All the grace

I copy the words that have struck me in my little journal. My tiny cursive letters mixed with tiny print ones. The tiny squares are satisfying to my eyes but I have to work hard to keep my letters in. I make them fit though, because I anticipate there is much from the pages that I am reading that I will copy here today. I thought, when I first picked up this small book that it would be a quick read. It would be if I could stop taking notes, if I could stop crying between them and if I didn’t feel the need to read them slowly, marinating over them. This morning I stop to wipe tears from my eyes and catch the faint smell of onions even after many days of hand washing and proceed to copy from the pages.

First, G’s words to La Shady after she asks him about a dream she had the night before, which turns out to be the night before she dies. He says, “God only wants you to feel those things, mijita–love in your heart…peace, You’re okay.”

He continues,

“Now what does the dream mean, told to me just hours before Shady’s life was to end? I have no idea. Except that we are unfailingly called to stand with Shady and all those who grieved her passing. Beyond that, I don’t really know. Allowing our hearts to “be broken by the very thing that breaks the heart of God.” In the end, what needs to get disrupted will find its disruption in our solidarity and in our intimate kinship with the outcast–who too infrequently knows the peace of a white dove resting on a shoulder. What is the failure of death, after all, when it is measured against what rises in you when you catch sight of this white bird?

Nietzsche writes, “The weight of all things needs to be measured anew.” 

Enough death and tragedy come your way, and who would blame you for wanting a new way to measure. 

If we choose to stand in the right place, God, through us, creates a community of resistance without our even realizing it. To embrace the strategy of Jesus is to be engaged with what Dean Brackley calls “downward mobility.” Or locating ourselves with those who have been endlessly excluded becomes an act of visible protest. For no amount of our screaming at the people in charge to change things can change them. The margins don’t get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them.

The trickle-down theory doesn’t really work here. The powers bent on waging war against the poor and the young and the “other” will only be moved to kinship when they observe it. Only when we can see a community where the outcast is valued and appreciated will we abandon the values that seek to exclude.”

On the next page he writes, “Without meaning to, we sometimes allow our preference for the poor to morph into a preference for the well-behaved and the most likely to succeed, even if you get better outcomes when you work with those folks. If success is our engine, we sidestep the difficult and belligerent and eventually abandon “the slow work of God.” 

Failure and death become insurmountable.” 

Down near the bottom of the page G quotes the Spiritual guide at Homeboy Industries, who says, “We see in the homies what they don’t see in themselves, until they do.” 

G writes about another homegirl, 

“I suppose we could have fired her. And yet we decided, with all the “no matter whatness” we could muster, that she would give up on us long before we would ever give up on her. And give up she did. She just stopped showing up. We’ll be ready for her when she comes back. 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 behaviour is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.” 

—Tattoos on the Heart by Gregory Boyle 

I wrote in my journal: 

 – The slow work of God

 – Seeing in another – what they do not see in themselves, until they do – worth!

 – the no matter whatness of Jesus love

 – kinship

 – the vocabulary of the deeply wounded whose burdens are more than they can bear

Even now, many weeks after I first copied the words above into my little journal, tears come. The message here is a reminder worth remembering.

One so fitting for the days we are living in and for the relationships right here in my rooms and in my town, and in my world and also in yours.

Because, “Only when we can see a community where the outcast is valued and appreciated will we abandon the values that seek to exclude.”

Thank you G. For writing this book, for faithfully loving those around you like a gangster. A Jesus one.