brazos cruzados,’ tapping our feet,
staring at our watches. We all want to make something happen. We want to roll
up our sleeves. We want to create something different.
What Martin Luther King says about church could well be said about at the Sol
Kanee lecture. This is not the place you've come to. It has always been the place
you will go from. You'll go from here to do something different and something
that reflects the kind of vision you have for how you hope the world might look.
What I want to suggest in the brief time I have with you that [00:20:00] what I
think we're called to create is in fact the community of kinship, such that God in
fact might recognize it. Mother Teresa I think diagnosed the world's ills correctly
when she suggested that the problem in the world is that we've just forgotten
that we belong to each other.
How do we stand against forgetting that? How do we imagine a circle of
compassion and then imagine nobody standing outside of it? How do we
dismantle the barriers that exclude? How do we inch our way out to the
margins? This is a word that Pope Francis uses a lot that gets translated
sometimes as edges, the periphery. How do we stand at the margins because
the truth about the margins is if you stand there, you look under your feet, the
margins are getting erased, precisely because you chose to stand there and you
stand with the specificity. You stand with the poor and the powerless and the
voiceless and you find a way to do that.
You stand with those whose dignity has been denied. You stand with those
whose burdens are more than they can bear, and every once in a while, you just
have this amazing privileged moment where you get to stand with the easily
despised and the readily left out, with the demonized, so that the demonizing
will stop and with the disposable so that the day will come when we stop
throwing people away. I suspect that if kinship happened to be our goal, we
would no longer be promoting justice. We'd be celebrating it. [00:22:00] Peace
and justice really is a byproduct of our kinship, because peace and justice won't
happen if you singularly focus on it. I think it can only happen if you work for
kinship and connection, if you stand against forgetting that we belong to each
other. Peace and justice will be a byproduct of that effort. No kinship, no peace,
no kinship, no justice. I think that's just how it works.
The Homeys have taught me everything of value and I couldn't be more grateful
to them, but in the last couple of years, they've taught me how to text and I'm
so grateful to them. I find that it sure beats the heck out of actually talking to
people, and I'm pretty good at it, kind of dexterous, LOL and OMG and BTW and
the Homeys have taught me a new one, OHN, which apparently stands for oh
hell no. I'm using that one quite a bit lately. I suspect I'm not alone in being
vexed by autocorrect, iPhone autocorrect and I had a Homegirl recently just on
a Sunday. Her name is Berta and she texted me, "Where you at?" I said, "I'm
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about to speak to a room full of monjas, which are nuns, sisters, about to speak
to a room full of monjas." I hit send and autocorrect sent her this message that I
was about to speak to a room full of ninjas. She thought that was pretty
interesting.
My worst one was a Homey who texted me, I've got five of those today that
said, "Hey, they cut off my phone [00:24:00] or my light bill or whatever." They
just didn't have money. I wrote, "Things are tight." When I pushed send,
autocorrect told them, "Thongs are tight." He wrote me back, "Sorry to hear
that. What about my rent?" Anyway, there I am in the car with two older
Homeys, Manuel and Poncho and they do a variety of things at Homeboy and
they're going to help me give a talk at a high school and Manuel's in the front
seat so we're driving about 15 minutes in and Manuel gets an incoming text that
he reads to himself and he chuckles and I said, "What is it?" He goes, "Oh it's
dumb. It's from Snoopy back at the office." Snoopy, I've just seen him and I gave
him a - I have water, yeah thank you. You all are very concerned about me.
Thank you and I appreciate it.
I'd just seen Snoopy and I'd just given him a big abrazote. Snoopy and Manuel
worked together in the clock-in room, where they clock in hundreds and
hundreds of our workers, and it's a tough job because gang members can
occasionally be attitudinal and so, I said, "What's he saying?" He goes, "Oh it's
dumb. Hung on. Hey Doug, it's me Snoops. Yeah they got my ass locked up at
county jail. They're charging me with being the ugliest [inaudible 00:30:43] in
America. You have to come down right now, show them they got the wrong
guy."
Well, we died laughing. I almost drove into oncoming traffic and then I realized
that Manuel and Snoopy are enemies. They're from rival gangs. [00:26:00] They
used to shoot bullets at each other. Now they shoot text messages and there's a
word for that and the word is kinship. How do we obliterate once and for all the
illusion that we are separate, that there is an us and a them? Everybody in this
room is engaged in some kind of service, from soup kitchens to working with
gang members or working on a side of town that's underserved. Everybody in
this room is engaged in some kind of service. Service is where you begin. You
never want to end there. Service is the hallway that gets you to the ballroom
and the ballroom is the place of kinship and connection. That's where you want
to end up, because truth be told, in service, there's a distance even. Sometimes,
I'm the service provider. You're the service recipient. You want to merge even
that. You don't want there to be any daylight that separates us between us and
them. You want to arrive at this exquisite mutuality.
One of the great privileges of my life was knowing Cesar Chavez as a friend, the
great farm worker leader, the starter of a movement. He was probably the best
listener I'd ever met in my life. If you were talking to Cesar Chavez, you were the
only person in the room. You're the only person who existed. He was never
looking over your shoulder to see if somebody more important was on the
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approach. It was only you, but quite famously, one of his reporter had
commented to him and said, "Wow, these farm workers, they sure love you."
Cesar just shrugged and smiled and said, "The feeling's mutual.", which again is
the whole [00:28:00] hope that somehow we arrive at this place where there is
no distance or daylight that separates us and Homeboy Industries, I'm not the
great healer and that gang member over there is in need of my exquisite
healing. Truth be told, we're all a cry for help. We're all in need of healing. It's
one of those things that unites us together as members of the human family.
