Niels Bohr and Philosophy of Physics: Twenty-First Century Perspectives examines the philosophical views, influences and legacy of the Nobel Prize physicist and philosophical spokesman of the quantum revolution, Niels Bohr.
The sixteen contributions in this collection by some of the best contemporary philosophers and physicists writing on Bohr’s philosophy today all carefully distinguish his subtle and unique interpretation of quantum mechanics from views often imputed to him under the banner of the “Copenhagen Interpretation.” With respect to philosophical influences on Bohr’s outlook, the contributors analyse prominent similarities between his viewpoint and Kantian ways of thinking, the views of the Danish philosopher Harald Høffding, and themes characteristic of American pragmatism. In recognizing the importance of Bohr’s epistemological naturalism they examine his defence of the indispensability of classical concepts from a variety of different perspectives.
This collection shows us that Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, now nearly a century old, still has the power to shed light on a variety of issues that have arisen only since his lifetime, as well as decoherence theory and other non-collapse interpretations. Balancing historical themes with contemporary discussions, Niels Bohr and the Philosophy of Physics establishes Bohr’s on-going contribution to the philosophy of physics and examines his place in the history of philosophy.
“Well I tell you, my wife would demand I let you know,” Sanders told podcast host Joe Rogan on Tuesday (Aug. 8), according to Fox News, even promising he would announce the findings on the podcast. (You can see the full podcast here.)
Rogan asked if Jane was a “UFO nut”, which Sanders denied. Jane, however, has been pressing the candidate about what information he might have right now, as a senator. “She goes, Bernie, ‘What is going on [that] you know? Do you have any access?'” Sanders said.
It’s unclear, however, if the Republicans will push this issue into election headlines. In June, U.S. President Donald Trump — who will run again for the Republican party in 2020 — told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that he also received a briefing about recent sightings by military pilots. “I did have one very brief meeting on it,” he said. “But people are saying they’re seeing UFOs. Do I believe it? Not particularly.”
Although this debate sounds like a rehash of conversations surrounding the 1950s- and 1960s-era Project Blue Book, a famous set of Air Force studies concerning UFOs that shut down in 1970 amid a lack of evidence, it does have more recent origins.
For example: the sightings happened shortly after a radar system was upgraded in the jets. “As anybody who uses Microsoft products knows, whenever you upgrade any technical product, there are always problems,” Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California, told Space.com in May.
But there’s been so much attention on the issue that in June, the Defense Department briefed Mark Warner (D-Va), the Senate’s intelligence committee vice chairman, about these encounters — along with two senators, Politico reported. But it appears the motivation was focused more on safety than finding visitors.
“If naval pilots are running into unexplained interference in the air, that’s a safety concern Senator Warner believes we need to get to the bottom of,” Warner spokesperson Rachel Cohen said in a statement to Politico at the time.Famous People Who Believe in Aliens
While we wait on party positions on space aliens for 2020, remember that this isn’t the first time the issue popped up in talks with a Democratic presidential candidate. In 2016, Hilary Clinton promised New Hampshire’s Conway Daily Sun News that she would “get to the bottom” of the UFO phenomenon. She added that Earth may have been visited already by aliens, but “we don’t know for sure.”
However, it is unclear how seriously Clinton was speaking to the newspaper, which is located in a key state for the election primaries.
For thee the sun doth daily rise, and set Behind the curtain of the hills of sleep, And my soul, passing through the nether deep, Broods on thy love, and never can forget. For thee the garlands of the wood are wet, For thee the daisies up the meadow’s sweep Stir in the sidelong light, and for thee weep The drooping ferns above the violet. For thee the labour of my studious ease I ply with hope, for thee all pleasures please, Thy sweetness doth the bread of sorrow leaven; And from thy noble lips and heart of gold I drink the comfort of the faiths of old, And thy perfection is my proof of heaven.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 22, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.About this Poem Sonnet XLIV originally appeared in Sonnets and Other Verses (Stone and Kimball, 1896).
George Santayana was a philosopher, critic, essayist, novelist, and poet. He received his PhD from Harvard, where he taught Conrad Aiken, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. In 1912, Santayana moved to Europe and never returned to the United States. He died in 1952.
“I mean to work tremendously hard,” the young Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) resolved in contemplating his literary future, beseeching his impoverished mother to buy him books. At the age of twenty-seven, he was arrested for belonging to a literary society that circulated books deemed dangerous by the tsarist regime. He was sentenced to death. On December 22, 1849, he was taken to a public square in Saint Petersburg, alongside a handful of other inmates, where they were to be executed as a warning to the masses. They were read their death sentence, put into their execution attire of white shirts, and allowed to kiss the cross. Ritualistic sabers were broken over their heads. Three at a time, they were stood against the stakes where the execution was to be carried out. Dostoyevsky, the sixth in line, grew acutely aware that he had only moments to live.
And then, at the last minute, a pompous announcement was made that the tsar was pardoning their lives — the whole spectacle had been orchestrated as a cruel publicity stunt to depict the despot as a benevolent ruler. The real sentence was then read: Dostoyevsky was to spend four years in a Siberian labor camp, followed by several years of compulsory military service in the tsar’s armed forces, in exile. He would be nearly forty by the time he picked up the pen again to resume his literary ambitions. But now, in the raw moments following his close escape from death, he was elated with relief, reborn into a new cherishment of life.
Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871
He poured his exultation into a stunning letter to his brother Mikhail, penned hours after the staged execution and found in the first volume of the out-of-print collection of his complete correspondence, the 1988 treasure Dostoevsky Letters (public library).
Brother! I’m not despondent and I haven’t lost heart. Life is everywhere, life is in us ourselves, not outside. There will be people by my side, and to be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that’s its task. I have come to recognize that. The idea has entered my flesh and blood… The head that created, lived the higher life of art, that recognized and grew accustomed to the higher demands of the spirit, that head has already been cut from my shoulders… But there remain in me a heart and the same flesh and blood that can also love, and suffer, and pity, and remember, and that’s life, too!
