Barking to the Choir

Boyle states he has recently taken to studying the book of Acts, which provides useful insights about community health. One line from the book sticks with Boyle: “And awe came upon everyone” (51). He feels the most important metric of community health “might well reside in our ability to stand in awe at what folks have to carry rather than in judgment at how they carry it” (51). 

Boyle talks about a time he was invited to speak to a gathering of 600 social workers in Richmond, Virginia. Not realizing he had committed to filling an entire day with material, he brought along two homies named Sergio and DeAndre. Sergio told the group about his childhood. He was six years old when his mother told him to kill himself for the first time, and nine when she abandoned him off at an orphanage in Baja. His grandmother eventually retrieved him, but his mother beat his back bloody throughout his elementary school years. He developed a habit of wearing three shirts, even in the summer, to cover up the wounds and blood—and took this habit into adulthood. But eventually, he learned to accept his scars: “How can I help others to heal if I don’t welcome my own wounds?” he rhetorically posed to the group of social workers. “And awe came upon everyone,” Boyle recounts (54). 

Boyle believes that “dropping [the] enormous inner burden of judgment allows us to make of ourselves what God wants the world to ultimately be: people who stand in awe. Judgment, after all, takes up the room you need for loving” (57). He states Homeboy Industries purposefully roots its community in resilience to address the deep trauma its members have experienced. Boyle watches as his homies navigate the many crises of poverty—which he sees as an awe-inspiring endeavor every time. 

Boyle tells the story of a time he offered a workshop on mentoring at a conference in Palm Springs. Two homies named Manny and Chubbs accompanied him. He instructed them to tell their stories, while being sure to talk about someone who mentored them in the past. Manny, a heavily tattooed man whose appearance invited judgment, told a story from his childhood. An older boy named Rafa, Manny’s neighbor, took Manny under his wing when Manny was about six-years-old—giving Manny important advice about how to survive in their neighborhood and who to avoid, and promising Manny he would go to medical school and come back and rescue Manny to become his son. Instead, Rafa was murdered in the street: shot in the head as he walked next to Manny. Manny did not speak for an entire month after the trauma. But at this point in the story, Boyle observed how “the entire audience found itself in a place of lavish forgiveness at what the sight of Manny led them to think when they first laid eyes on him” (65-6). In that audience, Boyle saw “awe trading places with judgment, swiftly and cleanly, ‘for fond love and for shame’” (66). 

Boyle also talks about brothers named Topo and Snoopy. One day, Topo took PCP and started a fight with one of his friends at a football game at Pecan Park. Snoopy loaded the shirtless and bleeding Topo into Boyle’s car, before asking Boyle to take him home. As Boyle drove Topo, Topo told him he was going to shoot the friend with whom he just fought. When they arrived at Topo’s home, Topo insisted they must return to the park to retrieve his pair of huaraches. Boyle refused to do so and asked Topo not to disrespect him by going back to the park on his own. Snoopy soon arrived and plead with his brother to stop smoking PCP. Then, Snoopy broke into sobs of deep anguish. Topo immediately joined his brother, and they embraced each other. “How close these two are, I think, to the tender glance of God,” Boyle writes (72).