I remember no Homey ever found more job opportunities than this guy
everybody called Dreamer. I knew him since he was a little [foreign language
00:28:34] growing up in the housing projects, a little guy and he grew up. I knew
his family and they were in my parish and I watched him get into a gang and a
very intelligent kid with a dangerous sense of humor that I always enjoyed, but
he never really did school and in his early 20s, he's in his 40s now, but in his
early 20s, he was a yo-yo, in and out of being locked up. I'd find him a job.
Nobody, we didn't find more jobs for any other person but this guy, private
sector, in one of our social enterprises, but he'd always gravitate back to vague
criminality before too long. It's anything, usually something that involved drugs,
the sale of or the use of and then he'd wander back to me asking for another
job. This went on for some time. He had finished a 4-month probation violation
in county jail and there he is sitting in front of me in my office and he says what
gang members often say, "This time it will be different."
I go, "Hmm, all right." With him sitting there, I call a friend of mine who runs a
vending machine company and he had hired Homeys in the past. I'm thinking
maybe he'll do it again, [00:30:00] and sure enough, he says, "Tell him he can
start tomorrow." That's a holy man right there. Jimmer began work the next day
at the vending machine company. Two weeks later, there he is again in front of
my desk. I go, "[foreign language 00:30:17] Here we go all over again.", but this
time, he pulls out of his pocket his very first paycheck and he waves it proudly
and he says, "Damn, G, this paycheck makes me feel proper. My mom, she's
proud of me and my kids, they're not ashamed of me, and you know who I have
to thank for this job." I said, "Well, gosh, who?" He looks at me strangely and he
says, "Well, God of course." I said, "That's right, that would be God, yeah." He
goes, "You thought I was going to say you." I said, "No, gosh. God's number 1."
He said, "You are so lucky we're not living in them Genesis days." "I'm sorry,
them Genesis days?"
He goes, "Yeah, because God would have been had struck down your ass
already by now," he said. All I really recall of that conversation is that we just
dissolved and laughed and we fell out of our chairs and I defy you to identify
exactly who's the service provider, who's the service recipient. I have no idea.
It's mutual. If you'll permit me, I want to take a little higher aerial view, because
why would this even matter, and I'm a priest, I'm a Jesuit and I think a lot
depends on what kind of God you have. [00:32:00] It helps you see. A couple of
weeks ago, the Pope was in the United States and a lot of people were talking
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about him. I was talking about Yogi Berra, the New York Yankees catcher and I
was a catcher when I was a kid on Little League. I always loved Yogi Berra. Later
on as an adult, I discovered that he was famous for having mangled the English
language and deja vu all over again. There's a whole list of things.
The Homeys mangle their language too, and they're famous for it all the time. I
wrote about it a little bit in my book, like for example, recently I had a Homegirl
named Lisa who works for me and her man came to pick her up after work and
she wanted to introduce him to me and she brings him in. She goes, "This is my
sufficient other." I said, "No doubt." Recently, I turned the reins over at running
the place so I have a CEO who does the day to day, which is a nice thing because
it's a $15 million annual operation. It's nice to have somebody else run it and a
Homey came into my office not long ago and he says, "Damn G, my lady, she is
in a bad mood today." I said, "Why?" "Well, she's beginning her administration
period." I said, "I just ended mine and I kinda know what she's going through."
My favorite one, and there's my point, happened when I was presiding at mass
in a juvenile detention facility in San Fernando Juvenile Hall in Sylmar, and we're
in a big gym and there are 300 kids there, [00:34:00] mainly gang members and
I'm vested and I had a little OHA, the sheet that has the readings in it, and
sometimes as a presider, I'm going to listen to the readings. I'm going to close
my eyes. I put the sheet on my lap and I listened to these gang members come
up and doing the readings and some kid, I think it was the Psalm. I was listening
with my eyes closed and he got up with something of an overabundance of
confidence and he said, "The Lord is exhausted." I go, "What the hell?" The Lord
is exalted.
I remember thinking at the time, "Wow, it's way better." I remember thinking,
"That's the God I want to know, the one that's exhausted." You know how you
would go up to somebody and say, "How are you feeling?" "Oh, I'm so tired but
it's a good tired." "Why?" "Well, I helped my friend move into her apartment or
I had the grandkids the whole week. I'm exhausted. I'm pooped, but it's a good
tired." Then just the thought of a God who exhausts God's self in being too busy
loving us to have any time left to be disappointed. Yeah, I like that God way
better than the exalted one or the one who cares about it being exalted. I know.
I think these things matter because how you see God is how you're going to see
folks who are broken and on the margins and it's the only way that you can have
mercy and recognize your wound and their wound.
Homeboy Industries started a long time ago. I had more hair and no gray.
[00:36:00] I was pastor of the poorest parish in the city of Los Angeles, Dolores
Mission, nestled in the middle of two public housing projects, Pico Gardens and
Aliso Village. It was the largest grouping of public housing west of Mississippi.
We had eight gangs in those projects, in my parish. There are more outside, but
just in my parish were eight, which is unheard of. Usually, you'd have one and all
the enemies would be outside, but we had eight and they're all at war with each
other, making it according to the LAPD, the place of the highest concentration of
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gang activity in Los Angeles. If LA is the gang capital of the world, my parish was
the gang capital of Los Angeles, which I didn't know when I drove up.
I buried my first young person killed in 1988 and I buried my 200th young
person 2 months ago, killed for no reason at all, not all of them from that parish
but I run a large gang intervention program so I get asked to do this. The first
thing we did was we started a school because there were so many junior high
aged, middle school aged gang members who had been given the boot from
their home school. Nobody wanted them so they were wreaking havoc in the
projects. They were violent. They were selling drugs. They were writing on walls.