Still, even through this elation, the animating force of his being — his identity as a writer — grounds him into a depth of despair. “Can it be that I’ll never take pen in hand?” he asks in sullen anticipation of the next four years at the labor camp. “If I won’t be able to write, I’ll perish. Better fifteen years of imprisonment and a pen in hand!” But he quickly recovers his electric gratitude for the mere fact of being alive and, reassuring his brother not to grieve for him, continues:
I haven’t lost heart, remember that hope has not abandoned me… After all I was at death’s door today, I lived with that thought for three-quarters of an hour, I faced the last moment, and now I’m alive again!
In a beautiful testament to the elemental fact that when all the static of our self-righteousness dies down, what remains between good people is only love, he writes:
If anyone remembers me with malice, and if I quarreled with anyone, if I made a bad impression on anyone — tell them to forget about that if you manage to see them. There is no bile or spite in my soul, I would like to so love and embrace at least someone out of the past at this moment.
[…]
When I look back at the past and think how much time was spent in vain, how much of it was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in the inability to live; how I failed to value it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit — then my heart contracts in pain. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each moment could have been an eternity of happiness. Si jeunesse savait! [If youth knew!]
Now, changing my life, I’m being regenerated into a new form. Brother! I swear to you that I won’t lose hope and will preserve my heart and spirit in purity. I’ll be reborn for the better. That’s my entire hope, my entire consolation.
Life in the casemate has already sufficiently killed off in me the needs of the flesh that were not completely pure; before that I took little care of myself. Now deprivations no longer bother me in the slightest, and therefore don’t be afraid that material hardship will kill me.
Having spent years in material privation myself — though never, mercifully, nearly to the extent Dostoyevsky endured — and being always grateful for how those times annealed me, how they made me less afraid of poverty and hardship, more willing to take risks others might not, to take less materially secure paths in life (one resulting in the birth of Brain Pickings), I can’t help but wonder how much this harrowing experience fomented Dostoyevsky’s extraordinary perseverance as an artist against the tides of convention and the constant specter of poverty. It certainly reverberates throughout Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, and especially The Brothers Karamazov; it certainly informed his ideas about the meaning of life, set forth decades later in the guise of a dream, and inspired his insistence upon the existential duty of seeing the goodness in people “despite the abundance of all sorts of wretches.”
Image captionMichael Kearney, pictured here at the age of 22, won the $1m grand prize in game show Gold Rush in 2006
Before Michael Kearney could walk, he had started to master the English language. From as young as four months old – when he spoke his first word – Michael bore the hallmarks of a child prodigy.
Home-schooled by his parents, Michael’s intellectual development accelerated at a head-spinning pace. Fast-tracked through high school and college, Michael enrolled at the University of South Alabama in 1992 at the age of eight.
Two years later, aged 10, he walked out with a Bachelor’s degree in anthropology, entering the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest ever university graduate – an extraordinary feat that remains unsurpassed to this day.
What happened since then is less well-documented. Beyond the late-2000s, Michael’s online footprint amounts to a few bread crumbs. Nowadays, the BBC understands the 35-year-old lives a private life, his last known whereabouts in Nashville, Tennessee.
From master musician Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to gifted mathematician Ruth Lawrence, no two child prodigies are the same. Yet Michael’s case is a reminder that childhood precocity does not necessarily guarantee enduring success and attention throughout adult life.
Laurent Simons, a nine-year-old Belgian whizz-kid, shows all the same promise that Michael once did. He, too, possesses exceptional talents that he has channelled into academic pursuits. If Michael’s university record was to be broken, Laurent seemed like the kid to do it.
He first made headlines in 2018, when, at the age of eight, he graduated from secondary school alongside 18-year-olds. Like Michael before him, Laurent, who is said to have an IQ of 145, became the centre of media attention.
With his child prodigy credentials cemented, the next step was a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. As of November, Laurent was on track to complete the three-year course before 26 December, his 10th birthday.
Image captionLaurent Simons, aged nine, was studying for a degree in electrical engineering at Eindhoven University
Michael’s long-standing record, it seemed, was in his sights.
But earlier this month, the university said it would not be feasible for Laurent to complete the course before he turned 10, and offered him a mid-2020 graduation date, instead. His parents, Alexander and Lydia, refused the offer and immediately removed him from the course. He would continue his studies at a university in the US instead, they said.
In its defence, the university said if Laurent were to rush the course, his academic development would suffer. The university also cautioned against placing “excessive pressure on this nine-year-old student” who, it said, had “unprecedented talent”.
Image captionLaurent, pictured with his parents Lydia and Alexander, was aiming to complete the three-year degree course in just 10 months
Record-breaker or not, Laurent’s academic progress so far has still been exceptional by historical standards. He is still expected to graduate from university, whenever and wherever it happens.
If the pressure to do so has become more intense, Laurent is not showing it. In interviews, Laurent seems self-assured and optimistic for a future flush with endless possibilities. Studying medicine and making artificial organs are among his to-dos.
Laurent has what Ellen Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College, calls a “rage to master”, an unstoppable motivation to excel in his domain of ability. When Laurent is an adult, he may reach the limit of that ability, allowing other bright individuals of a similar age to catch up. As a result, Prof Winner said, Laurent’s talents as a child might seem less special as an adult.
“When prodigies do not make the transition to adult creator, they may feel like failures,” Prof Winner, author of Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, told the BBC. “No-one cares anymore that a 21-year-old can play the violin with great expertise or ace calculus or understand Latin and Greek.”
Image captionPsychology professor Ellen Winner said Laurent had a “rage to master”
As a former child prodigy, Gabriel Carroll, now in his 30s, said he felt awkward when others talked about his illustrious past.
“I think gee, have I not done anything since then,” he told the BBC.
But Gabriel’s adult life has been far from a failure. An assistant professor of economics at Stanford University, Gabriel pursued a career in a field related to his gift: solving mathematics puzzles.
In his seventh grade SAT [Scholastic Assessment Tests] exams, Gabriel achieved the highest score in California, including a perfect 800 in mathematics. In high school, his mathematical prowess was put to the test against the world’s best young minds at the International Mathematical Olympiad, where he won two gold medals in 1998 and 2001.
When speaking about his achievements, Gabriel struck a humble tone, more comfortable at pointing out his weaknesses than his strengths.
