Visiting Voices

Commencement Address for the Class of 2021, an excerpt

FR. GREGORY BOYLE, SJ

There is a vision that undergirds the education you have received. It’s a vision about a community of beloved belonging and creating such a place of kinship and connection and of such exquisite mutuality. The prophet Habakkuk writes, “[We are called then to stand with all who are suffering:] for the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and it will not disappoint. And if it delays, wait for it.”

And you wait at the margins.

Because if you stand there, the margins get erased, and you imagine a circle of compassion, and then you imagine no one standing outside that circle. You choose, at the margins, to dismantle the barriers that exclude. You don’t go to the margins to make the difference. You go to the margins so that the folks there make you different. And so you stand with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. You stand with those whose dignity has been denied. You stand with those whose burdens are more than they can bear. And you get to stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop with the disposable, so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away. And it is a gift to be able to stand there. And to choose to inhabit your mutual nobility and dignity, unlocking eternity for each other.

Gregory Boyle, SJ, is the founder of Homeboy Industries, the largest gang-intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry program in the world. Each year more than 10,000 former gang members from across Los Angeles come through Homeboy Industries’ doors in an effort to make a change in their lives. As Fr. Boyle writes in his second book Barking to the Choir, “Homeboy wants to give rise not only to the idea of redemptive second chances but also to the new model of church as a community of inclusive kinship and tenderness.” People are encouraged to delight in one another the way Fr. Boyle is convinced God delights in every one of us. He typically brings his homies with him to speaking engagements and in doing so centers the stories of their wisdom and experiences. Their wisdom is hard won—Fr. Boyle has buried close to 250 individuals due to gang violence— and Homeboy employs four therapists (and 49 more who volunteer) to walk with individuals trying to overcome a childhood of poverty, addiction, violence, mental illness, or deep trauma. Fr. Boyle sticks to his Ignatian roots when he speaks of finding God in all things, most especially in the community of homies he calls his colleagues, friends, and neighbors. (One of his homies is his spiritual advisor.) Fr. Boyle has received the California Peace Prize, the 2008 Civic Chamber of Commerce, and was inducted into the California Hall of Fame. He is the author of New York Times bestseller Tattoos on the Heart.