I remember I walked out to them and I would corner them, isolate them. I'd say,
"Hey, if I found a school that would take you, would you go?" To my surprise,
every single one said yes.
Then I couldn't find a school that would take them, so that forced my hand.
Across the street from the church is our parochial elementary school, K-8, first
two floors. The entire third floor was the convent, where the ‘ninjas’ lived. I
gathered them all together in the living room and I said, "Hey, would you guys
mind [00:38:00] moving out and we could turn the convent into a school for
gang members?" They said sure. I don't know what we'd do without nuns. That
happened and gang members came in large numbers to the church, not to
church services but to our church complex, which upset the apple cart a little bit
because our church is supposed to be hermetically sealed, good people in, bad
people out, so that was a good gospel challenge.
They started saying, "If only we had jobs.", and so myself and the women in the
parish, we marched around the factories that surrounded the housing projects,
trying to find felony friendly employers and that wasn't so forthcoming. We
invented things. A crew to paint out graffiti and a landscaping crew and a light
maintenance crew and a crew to build our child care center, and in 1992, Los
Angeles had the civil unrest and everybody looked to our community to be one
of those that would predictably explode and we didn't. When the LA Times
asked me why is that, I said, "I think it's because we had 60 strategically hired
gang members working. They had a reason to get up in the morning, a reason
not to torch their community. They were invested."
A movie producer named Ray Stark, who happened to have $500 million,
summoned me and long story short, he said, "How would you use some of my
money?" I'd like to use all of it actually, but that was not on the table. I said,
"Why don't you buy this abandoned bakery across the street? It has [00:40:00]
ovens. We'll put hairnets on rival enemy gang members. They can bake bread
and we'll call it Homeboy Bakery." That's the extent of my business plan that I
presented to him and he said, "Sure." We were off and running. A month later,
we started Homeboy Tortillas in the Grand Central Market. Once we had plural,
we changed our name from Jobs for a Future to Homeboy Industries, as if there
was any industry involved in this.
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Not everything worked, I'll be the first to admit it. Homeboy Plumbing really was
not hugely successful. Who knew people didn't want gang members in their
homes? I did not see that coming. Nobody ever intends to do such a thing, but
we backed our way now into becoming the largest gang intervention program
and reentry program on the planet. 15,000 folks a year walk through our doors
and just about anything that you think might be helpful, we try to do. The
centerpiece is our 18-month training program. Every gang member wants to get
in that. We have a lot of curricular offerings from anger management to
parenting, to grief and loss. We still have the school, tons of 12-step programs, a
case management for all our trainees, mental health therapy. We have five paid
therapists and 42 volunteer therapists and psychiatrists who prescribe medicine
when needed, free tattoo removal, no place on the planet removes more
tattoos, gang-related tattoos than we do I suppose.
We have three laser machines and a designated clinic. [00:42:00] We have one
paid physician assistant but we have 47 volunteer doctors, thousands and
thousands of treatments a year. If any of you are starting to regret that
University of Manitoba tattoo you have, see me afterwards. You're not laughing
so I take it you have one of those tattoos. That's a clear indicator. It all started
because of a guy named Frank, who wandered into my office. I'd never met him
before. I didn't know him. Two days out of Corcoran State Prison and he's sitting
in front of my desk and tattooed on his forehead filling the entire space like a
billboard, and pardon my French, it said, "Fuck the world.", filled the whole
space. He said, "You know, I am having a hard time finding a job."
I said, "Well Frank, maybe we could put our heads together on this one." I was
thinking, "Where do I send him? To McDonald's?" Do you want fries with that?
No, I don't want fries. Mothers clutching their kids running out of the store.
Naturally, I hired him and he baked bread, he bagged bread for 2 years and so I
went looking for a doctor and I found a doctor at White Memorial Hospital who
had a laser machine and he gave me 1 hour a month to chip away at Frank's
forehead and a few others. Before long, I had a waiting list of 3,000 gang
members who wanted the same service, so we couldn't really stay with that
arrangement. A parenthesis, Frank is now a security guard at a movie studio in
Hollywood and there is no trace left of the dumbest, angriest thing he'd ever
done, proving once [00:46:00] and for all, as Sister Helen Prejean says, "All of us
are a whole lot more than the worst things we've ever done."
What else? We have all our training programs, solar panel installation training
program. That's hugely successful and we're able to locate incredible jobs after
that. We have all our social enterprises, which have grown to 10. I can never get
them all but the bakery, which is thriving and Homeboy/Homegirl merchandise
and Homeboy silkscreen, which is huge, been around for 21 years. Homeboy
Diner, which is the only place you can get food at City Hall in Los Angeles. I'm
missing a lot. Homeboy Grocery, which is where you buy our chips and salsas at
a whole chain of stores in California. Farmers Markets, we have a lunch truck.
We have two venues at LAX, so if you fly to American Airlines over at Terminal 4,
2015 Sol Kanee Lecture – Fr. Gregory Boyle, SJ
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United Airlines, Terminal 6, and Homegirl Café, where women with records,
young ladies from rival gangs, waitresses with attitude, will gladly take your
order.
It's become something of a famous place at any given time. Do you know actor
Jack Black? He was in there a couple of weeks ago. Jim Carrey has been there
numerous times, pandemonium whenever he's there. It's selfies all over the
place. A couple of months ago, with only 2 hours notice from the Secret Service,
we had Vice President Joe Biden wanted to have lunch there. It was motorcade
and entourage and I was making my 8-day annual silent [00:46:00] retreat so I
wasn't there. I get a voicemail message, "Hey, Father Boyle, this is Joe Biden."
He doesn't even say Vice President. "This is Joe Biden. Wow, Homeboy
Industries.", like an old shoe. At one point he says, "I tell everybody who will
listen, the only reason I stay a Catholic is we've got Jesuits and nuns." I said, "Me
too, Joe."