Image captionIn seventh grade, Gabriel Carroll achieved the highest SAT score in the state of California
“I feel less developed in the areas of social and emotional skills than perhaps I would have been had I not been so technically focused,” Gabriel said.
He credited his parents, both tech industry workers in California, with instilling him with that focus. They were “extremely important” in his development, teaching him mathematics and giving him puzzle books to solve from age six. Reflecting on his upbringing, Gabriel said he felt “very lucky on the whole” but did have “a couple of regrets when one thinks about how much agency one has as a child”.
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Media captionMeet the schoolboy with a higher IQ than Bill Gates and Albert Einstein
By agency Gabriel meant the capacity to act independently, free from the overt influence of parents. This has particular relevance in the context of child prodigies, whose parents are commonly depicted as pushy, domineering and overbearing.
Jennifer Pike, a British violinist who burst on to the classical music scene as a youngster, said the parents of child prodigies were often stereotyped in this way.
“I’m aware of the myth, or popular belief, that parents must somehow be pushing their young child into living their dream,” Jennifer told the BBC. “I think that’s a trope that’s definitely true in some cases, but not the case for most.”
Image captionJennifer Pike, a violinist, won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition at 12
For Jennifer, it was she who took the lead, not her parents. That self-determination was evident in 2002, when Jennifer won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition aged 12. At the time, she was the youngest winner of the award, a record she held for six years.
From that moment, her biggest challenge has been “overcoming that perception of you in one moment in your life”.
“People want to keep you in this box,” Jennifer, now aged 30, said.
Image captionJennifer said the parents of child prodigies were often stereotyped
Anne-Marie Imafidon, a tech entrepreneur with a master’s degree at the University of Oxford, said she couldn’t imagine a life outside that box.
“I’ve only ever had the label,” she told the BBC.
The label has stuck since Anne-Marie and her four siblings were dubbed “Britain’s brainiest family” by the UK media. At school, computing, mathematics and languages were her forte. She passed two GCSEs while still at primary school and, at the age of 11, became the youngest person to receive an A-level in computing.
Image captionAnne-Marie Imafidon has a master’s degree from the University of Oxford
Almost 20 years on, Anne-Marie said she had nothing left to prove, mostly because she never saw herself as a genius “you see in the movies”, a Rain Man-type. Excelling in her domain of ability – mathematics and computer science – is enough for Anne-Marie.
The difference between an adult genius and a child prodigy is an important distinction, Prof Winner said. A prodigy is a child who is very precocious in a certain field, mastering a domain that has already been invented, she says. A genius, she believes, is someone who revolutionises a field of knowledge.
“Most prodigies do not make the leap in early adulthood from mastery to major creative discoveries,” Prof Winner said. “Some do, most do not. Instead most become experts in their areas of giftedness – professors of math; performers in an orchestra, and so on.”
Like Anne-Marie and Gabriel, Jennifer said she “never defined success in terms of achievements in that way”. Her life goals are far more modest.
“I’m just happy to have a career and to have survived the journey,” Jennifer said.
Image captionLaurent said he had #giganticplans for the future in a post on his Instagram account
Surviving the journey from childhood to adulthood with their aura of success intact is exactly what Jennifer, Gabriel and Anne-Marie have done. Their gifts have transcended childhood, delivering them to the promised land of recognition – their Wikipedia pages and websites brimming with accolades.
As for those child prodigies who did not, they are a cautionary tale for the next generation.
For now, Laurent is embracing the limelight, posting about his #giganticplans to his 64,000 Instagram followers. But Prof Winner said child prodigies like Laurent should be wary of the public stage. Given the trials and tribulations of adult life, it does not take a genius to figure out why.
Translators: Mike Zonta, Melissa Goodnight, Richard Branam, Hanz Bolen
SENSE TESTIMONY: Struggle for dominance leads to disenfranchisement and alienation.
5th Step Conclusions:
1) Truth is automatically indivisible, enfranchised, privileged, the only friend, the only family, the only social gathering. OR: Truth hungers for Itself.
2) There is but ONE Infinite Consciousness — which is singularly indomitable and irrepressible, and that reveals unopposed harmony and perfectly privileged empowerment, in every auspicious emergence of It’s all-inclusive expression.
3) Truth is the Inalienable Estate, this liberty is the Mountain (Mind) of Kindness; equalling the domesticated homestead of family economics, these special privileges are self granted accuracy, Being the Principle of changelessness.
4) I and All only and always belong to One Mind Truth I AM, I and All belong with integrity, ability, presence and clarity. I and All are knowingly accepted and received instantaneously I and All are present, able to communicate, guide and give love abundantly.
All Translators are welcome to join this group. See Weekly Groups page/tab.
While we aren’t very forgiving of body odor, there’s a phenomenon that occurs when attraction is at play: We often love the natural scent emitted by our romantic partners or potential mates.
This phenomenon is pheromones; they’re chemical signals that are responsible for one being’s attractiveness or attraction to another. Our bodies release pheromones through sweat, urine, skin, and saliva, while a small organ inside the nose — the vomeronasal organ — receives them subconsciously. The nervous system communicates this attraction to the hypothalamus, resulting in an altered mood, and heightened heart rate, body temperature and breathing. As all of this occurs, we immediately attach this musk to our emotions. Simply put: If your girlfriend likes when you don’t wear deodorant, it’s because she is naturally aroused by your body’s chemical excretions. You don’t necessarily smell good, but you smell incredible to her, and it’s a big reason why she’s attracted to you.
Pheromones are perplexing to scientists, since their effectiveness differs from one species to the next. For example, the female silk moth will release a molecule that lures males from far away to come mate with her. Similarly, the molecules in male mouse urine can accelerate puberty for females. It’s not known how effective pheromones are in humans, or what weight they have in our attraction to someone else.
There are four types of pheromones:
Releasers: The pheromones responsible for sexual attraction; they’re almost instantly received and effective.
Primers: Slow-acting, hormone-altering pheromones that influence menstrual cycles, pregnancy retention, and puberty/sexual development.
Signalers: Genetic “odor imprints” that help us identify someone by their scent. Most useful between mothers and newborns.
Modulators: Mood-altering pheromones, often good for calming anxiety.