I wasn't there so I had to get the debrief and there was a Homey named Louie
who came up to me and said, "While you were gone, we were visited by an
MVP." I said, "Do you mean VIP?" "That one, VIP." He goes, "Damn G, imagine
here at Homeboy Industries, we were visited by the Vice President of the United
States, Mick Romney." I swear to you, you couldn't make that up so I'm thinking
of adding a current affairs class to our curriculum. Most famously, Diane Keaton
came once for lunch and she's a movie star, actress, Academy Award winner,
Annie Hall, Godfather movies, big movie star. She's there with a regular, a guy
who's there once a week. Her waitress is Glenda and Glenda's a big girl, been
there, done that, tattooed, gang member, felon, parolee. She has no clue who
Diane Keaton is, and so she's taking her order and Diane Keaton says, "What do
you recommend?"
Glenda rattles off the three platios that she really likes and Diane Keaton says,
"I'll have that second one. That one sounds good." Suddenly, something dawns
on Glenda. She looks at Diane Keaton and she says, "Wait a minute. I feel like I
know you from somewhere, like maybe we've met." Diane Keaton decides to
deflect it humbly, "Oh gosh, I don't know. I suppose [00:48:00] I have one of
those faces that people think they've seen before." Then Glenda goes, "No, now
I know, we were locked up together." Honest to God, that just took my breath
away when I heard it. I don't believe we've had any further Diane Keaton
sightings now that I think of it.
Suddenly, kinship so quickly, Oscar-winning actress, attitudinal waitress, exactly
what God had in mind. What is on God's mind? Again, if you'll permit me here,
you need I think need only go to hear Jesus say to the gathered that you maybe
one. I suppose he could have said more stuff about himself but he doesn't want
it to be about himself. He wants it to be about us. I invite you to take a leisurely
stroll through the Acts of the Apostles and what you will discover beyond the
quaint snapshot of life in the earliest Christian community is in fact the measure
of health in any community at all, including here. Things will leap off the page,
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things like see how they love one another. That's not a bad measurement.
There's nobody needy in this community, equally a great metric, but my favorite
one is an odd one and it says just simply, “and awe came upon everyone.” It
would seem that the measure of the health of any community at all may well
reside in its ability to stand in awe at what the poor [00:50:00] have to carry
rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.
All of us are called to be what Alice Miller, the late great child psychologist
called Enlightened Witnesses, people who through your kindness and
tenderness and focused attentive love, return people to themselves. At
Homeboy Industries, we go out of our way not to hold the bar up and ask
people to measure up. We just want to show up and hold the mirror up and tell
people the truth, knowing that my truth is your truth and your truth is a gang
member's truth and it all happens to be the same truth, then here's the truth.
You are exactly what God had in mind when God made you.
Then you watch folks on the margins as they become that truth, as they inhabit
that truth and no bullet can pierce it. No four prison walls can keep it out and
death can't touch it because it's huge, but it is a task at Homeboy Industries
always to reach in and dismantle the messages of shame and disgrace that get
in the way, that keep people from seeing their truth. We were talking about this
at lunch. Marcus Borg, the late also great Scripture scholar, used to say that the
principal suffering of the poor throughout history and throughout Scripture is
shame and disgrace. I think that's quite right. That's the thing you have to
contend with.
I remember some years ago, I was invited to speak to 600 social workers in
Richmond, Virginia and I wasn't paying that much attention. I always say
[00:52:00]yes to things and then only months later, what is this thing? I look,
pulled out the letter and I figure I'm a keynote, maybe to open, close, lunch, I
look at it and it's a one-day conference from 9 to 5. It's a gang in-service. I am to
be the only speaker from 9 to 5. I call two Homeys in Andre and Jose. I sit them
down and I said, "Look, you're flying with me to Richmond, Virginia." I'd like you
to get up and tell your stories, take your time because we've got a long-ass day
to fill.
I had never heard their stories. Jose gets up. He's 25 years old and a gang
member, tattooed, been to prison of course and started like anybody does in
our 18-month program in what we call the humble place, the first 3 months,
their first phase is cleaning toilets. It's like an equalizer. Somebody comes in, I'm
a shot caller in my gang, great, toilets. Everybody does toilets. It's a great way to
start. He worked his way up. He ended up becoming a valued member of our
substance abuse team, a man very, very solid in his own recovery and now he
was helping younger guys and women with their addiction issues, a man who
had spent a long stretch of time as a homeless man and an even longer stretch
as a heroin addict.
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He gets up in a self-effacing way to begin his talk and he said, "I guess you could
say my mom and me, we didn't get along so good. I think I was 6 when she
looked at me and she said, 'Why don't you just [00:54:00] kill yourself? You're
such a burden to me.'" 600 social workers audibly gasped and then he says, "It
sounds way worser in Spanish." We got whiplash going from gasp to laugh. Then
he said, "I think I was 9 when my mom drove me down to the deepest part of
Baja, California and she walked me up to an orphanage. She knocked on the
door. When the guy came to the door, she said, 'I found this kid.', and she left
me there for 90 days until my grandmother could get out of where she had
dumped me and my grandmother rescued me. My mom beat me every single
day of my elementary school years with things you could imagine and a lot of
things you couldn't. Every day, my back would be bloodied and scarred. In fact,
I'd have to wear three t-shirts to school every day. The first t-shirt, because the
blood would seep through, and the second t-shirt you could still see it. Finally,
the third t-shirt, you couldn't see any blood.