In some species, pheromones are also used to communicate territory or alarm; many insects mark the area surrounding their eggs, which tells other females to lay their eggs elsewhere. Whether it’s a friendly warning or a threat, these chemical signals are understood by other members of that species.
That’s where pheromones get especially interesting; they don’t just play a role in attraction, but in how the members of one species interact.
Often times, women who live or work together will experienced synchronized periods. A 1998 study by Martha McClintock posits that pheromones released through the skin and sweat are responsible for this phenomenon, and that the women are communicating subconsciously. The pheromones either speed up or decelerate ovulation in each woman until they are all ovulating in unison. (Many scientists have refuted this study, while others honor it.)
In terms of attraction, pheromones can work against you, too. They’re just as likely to repel someone — or to have no effect at all — than to attract. And it’s not necessarily mutual, either: Sometimes, you might be drawn to someone else’s pheromones, and he or she might have no reaction to yours — or worse, that person might have a negative reaction. It’s all happening subconsciously, though, so this isn’t a recommendation to cease wearing deodorant to see who finds your musk appealing. Pheromones are largely released through skin and hair — not just while sweating — and even if she eventually forgives or adores your BO, you’ll still need to woo her the traditional way.
When you feel attracted to someone else, or when you exude confidence, your pheromones are likely going to work in your favor. For men, the hormone androsterone is behind this chemical signal, and for women, estrogen. In heterosexual individuals, these two attract one another, and can have significant mood-altering effects on a potential mate. (For example, male pheromones can accelerate a woman’s menstrual cycle, or even increase her fertility.) While your outward attractiveness plays a significant part in picking someone up, so do these chemical signals, meaning you might find yourself with someone who is “out of your league,” or vice versa, and the attraction feels inexplicable. Hopefully you’re a likable guy and that’s working to your benefit, but it also might be a pheromone match.
One 2008 study monitored the response of homosexual individuals to synthetic androsterone and estrogen, and found that homosexual men have the same response to androsterone as heterosexual women; similarly, homosexual women’s anterior hypothalamus — the part of the brain responsible for arousal — responded to estrogen just as positively as a heterosexual male would. However, homosexual men were also aroused by estrogen.
A 2005 study used pheromones in sweat from hetero- and homosexual men and women to gauge attraction. Homosexual men and women both felt most drawn to the pheromones of their respective homosexual counterpart. Heterosexual men and women — as well as homosexual women — preferred the sweat of heterosexual males over homosexual males. The same goes for homosexual female sweat: All three other groups preferred the heterosexual female sweat. Heterosexual men were indifferent to hetero- or homosexual females’ sweat, and homosexual men preferred the sweat of heterosexual women over that of heterosexual men.
The conclusion? One’s sexuality is aligned with his or her pheromonal response and attraction to potential mates. If you’re a gay man and you meet a pair of identical twins — one gay, one straight — you might subconsciously know which one is in your dating pool, even without any direct indication.
That’s the phenomenon at work: Attraction is often subconscious, though not as inexplicable as we may think.
Fr. Greg Boyle makes amazingly winsome connections between things like service and delight, compassion and awe. He landed as an idealistic young Jesuit in a gang-heavy neighborhood of Los Angeles three decades ago. Now he heads Homeboy Industries, which employs former gang members in a constellation of businesses from screen printing to a farmers’ market to a bakery. This is not work of helping, he says, but of finding kinship.
Krista Tippett, host:Father Greg Boyle makes amazingly winsome connections between things like service and delight, and compassion and awe — amazing, because he works in an urban setting others describe in terms of crime and despair. He landed as an idealistic young Jesuit in a gang-heavy neighborhood of Los Angeles three decades ago. Now he heads Homeboy Industries, which employs former gang members in a constellation of businesses from screen printing to a farmers market to a bakery. An op-ed in The Los Angeles Times said of Homeboy Industries, “How much bleaker and meaner would L.A. be without it?” Fr. Greg says service is not an end in itself, but a beginning towards finding real kinship with others. That’s in this story he tells, for example, about giving a blessing to a kid named Louie.
[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]
Greg Boyle:I said, “You know, Louie, I’m proud to know you, and my life is richer because you came into it. When you were born, the world became a better place. And I’m proud to call you my son, even though” — and I don’t know why I decided to add this part — “at times, you can really be a huge pain in the ass.”
[laughter]
And he looks up, and he smiles. And he says, “The feeling’s mutual.”
[laughter]
And suddenly, kinship, so quickly. You’re not this delivery system. Maybe I return him to himself. But there is no doubt that he’s returned me to myself.
Ms. Tippett:I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.
[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]
Ms. Tippett:Fr. Greg Boyle first became known to a wide audience in the 1990s, when a book was written about him called G-Dog and the Homeboys. In 2010, he wrote his own very moving memoir, Tattoos on the Heart, and more recently, penned a terrific follow-up, Barking to the Choir. In addition to Homeboy Industries, Fr. Greg’s work with young men and women also includes free services like GED classes, life counseling, and tattoo removal. I interviewed Greg Boyle at the outdoor Hall of Philosophy at the Chautauqua Institution in the summer of 2012.
[applause]
Ms. Tippett:I want us to talk, obviously, about what you do, but really focus in on the “why” of it and on what these experiences have worked in you, and how they’ve formed your sense of who God is and what it means to be human. But first of all, tell us how you came to your call to be a Jesuit.
Fr. Boyle:First of all, it’s so great to be here, and I’m so honored to be in a conversation with you. I’m a big fan, though I do have a recurring nightmare that I’m interviewed by Krista Tippett, and I’m found shallow and lacking faith.
[laughter]
This is way better than the actual nightmare I have.
[laughter]
Well, I was educated by Jesuits, so for me, they were always this combo burger of absolute hilarity and joy, and the most fun people to be around. And they were prophetic. This was during the time of the Vietnam War, so we’d laugh a lot, and I’d go with them to protesting the war. The combination of the prophetic and the hilarious — I loved that. So I thought, boy, I’ll have what they’re having, you know? So that’s what I did. It’s not very deep, but that’s kind of — the reasons you join an organization like the Society of Jesus aren’t the reasons you stay. But that kind of was my initial hook.