Kids at school, they'd make fun of me, 'Hey fool, it's 100 degrees. Why are you
wearing three t-shirts?'" Then he couldn't speak any longer, so overwhelmed
with emotion. He seemed to be staring at a piece of his story that only he could
see. When he could regain speech, he said through his tears, "I wore three tshirts well into my adult years because I was [00:56:00] ashamed of my wounds.
I didn't want anybody to see them, and now I welcome my wounds. I run my
fingers over my scars, my wounds are my friends. After all, how can I help heal
the wounded, if I don't welcome my own wounds?" Awe came over everyone.
The measure of our compassion lies not in our service of those on the margins
but only in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them.
If you don't welcome your own wound, you will tend to despise the wounded. In
the state of California, because we don't welcome our own brokenness, we take
the broken and we build prisons to house them. Getting the diagnosis right is
everything. We were talking about this yesterday with a lot of stakeholders here
in Winnipeg. Nobody has ever met a treatment plan worth anything that was
born of a bad diagnosis. I don't believe that's ever happened. Years ago, I was
diagnosed eventually with leukemia. I'm feeling okay at the moment, I'm here,
or as the Homeys still say, "I hear your cancer's in [00:58:00] intermission." I
said, "Yeah, apparently it stepped out to the lobby to buy popcorn, may the line
be long."
A funny thing giving the blood next door [a blood donor clinic was operating in a
room adjacent to the lecture hall]. I used to always give blood. That was a
regular feature of my life because myself and my dad, we always had blood that
anybody could use. I went to give blood and the guy kind of blanched and he
said, "You need to go to your doctor." So, I went to my doctor who I don't ever
go to anymore and he said, "You have mono." I think we can all agree there's a
difference between mononucleosis and leukemia. Only a year later did I
discover that I had leukemia and I had to be raced into chemo.
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A bad diagnosis is never neutral. It always puts you behind the 8-ball. You have
to play catch up. It does damage, the thought you got it right. You want to get it
right, but this kind of thing, urban violence and gang violence, we always get it
wrong. We diagnose it so crazily. We always think kids are drawn to gangs, join
the gangs, see the world, wine, women and song, not true, then you might even
say gang members have told us that's the truth. You believe them? It's easier to
say that I joined a gang because I wanted to belong and they're my second
family and they have my back. It's easier to say that than to say, "My mom used
to put cigarettes out on me and she used to put my head in the toilet and flush
until I nearly drowned." That's hard to say. It's easier to say, "I joined a gang
because I wanted to belong. No kid is seeking anything when he joins a
[01:00:00] gang, always fleeing something. I've never met the exception and I've
been doing this a long time.
Gangs are the places kids go when they've encountered their life is a misery.
Who doesn't know by now that misery loves company? Gang violence is the
urban poor's version of teenage suicide. Often enough, it's how they act this
out. If a kid can't imagine or conjure up an image of what tomorrow looks like,
then his present isn't very compelling and if his present doesn't compel him,
then he won't care whether he inflicts harm and he won't care whether he
ducks to get out of harm's way. It's how it works. You want to get this right.
I was telling this yesterday and I hate to repeat myself but there I am on the Dr.
Phil Show and I know what was I thinking, but we thought we had talked the
producers down for doing something stupid and there I am backstage and I
could hear Dr. Phil say, "Now ladies and gentlemen, the Executive Director and
Founder of Homeboy Industries, Father Greg Boyle." I walked out there and
their bleachers' filled with people and they're clapping. To my horror, there's
Phil sitting on the stage on a stool. My empty stool is next to him awaiting me,
but on his side of the stage is a gorgeous Mahogany coffin on those four-wheel
dollies. On my side of the stage is a perfectly reconstructed jail cell with bed and
toilet and sink and bars. They went to great expense for these two set pieces.
They flew out 14 year old, 15 year old, 16 year old boys, African American,
Latino, Caucasian, three kids who apparently had been [01:02:00] gravitating
perilously close to gang involvement, with their very distraught single mothers.
One by one, they brought the kids out and they would sort of, Phil would grab
each one figuratively by the lapel and say, "Don't you see where this choice is
leading you? To death or prison." Finally, by the third kid, I had to intervene. It
was more than I could take. I said, "Phil, how do I break this to you? These kids
know this better than either of us know it. They know it will end in death or
prison. They don't care that it will." That's the key diagnostic moment. If you
know that that's the diagnosis, that will lead you down the path that will lead to
a treatment plan worthy of this complex social dilemma.
There is only three profiles of kids who join gangs, not five, not eight, only three.
There's the despondent kid who can't imagine tomorrow. There's the
2015 Sol Kanee Lecture – Fr. Gregory Boyle, SJ
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traumatized kid who cannot see his way clear to transform his pain so he keeps
transmitting it, and then there's the mentally ill kid and they're all on a
continuum of severity, from this kid's more despondent than mentally ill. This
kid is more traumatized than mentally ill. If we knew that to be the case as I
would bet my entire life on it, we would infuse hope to kids for whom hope is
foreign and we would help heal the traumatized and we’d deliver mental health
services in a timely and culturally appropriate way.
Thank you for clapping periodically because then I could take a swig of water
and I'm very grateful to you. I'm battling some kind of thing. Let me end with
this story and then we're going to open it up for some [01:04:00] questions and
hopefully some answers. I’ll anticipate a question. One question that always
comes up is about enemies working side by side with each other. It's decidedly
dicey. A kid will come in and say, "I'm ready, ready, ready." Then I'll say, "Okay, I
have an opening in the bakery but you have to work with X, Y and Z and I rattled
off the names of rivals, enemies." They always think for a long time and then
they say, "Okay, I'll work with them. I'm not going to talk to them."
I remember how in the early days how much that bothered me, because it just
did, and I got panicked about it until you discover of course that it's impossible
for human beings to demonize people they know. Humans can't pull that off.
Humans can't sustain that. I had a kid, a little short guy, 19 years old, everybody
called him Youngster. I thought he was ready so I bring him into our Homeboy
Silkscreen factory, which is a huge facility off-campus from our headquarters,
thousands and thousands of gang members have worked side by side there over
the last 2 decades. I introduced Youngster to his 30 co-workers and I watch him
as he shakes hands with each one, looks them in the eye, firm handshake and
there were a lot of enemies, a lot of rivals. I remember thinking, "Wow this is
great.", until he gets to the last guy, and the last guy seems to be wanting to
avoid this encounter altogether, a kid everybody called Puppet.
When Puppet and Youngster are in each other's vicinity, they mumble
something, they stare at their shoes, they don't shake hands. I know they're
enemies because I know what gangs they're from but he just finished shaking
hands with a whole bunch of enemies. [01:06:00] I discovered later that this is a
hatred that's really quite deep and personal, beyond which neither of them
think they can get past. I sensed that much at the moment and I said, "Look, if
you guys can't hang working together, let me know. I got a bunch of people who
want this job." [foreign language 01:06:21], I hate those, they don't say a word.
6 months later, Puppet leaves his house, walks to a corner store some distance
from his home and he buys something. On his way home for some reason, he
decides to take a shortcut so he dodges into an alley and because he took this
detour, suddenly, unexpectedly, he's surrounded by 10 members of a rival gang,
10 against 1. They beat him badly.
He falls to the ground, and while he's lying there, they will not stop kicking his
head until he's lifeless. Somebody finds his body and takes him to White
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Memorial Hospital, where he's declared effectively brain dead, but it's the policy
there to keep you connected to machines for 48 hours so you can get a flat read
with no brain activity, and if it's flat for 2 days, then the doctors can sign the
death certificate and make it official. This allowed family and friends to gather. I
was giving a talk at St. Louis University. I flew home immediately. I've seen a lot
of horrible things in my life but nothing to compare to the sight of this young
man with his head swollen many times its size. It was horrifying. You could
barely train your eyes on him.
[01:08:00] At the end of the 48-hour period, as a priest, I said a blessing prayer. I
gave him [foreign language 01:13:13]. I anointed his forehead with oil. We
disconnected and a week later, we buried him. In the first 24 hours, as Puppet
was lying beaten in the hospital and I was alone in my office at 8:30 at night, the
phone rings and it's Youngster, Puppet's co-worker from the Silkscreen factory.
"Hey.", he says, "That's messed up, about what happened to Puppet." I said,
"Yeah, it is." Then with a certain kind of eagerness even, he says, "Is there
anything I can do? Can I give him my blood?" We both fell silent under the
weight of it, until finally he broke the silence, choking back his tears and he said
with great deliberation, "He was not my enemy. He was my friend. We work
together."
Can I say that always happens at Homeboy Industries? Of course it does. Any
exceptions? No. I can't think of a single one. It shouldn't surprise us that God's
own dream come true for us that we be one just happens to be our own
deepest longing for ourselves, for it turns out, it's mutual. You find your way out
to the margins because [01:10:00] you know that if you stand there, look under
your feet, the margins are getting erased because you stood there, and then
brace yourselves because people will accuse you of wasting your time. The
prophet Jeremiah writes, "In this place, for in this place in which you say it is a
waste, there will be heard again the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness,
the voices of those who sing.", and we're called to make those voices heard, for
this lecture is not the place you've come to, it's always been the place you will
go from. For the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment and it will not
disappoint, and if it delays, we wait for it.
Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you. Some of you need to go to class
and some of you don't want to go to class and they were going to do question
and answers. Yes, you want to say something? Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
We have two microphones, one on the right and one on the left, so if you just
raise your hands, we'll try and bring a microphone around to you as quickly as
possible. [01:12:00]
Speaker 6:
Father, could you talk a little bit about racism? Much of the margins in Winnipeg
relate to racism and I wonder if you could speak about racism at Homeboy.
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Father Gregory:
I don't think I'm all that good at that. Our program is not for those who need
help. It's only for those who want it. You have to walk through the door. It's like
recovery. No amount of me wanting that guy to have a life is the same as that
guy wanting to have it. It's just like recovery. Recovery, they say it takes what it
takes. Who and why walks through our doors? Why would they walk through?
It's the death of a friend, the birth of a son, the long stretch in prison, whatever.
As I mentioned, those eight gangs we had, seven were Latino and one was
African American. Within no time at all, the African American CRIPS set moved
out of the projects.
The area in which we moved to our second and our third headquarters was in
what they called the Hollenbeck Police precinct, 40 gangs, 10,000 gang
members, all Latino. We had that reputation for a time that we only helped
Latino gang members, and the truth is we help anybody who walks through the
doors. If African American gang members don't walk through the doors, there's
not much that we can do. We can't do quotas. We don't recruit, because we
know how it works. There isn't a gang member in LA County who doesn't know
about Homeboy Industries.
By the time we got to our fourth headquarters in 2008, that's when we started
to see [01:14:00] that we were serving the whole county. Of course, in the
California prisons, African American gang members and Latino gang members, it
doesn't matter anymore who your enemies are among the Latinos. It's about
race. That's an added complication at Homeboy. We have men, women, African
American, Latino, Asian. We even have white supremacists, which is an
interesting mix. They come out of prison. They have Swastikas all over the place,
and if they're willing to change their lives, why wouldn't we be willing to help
them do it?