Ms. Tippett:Right. Why did you stay? Tell me that.
Fr. Boyle:[laughs] I got a feeling you might ask that. Again, it’s — “la Compañía de Jesús” is what St. Ignatius called the thing, so it’s about being in companionship with Jesus. And St. Ignatius, in his spiritual exercises, has a meditation called “The Two Standards.” And in it he says, very simply, “See Jesus standing in the lowly place.” It’s not about saluting a set of beliefs, necessarily; it’s about walking with Jesus and being a companion. And I haven’t found anything that’s brought me more life or joy than standing with Jesus, but also with the particularity of standing in the lowly place with the easily despised and the readily left out, and 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. And I find the fullness of life in trying to, as best I can, in my own way, to stand there.
Ms. Tippett:So that particular place where the Jesuits took you — in 1986, is that right? — is to the Dolores Mission, which, at that time — I don’t know if this is still true — was the poorest parish in the city and had the highest concentration of gang activity in the world, at that time. And there’s so much grief and so much heartbreak in these kids’ lives and in the stories that you tell. And yet you always come back, again and again, to talking in this way: that spiritually, theologically, this is not so much about helping others — I’m saying that — but that this is fundamentally about our common call to delight in one another. I think that’s very unexpected language.
Fr. Boyle:Well, Dorothy Day — I think she quotes Ruskin when she always talks about the “duty to delight.” [Editor’s note: Dorothy Day often quoted John Ruskin’s phrase “the duty of delight” in her writing. She references the idea in The Long Loneliness, as well as in journal entries. Learn more.] And I think it’s right to see it as a duty, because you have to be absolutely conscious of it. But it’s really a delighting that enters into full kinship with each other. I’m greatly privileged in my life to have known Cesar Chavez, who was an extraordinary leader of a movement but was also one of the best listeners I’d ever known. He could just — you were the only person who existed, if you were having a conversation with him. But I remember, once, a reporter had commented to him and said, “Wow, these farm workers, they sure love you.” And Cesar just shrugged and smiled. And he said, “The feeling’s mutual.”
[laughter]
And that’s what you hope for; I’m not the great healer, and that gang member over there is in need of my exquisite healing. The truth is, it’s mutual, and that as much as we are called to bridge the distance that exists between us, we have to acknowledge that there’s a distance, even in service: a service provider; you’re the service recipient. And you want to bridge even that so that you can get to this place of utter mutuality.
And I think that’s where the place of delight is: that I’ve learned everything of value, really, in the last 25 years, from precisely the people who you think are on the receiving end of my gifts and talent and wisdom — but quite the opposite. It’s mutual.
Ms. Tippett:I always like hearing people tell about the things they did that didn’t work out on the way to the things that they know. And it’s very interesting — one of the ways you tried to serve when you first arrived there was, you were going to be a peacemaker, right? You were going to make truce between these warring gangs. And you found that, in fact, that — which maybe seemed obvious — wasn’t right.
Fr. Boyle:Well, a lot of things — anything worth doing is worth failing at, I think, so it seemed sensible to me. And we’d have these Pyrrhic victories of “Let’s agree not to shoot into each other’s houses.” That seems not much of a victory. Then we’d have ceasefires and truces and peace treaties. And it was a lot of shuttle diplomacy, where I’d actually write up a thing, and one side would sign it, the other side would sign it, and it would work for a time. But if you work with gangs, you provide oxygen to gangs. And that’s not a good thing, and I can see that now.
Ms. Tippett:One of the realizations you’ve said you made out of that is that peacemaking requires conflict. And while there’s lots of violence between gangs, there’s not conflict that you can define, like you can with a war.
Fr. Boyle:Yeah, it’s difficult, because I’m sort of the dissenting voice, I think, in the country at the moment, when it comes to this thing. And sometimes people will say to you, “Well, how can you be against peacemaking?” Well, obviously, I’m not against peacemaking. But I’m old-fashioned: I think peacemaking requires conflict, and it’s important to say that there is no conflict in gang violence. There’s violence, but there’s no conflict, so it’s not about anything.
So you want to understand: What language is gang violence speaking? That’s important to me.
It’s about a lethal absence of hope. It’s about kids who can’t imagine a future for themselves. It’s about kids who weren’t seeking anything when they joined a gang. It’s about the fact that they’re always fleeing something — always, without exception. So it shifts the way you see things.
Somebody, Bertrand Russell or somebody, said, “If you want to change the world, change the metaphor.” And that’s kind of how we want to, I think we need to proceed, in something like this. So if you think it’s the Middle East, you’re quite mistaken. If you think it’s Northern Ireland, wrong again. It’s about kids who’ve ceased to care. So you want to infuse young people with hope, when it seems that hope is foreign.
Ms. Tippett:And as you tell their stories, it’s hard to imagine where they would draw hope from. A lot of them — I don’t know, it’s not just that many of them have been abandoned or that they come from a single-parent home. The stories that stuck with me were the kid whose father left them on the day of his 6th birthday while they were all waiting to light the candles for his dad to come home; or the one whose mother literally tortured him because he reminded her so much of his terrible father. And there’s drugs and violence and incarceration in these kids’ families.
What also occurs to me, though — because you know them, you take delight in them, and you love them — I think that also gives you a much more — well, a sense of how the lines between what it means to be an enemy or a friend or a victim or a survivor — how those things blur in real, messy, human life.
Fr. Boyle:Well, lately, I’ve been reading the Acts of the Apostles really carefully. And if you start to read it and think it’s a quaint snapshot of the earliest Christian community, that’s one thing. But what if you were to read it as a measure of the health of any community? So you see how they love one another, or there is nobody in need in this community, for example. But my favorite one is — it leapt off the page to me. And it says, “And awe came upon everyone,” so that the measure of our compassion lies not in our service of those on the margins, but in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship. And so that means the decided movement towards awe, and giant steps away from judgment.
So how can we seek a compassion that can stand in awe at what people have to carry, rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it? And I think that’s sort of the key here. That’s the place of health in any community — forget Christian community; in any community, that’s how you know that you’re healthy.