We try to model what it is for people to not demonize, and the truth is you can't
demonize people you know. There are a lot of systemic structural things in your
question and I don't know how to address it except that in the end, kinship will
win the day. That may seem kind of lofty, but kinship is about just being
persevering in the notion that we have to stand against forgetting that we
belong to each other, recognizing that for example in California prisons, they're
just filled with poor men of color. All the while, you're trying to announce that
as an injustice. You're trying to show a light on that reality, but the truth is, at
Homeboy, we're trying to work with people, one person at a time, knowing that
if you stand at the margins, people start to question the margins. If you stand at
the margins, people start to say, "Why are you standing there?" I think that's
important because people will ask you why you're standing there.
It's less about having a program; how [01:16:00] do we address racism. I think
you chip away at stuff and it is the slow work of God to acknowledge that we
belong to each other and that widening the circle so that nobody is outside of it
is a daily constant struggle and you have to engage in it. I don't have any kind of
magic wand how to address racism. I think there are so many complex things
2015 Sol Kanee Lecture – Fr. Gregory Boyle, SJ
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especially in the United States in terms of policing that I think they really do
believe that their task is to get the bad guy and the bad guy doesn't belong to
them and the bad guy to them is often a poor man of color.
That's a cultural shift in how you do policing and we've made progress but we
have a long way to go.
Speaker 7:
Doesn't the United States itself as a country with racial segregation that is
mirrored in the prison populations in the United States, because what you find
in terms of empirical evidence about good behavior in prisons, in particular US
prisons, is that they're highly racialized. You are from Homeboy. How do you
actually take on that task of de-racializing these guys who come in with very
fixed notion of race, very ignorant and I guess very brainwashed and with a
violent, with high levels of violent tendencies to hate the other. How do you deracialize Latinos compared to African American, compared to white, compared
to Asian? How do you do that at Homeboy? I guess [01:18:00] you've been
successful. I've never heard about it, but clearly it's been a successful industry.
How do you do it in the United States where people are heavily racialized?
Father Gregory:
I don't think we ever - we never deal with things head on. We never said, "Let's
talk about we know that you guys are enemies, you're from rival gangs so we're
going to sit you down." We never do that. We know that you're African
American, you're Latino. In prison, you guys don't get along. We're going to deal
with that. We don't. I was saying earlier that Richard Rohr, the theologian says
that, "Women work things out face to face. Men work things out shoulder to
shoulder." By and large, we work things out shoulder to shoulder. We don't
articulate it. It's utterly reliable. It will always work out. Again, there is
absolutely no exception to this. After they finish their time here that they hang
on to this racial disparity, it doesn't happen. It just tells us something about
human nature. Put people together and then pretty soon people go, by osmosis
they actually discover, "wow, we're actually similar. We're not dissimilar. My
God, we have the same issues. My God, we've been traumatized by the same
things. We've shared a torturous childhood. We have that in common."
That stuff happens very, very fast, without anybody sitting down. Let's talk
about the racial divide that we've experienced. Never happens at Homeboy. I'm
really glad it doesn't because it's more organic. It's more natural and it's utterly
reliable, utterly. In fact, you'll find folks being in photographs together and
sometimes, they'll comment on it and then they'll have their arm around and
they said, "We'd never do this in prison." They always say stuff like that. Again,
you don't want to force stuff. People come at their own time. [01:20:00] I heard
a Homey the other day describe Homeboy Industries. He goes, "Here, we laugh
from the stomach." I'd never heard that before. I thought, "Yeah, I get what it is.
It's genuine. It's deep. It's profound. It's universal. We all share it. Yeah, here we
laugh from the stomach.
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I asked a Homey the other day, a little guy, a minor who came from school. He
was just sitting in my office. He deposited his backpack for safekeeping. They all
do that in my office. They know that no one will enter my office to steal their
backpack, which is true. He's just sitting there and I'm writing something. I said,
"Hang on a second." I said, small talk, "How'd you get here today?" "Oh I
walked." "Oh okay." Then he says, "actually, I came running." I looked at him
and we both connected. I said, "Yeah, that's right. You came running. I get it."
It's a place that's spacious and generous and accepting and boundless and it's
love. If love is the answer, community is the context, tenderness is the
methodology and tenderness is the most foreign thing that a gang member has
ever experienced, and it's liberating. Everybody finds transformation. I do not
transform that kid but we both find transformation in that place and there's a
difference there.
A PBS reporter finished that interview by saying, "How does it feel to have saved
thousands and thousands of lives?" I said, "I don't know what you're talking
about. All I know is [01:22:00] my life has been changed by the people here in
this place. In fact, every day, I come running." Yes?
Speaker 8:
I wonder if you can reconcile for me if you will the central image of kinship that
you keep on coming back to with people who would speak of language of
professionalism and appropriate boundaries and care for the caregiver and a
like question is whether there is a union and whether you could imagine your
industry being the same with the union.
Father Gregory:
Say it again, say that, the second part.
Speaker 8:
Is there a union?
Father Gregory:
A union?
Speaker 8:
Yeah. Is Homeboy Industries unionized?
Father Gregory:
No, I'll answer that first part. We're a training program and we're a therapeutic
community. It kind of is a language that we wouldn't necessarily understand.
We want them to move on after 18 months. It's hard for them because they
don't want to, because it's kind of a cocoon. It's a nest. It's a comfort zone. We
want them to always feel that way. Homeys will come back. It's a touch stone of
tenderness where they can come and a kid came in the other day, used to work
for us years and years ago or was in our training program. I said, "What are you
doing?" "It's my day off. I came to get my fix." I said, "Fix of what?" He goes,
"Love." I get it. I know exactly what that is.
I think the question about boundaries is really a good one. We're so terrified,
terrified and in the end, [01:24:00] tell me how we can do this without it being
relational. I don't know how, and we think it can happen without entering into a
relationship, without being connected to each other and I don't know how,
2015 Sol Kanee Lecture – Fr. Gregory Boyle, SJ
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because then we have this idea that if we just deliver services fast enough, and
here are the list of services, and often enough, it's the outsider view designing
the list of services without really listening to people.