So recently, I gave a talk, a training, an all-day training to 600 social workers, a training on gangs. I had two homies with me, and one of them was a guy named José. And he got up — he’s in his late 20s, and he now works in a substance abuse part of our team, a man in recovery and been a heroin addict and gang member and tattooed. And he gets up, and he says, very offhandedly, “You know, I guess you could say that my mom and me, we didn’t get along so good. I guess I was six when she looked at me, and she said, ‘Why don’t you just kill yourself? You’re such a burden to me.’”
Well, the whole audience did what you just did. They gasped. And then he said — “It’s sounds way worser in Spanish,” he said.
[laughter]
And everybody did what you just did. And then he said, “You know, I guess I was nine when my mom drove me down to the deepest part of Baja California, and she walked me up to an orphanage, and she said, ‘I found this kid.’” And then he said, “I was there 90 days, until my grandmother could get out of her where she had dumped me, and she came and rescued me.”
And then he tells the audience, “My mom beat me every single day. In fact, I had to wear three T-shirts to school every day.” And then he kind of loses the battle with his own tears a little bit, and he says, “I wore three T-shirts well into my adult years, because I was ashamed of my wounds. I didn’t want anybody to see them. But now my wounds are my friends. I welcome my wounds. I run my fingers over my wounds.”
And then he looks at this crowd, and he says, “How can I help the wounded if I don’t welcome my own wounds?” And awe came upon everyone, because we’re so inclined to judge this kid who went to prison and is tattooed and is a gang member and homeless and a heroin addict, and the list goes on. But he was never seeking anything when he ended up in those places. He was always fleeing the story I just told you.
[music: “En Cada Lugar” by Federico Aubele]
I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, in the Hall of Philosophy at the Chautauqua Institution with Fr. Greg Boyle, the founder of one of the largest gang intervention programs in the U.S., Homeboy Industries.
Ms. Tippett:Something I think a lot about is how, in this culture, we’ve overused and watered down some of the words we need the most, that actually mean the most. “Compassion” is one of them. “Love” is another. You talked about this a minute ago. You started talking about compassion. But I’d like to put some more flesh on those bones of those words. And I wonder, if you think about compassion or love, are there people who come to mind or moments that come to mind that really express what these words have come to mean, lived?
Fr. Boyle:Well, if you presume that God is compassionate loving-kindness, that all we’re asked to do in the world is to be, in the world, who God is, and so you’re always trying to …
Fr. Boyle:Yeah, and so you’re trying to imitate the kind of God you believe in. You want to move away from whatever is tiny-spirited and judgmental, as I mentioned, but you want to be as spacious as you can be, that you can have room for stuff. And love is all there is, and love is all you are, and you want people to recognize the truth of who they are, that they’re exactly what God had in mind when God made them. Alice Miller, who’s the late, great child psychologist, talked about we’re all called to be enlightened witnesses: people who, through your kindness and tenderness and focused attent of love, return people to themselves. And in the process, you’re returned to yourself.
Like I have a homie named Louie, who’s just turned 18, and he’s kind of a difficult kid. He’s exasperating, and he’s whiny. And he works for me, although “work” may be too strong a verb.
[laughter]
But homies lately have asked me for blessings, which is odd. It’s in the last three years. They never — they always ask me on the street or in my office, and they never say, “Father, may I have your blessing?” They always say, “Hey, G, give me a bless, yeah?”
[laughter]
And they always say it the same way. So this kid, Louie, I’m talking to him, and he’s complaining about something. And finally, at the end of it, he says, “Hey, G, give me a bless, yeah?” I said, “Sure.” So he comes around to my side of the desk, and he knows the drill, and he bows his head, and I put my hands on his shoulder.
Well, his birthday had been two days before, so it gave me an opportunity to say something to him. And I said, “You know, Louie, I’m proud to know you, and my life is richer because you came into it. When you were born, the world became a better place. And I’m proud to call you my son, even though” — and I don’t know why I decided to add this part — “at times, you can really be a huge pain in the ass.”
[laughter]
And he looks up, and he smiles. And he says, “The feeling’s mutual.”
[laughter]
And suddenly, kinship, so quickly. You’re not this delivery system. Maybe I return him to himself. But there is no doubt that he’s returned me to myself.
Ms. Tippett:You use this word, “spacious,” and synonyms for spacious are there all over the place, especially in your memoir when you’re talking about God, the spaciousness of God, the vastness of God, the largeness of God. You quote Hafiz: “this Great, Wild God,” God’s limitless magnanimity.
That’s very exciting, really emboldening language. But it’s not — I don’t think it’s a language people would ever reach for themselves, if they were shown the statistics about the part of town you minister in, or pictures. So how do you think about that gap, that disconnect?
Fr. Boyle:Well, I’m a Jesuit, so Ignatius always talks about the “God who is always greater,” and that is part of the issue, whenever you land on a God who’s tiny or judgmental or exacting or concerned with some kind of purity code. It sort of blows it wide open, knowing that there’s a need to have this blown wide open all the time.
And I can remember walking in the projects late at night, long ago, and there was this kid, Mario, sitting by himself, 16 years old, just sitting on his little stoop in front of the crummy old projects. So I see him, and I greet him — “Hey, how you doing?” — and I sit down next to him, and he goes, “It’s funny that you should show up right now.” And I say, “Why?” “Well, I was just sitting here praying, and I said, ‘God, show me a sign that you’re as great as I think you are.’ And then you showed up.”
[laughter]
I remember how moved I was by that. And it’s how you enter into the vastness and the spacious place that God holds. But it came by way of knowing that the day won’t ever come when I am as holy as the people I’m called to serve; that the day won’t ever come when I have more courage or am more noble or am closer to God, than this 16-year-old gang member sitting alone on his porch.
Ms. Tippett:What your ministry so bespeaks is this incarnational heart of Christianity, but that it always comes down to relationship between people — that that’s where we discover God, as well.
Fr. Boyle:Well, it’s relational, but it’s also — I think we’re afraid of the incarnation. And part of it, the fear that drives us is that we have to have our sacred in a certain way. It has to be gold-plated, and cost of millions and cast of thousands or something, I don’t know. And so we’ve wrestled the cup out of Jesus’s hand, and we’ve replaced it with a chalice, because who doesn’t know that a chalice is more sacred than a cup, never mind that Jesus didn’t use a chalice?