The people who I want to work at Homeboy Industries are the ones who stop
into my office at the end of the day and they say, "I don't know where I would
be without this place. This place saved my life today." Senior staff will say that
all the time, and I go, "Yes, that's the person I want to have work here."
Otherwise, you have people who are there to fix bad people or fix the broken
people and I don't want those people working at Homeboy. The people who can
say, "I am the healer," instead of, "I need healing." I want the person who says,
"I need healing." In the end, they have a greater capacity to receive people
because they're connected. Their brokenness connects to the woundedness of
those who walk through our doors.
I get the boundary thing but I don't know how we do this unless it's utterly
totally relational where you're connected to people. If it's dispassionate delivery
of services, well then you're the Department of Motor Vehicles. I'm not that
interested in that. Call me old fashioned. Yeah?
Speaker 1:
This will be our last question.
Father Gregory:
Oh really?
Speaker 9:
It's not a question. Thank you so much, Father Greg. At our church, [01:26:00]
one of our ministers and colleagues, Dr. Carl Ridd, taught us to say in the Lord's
Prayer, the kindom of God rather than the kingdom of God and I really
appreciate it you're making me really understand that today, the kindom of
heaven. Thank you so much.
Father Gregory:
you have one more over there?
Speaker 10:
Yeah, it's a nuts and bolt kind of a question. Do you have difficulty finding
enough employers to work with after your Homeys have done their 18 months
and do you support those employers, let's say as much as you support the
Homeys?
Father Gregory:
Yeah, it's a tough thing. It's hard to find employers willing to give them a chance.
We've been around for 27 years so we've been able to nurture a lot of
employers to be able to help them. A lot of times, they're nervous, and again
you can't demonize people you know and they'll go, "Okay, send me
somebody.", and they're quite terrified of that prospect. Then you send them
somebody and they go, "Wow, this guy's great. He's interesting. He's funny. He's
on time. Can you send us somebody else like him as well?" That happens but it's
just because we have this notion that keeps us from yeah, go ahead shout it out
and this will be the last one and I'll end with something.
2015 Sol Kanee Lecture – Fr. Gregory Boyle, SJ
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Speaker 11:
I'm just wondering in terms of if you could identify general risk factors for kids
and young adults. What I'm wondering is my understanding of gangs is that they
provide a sense of false family, to the gang member family. They provide
excitement. If you're selling drugs and you're doing well, you may be making a
lot of money, so can see how your organization would successfully substitute
the relationships, but how do you counteract that need for excitement, that
need for more money?
Father Gregory:
I think it's all myth. The three things you said are all myths, it seems to me.
[01:28:00] We perpetuate myths. We like myths. How are you going to keep
them down on the farm after they've made money hand over for selling drugs.
It's like a second family. It's protection, excitement. Law enforcement always
says excitement. When they go out and talk about gangs, they always say it's
excitement. I go, "Are you kidding me?" That's the biggest myth, as if
somebody's going, "wow, yes I'm going to join that group because it looks
exciting." No kid joins a gang because he wants to belong. He joins a gang
because he would like very much to die. Then you go, "no, wait a minute. I've
talked to gang members and they've told me excitement." I go, "Yeah, I know
they have." No, not even a slice of it is true, and that's really important because
you want to get underneath it. You want to say, "Wow, what is this about?"
Again, there's no substitute for having a reason to get up in the morning and a
reason not to gang bang at night and a reason for your mom to be proud of you
and a reason for your kids not to be ashamed of you. That beats any amount of
money you make as a drug dealer. Always, always, there's no exception. You go,
"well, wait a minute, there are guys making money selling drugs." Trust me. 95%
of all gang members want what every single guy in our office has, which is
purpose.
It's like recovery. It's hard for people. It's hard for people to walk in the door but
they all want it because they're human beings.
Speaker 11:
[inaudible 01:34:54]
Father Gregory:
Yeah, because I think in the end, it's important to debunk what we've come to
believe. Most of it is mythic. Once you get underneath it, you go, "Wow, this kid
[01:30:00] is fleeing something. Let's address what they're fleeing." Every kid
who comes into our offices comes with a disorganized attachment. Mom was
frightening or frightened and you can't calm yourself down if you've never been
soothed and that's how that works. We engage in attachment repair that
happens in a community that's real, that sheds light on their fake, false, shallow,
empty gang past, but you can't shake your finger at it. You have to help them
put their finger on it. Then in the light of real community, they can see what
that was, which is really the hard work where they have to re-identify who they
are in the world. “I used to be that. That was the old version of me and now I'm
this, exactly what God had in mind when God made me,” paradise. Thank you.
2015 Sol Kanee Lecture – Fr. Gregory Boyle, SJ
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Speaker 1:
We would now call upon Ms. Danielle Felicia, who's a Ph.D. candidate in the
Mauro [Centre] Peace and [Conflict]Studies program to deliver a note of
appreciation.
Danielle:
Over the past couple of days, I've had the honor of hearing Father Boyle in
various settings and community settings and in luncheons and had
conversations with him and I've noticed a few words come up frequently.
You've all heard them today and their tenderness, kinship, compassion and
healing and I think more than anything, Father Boyle embodies these words and
it's so refreshing to meet somebody who walks what they talk [01:32:00] and
he's brought such humility, wisdom and kindness to our community and I'm
truly grateful to have you here and it's my profound honor to present you with
this token of our appreciation.
Father Gregory:
I have a feeling I will know you forever. I don't know if you have the same
feeling. Here we go, let's just take a picture. You got it?
Danielle:
All right.
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
END
2015 Sol Kanee Lecture – Fr. Gregory Boyle, SJ
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