And a story I tell in the book about a homie who was — on Christmas Day, I said, “What’d you do on Christmas?” And he was an orphan, and abandoned and abused by his parents, and worked for me in our graffiti crew. And I said, “What’d you do for Christmas?” “Oh, just right here.” I said, “Alone?” And he said, “No, I invited six other guys from the graffiti crew who didn’t had no place to go,” he said. “And they were all…” He named them, and they were enemies with each other. I said, “What’d you do?” He goes, “You’re not gonna believe it. I cooked a turkey.”
[laughter]
I said, “Well, how’d you prepare the turkey?” He says, “Well, you know, ghetto-style.” And I said, “No, I don’t think I’m familiar with that recipe.” And he said, “Well, you rub it with a gang of butter, and you squeeze two limones on it, and you put salt and pepper, put it in the oven. Tasted proper,” he said. I said, “Wow. Well, what else did you have besides turkey?” “Well, that’s it, just turkey.”
[laughter]
“Yeah, the seven of us, we just sat in the kitchen, staring at the oven, waiting for the turkey to be done. Did I mention it tasted proper?” I said, “Yeah, you did.”
[laughter]
So what could be more sacred than seven orphans, enemies, rivals, sitting in a kitchen, waiting for a turkey to be done? Jesus doesn’t lose any sleep that we will forget that the Eucharist is sacred. He is anxious that we might forget that it’s ordinary, that it’s a meal shared among friends, and that’s the incarnation, I think.
Ms. Tippett:In terms of just this idea of incarnation and relationship, it took me a long time into my reading about you, and reading you, to realize that one of the transformative things that happens in Homeboy Industries, which is a different model from your peacemaker days, is that people are simply working, side by side. Kids who may have been in different gangs, they’re sharing days and time and jobs. Is that right?
My question also is, does it surprise you, at this point in your life, that some of the structure your vocation has taken is in starting these businesses?
Fr. Boyle:Yeah, you don’t want to hear me talk about businesses. I’m the least knowledgeable person on how to start. It’s like, don’t try this at home.
Ms. Tippett:Yeah, but you’re a CEO. You’re an executive director.
Fr. Boyle:[laughs] I’m a CEO. Oh, my gosh, I’m a CEO. I’m missing a board meeting to be here today. I could not be one bit happier.
[laughter]
Ms. Tippett:Yeah, OK, but look — there’s Homeboy Bakery, Homeboy Silkscreen, Homeboy Maintenance, Homeboy/Homegirl Merchandise, Homegirl Café. Those are businesses. You employ people.
Fr. Boyle:Yeah, and that came — that was born as — we began as sort of a job employment referral center, trying to find felony-friendly employers.
[laughter]
And that wasn’t so forthcoming. So by ’92, we had to start our own — we really — so we couldn’t wait, the demand was so huge. And gang members kept saying, “If only we had jobs.” So we started Homeboy Bakery in 1992, and a month later, we started Homeboy Tortillas in the Grand Central Market, a historic kind of area in LA. Once we had two, once we had plural, we came up with the highfalutin “Homeboy Industries,” as if there was any industry involved in this venture.
And then the idea is not just to have a paycheck. But I think one of the new things that I kind of discovered, probably in the last five years, is that community trumps gangs. So it’s not enough to just say, “Here’s a job.” Our motto, still, on our T-shirts is: “Nothing Stops a Bullet Like a Job,” but that does about 80 percent of what needs to be done.
There’s still the other 20 percent, which is relational, and it’s about healing. It’s about what psychologists would call “attachment repair,” because gang members come to us with this disorganized attachment. Mom was frightening, or frightened. And you can’t really soothe yourself if you’ve never been calmed down by that significant person in your life. And it’s never too late to kind of gain this, so they repair this attachment, and they learn some resilience. And then they redefine who they are in the world, which is really a huge task. And then we send them on, beyond us. And then the world will throw at them what it will, but it won’t topple them, because they’re this renewed person. That’s sort of the new piece in the last five years — that there’s a task that happens and needs to be addressed and attended to, and that’s the task.
Ms. Tippett:Were you attending to it before, but not as intentionally? It was happening, but you’ve named it now?
Fr. Boyle:That’s right, yeah. But things like therapy — everybody’s in therapy. I have 300 employees, and I have four paid therapists, but I have 41 volunteer therapists. So that’s kind of a new openness to that that wasn’t true in my first ten years. Homies would always say, “Oh, I’m not crazy,” and there was a stigma. And then I noticed, I don’t know how many years ago, maybe 15 years ago, homies would — I’d say, “You know, it might help you to talk about all the stuff you’ve been through in your life.” And then a homie once said to me, “You mean like Analyze This?”
[laughter]
He referenced that movie with Billy Crystal and Robert De Niro. And then I started hearing that, and you talk about a tipping point, where suddenly, it was OK for people to be in therapy. And so I don’t sense any kind of stigma, which is really healthy and wonderful, because they have a lot of work to do. They’ve been through a lot.
[music: “African Velvet” by Air]
Ms. Tippett:You can listen again and share this conversation with Father Greg Boyle through our website, onbeing.org. I’m Krista Tippett. On Being continues in a moment.
[music: “African Velvet” by Air]
I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, with Fr. Greg Boyle at the Hall of Philosophy at the Chautauqua Institution. We’ve been talking about his understandings of life, of service, and of God, which have emerged through his ministry creating Homeboy Industries. It’s one of the largest and most successful gang intervention programs in the U.S.
Ms. Tippett:I’m going to ask one more question, then why don’t we open this up for questions and comments. You, I’ve read, were diagnosed with leukemia. Would that have been a decade ago now?
Fr. Boyle:I think it’s probably — I think it’s nine years.
Ms. Tippett:Nine years. And so you, in a less adrenaline-fueled way than a lot of the people you share a life with, have faced mortality. And I wonder, has that changed the way you move through life, or even this work with them?
Fr. Boyle:Yeah, first of all, I wouldn’t trade that period of my life for anything. It was about the most graced moment in my life, for as uncomfortable as chemotherapy is — and I’m sure many in the audience have been through this — I wouldn’t trade it, because it was just so intimate and so mutual. But with the homies, it was this extraordinary place of exquisite mutuality that I really treasure. I was reading, recently, about the Dalai Lama. He was interviewed in The New Yorker, and somebody asked him about his own personal death. And he just shrugged, and he said, “Change of clothing.”
[laughter]
And that was sort of my experience when I went through leukemia, and greatly liberating.
But because I’ve had to bury so many kids — 183 kids, and kids I loved and kids I knew, and killed by kids I loved — boy, if death is the worst thing that can happen to you, brace yourself, because you will be toppled. And the trick is not to be toppled. The trick is to compile a list of all of the fates that are worse than death, but also compile the list of all the things — and so numerous to list — all the things that are more powerful than death. That’s what Jesus did. Jesus sort of put death in its place.
Ms. Tippett:Was it after your diagnosis that you discovered this story about the desert fathers and mothers? That the one word they meditated on was …
Fr. Boyle:Oh, yeah.
Ms. Tippett:I read that a couple of days ago, as I was getting ready for this, and it’s been so helpful for me.
Fr. Boyle:Yeah, whenever the desert fathers and mothers would get absolutely despondent and didn’t know how they were going to put one foot in front of the next, they had this mantra. And the mantra wasn’t “God,” and the word wasn’t “Jesus,” but the word was “today.” And that that’s sort of the key. There’s a play off-Broadway right now, called Now. Here. This. And that’s kind of my — that’s become my mantra. I’m big on mantras. So when I’m walking, or before a kid comes into my office, I always say, “Now. Here. This. Now. Here. This” so that I’ll be present and right here to the person in front of me.
Audience Member 1:So I’m thinking that you’ve already told me the answer to this question, which is “Now. Here. This.” But I hear you. I am moved by your work. I am moved by the plight of the poor. And I am here for a week, and then I go back to my privileged life in Fairfield County, Connecticut, among my Unitarian Universalist co-congregants. What is the message? What is there to be done, besides shrugging my shoulders and writing a check?
Fr. Boyle:Don’t stop writing the checks, first of all.
[laughter]
I owe that to my board meeting that’s happening right now.
Audience Member 1:OK, so I buy the indulgence, and then what happens?
[laughter]
Fr. Boyle:That’s right. [laughs]
Ms. Tippett:Yeah.
Fr. Boyle:OK, the answer really is kinship. Everybody’s so exhausted by the tenor of the polarity right now in our country. And the division is the opposite of God, frankly. I always think of Dives with Lazarus — Dives is in here not because he’s rich, but because he kind of refused to be in relationship with Lazarus — that that parable is not about bank accounts and heaven, it’s really about us. And so what’s on Jesus’s mind? He says that all may be one. And that’s kind of where we need to inch our way closer — that we imagine a circle of compassion, then we imagine nobody standing outside that circle. God created, if you will, an otherness so that we would dedicate our lives to a union with each other.
Audience Member 1:Thank you.
Ms. Tippett:I just want to say, that question you posed so beautifully is a question that weighs on me. I think so many people are carrying that question around right now and feeling pretty hopeless about it. It’s an open question, and …
Audience Member 1:Well, we’re resisting the divide. We’re resisting the divide, but we don’t know how to do it.
Ms. Tippett:Right.
Audience Member 1:We privileged folk.
Ms. Tippett:Right, not even the idea that we should create circles of inclusion is — we live so separately that we don’t know how to start those relationships. But I — one thing we’re not trained to do is — I love Rilke’s idea about holding the questions, living the questions until, one day, you live into an answer.
So I think when we don’t have the answer immediately before us, we then despair. And I wonder if part of our work now is to hold that question and to pose it with each other. And then, in that way, maybe we become listeners together, and we start to …
Audience Member 1:The Rilke piece is wonderful. Thank you.
Ms. Tippett:Oh, over here. Sorry. [laughs]
Audience Member 2:I grew up in the city and was homeschooled because my parents feared for my safety. And I go to St. Vivian Church, and they don’t touch the city because of their fear. And how do you combat the fear with love and compassion?
Fr. Boyle:Thank you for your question. I read once that the Beatitudes was — the original language was not “Blessed are” or “Happy are” the single-hearted or those who work for peace or struggle for justice. The more precise translation is, “You’re in the right place if …” And I like that better because it turns out the Beatitudes is not a spirituality. It’s a geography. It tells you where to stand. You’re in the right place if you’re over here.
So, I come from Hollywood where we say, “Location, location, location.” And it’s about location. You really have to go out. But knowing that service is the hallway that leads to the ballroom, you don’t want to have service be the end. It’s the beginning. It’s getting you to the ballroom, which is the place of kinship, the place of mutuality, that place that everybody knows here. When you go there, you go, “Who is receiving from whom? Who’s the service provider? Who’s the service recipient?” You hear yourself say that. “I know I’m here at the soup kitchen, but, my God, I’m getting more from this.” You know, everybody knows this. But it doesn’t happen unless you break out. And fear is just fueled by ignorance. So you have to break out of our ignorance. We have to go to the place that frightens us, you know?
And I’m always admiring of employers, especially in the early days before we were kind of established, who would call us. And I’d give a talk somewhere, and an employer would call me and say, “OK, send me somebody. I’m scared, though.” I said, “I get it.” Then they’ll love who they get, some homie who’s enormously eager and a good worker. And then he’ll call and say, “Send me somebody else like him too.” But they had to take that — look before you leap, but leap. Thanks.
Audience Member 3:I appreciate your personal stories, the interaction you have, but — the young man on the steps, and the like. But so many in the area where I come from — the way you deal with gangs is, you incarcerate them. And so how much of the interaction have you had with the justice system, the penal system? And how can we, in communities that want to put these “things,” and depersonalize them away — can we do, can be done, societally, congregationally, personally?
Fr. Boyle:I don’t spend a lot of time in courts anymore, except that I always testify when asked, and I’m asked a lot in death penalty sentencing cases where there’s a gang member. And I’m called in as a gang expert, because I oppose the death penalty. But I’ve never encountered — and I’ve probably done 50 of these across the country — I’ve never encountered somebody, a gang member who’s on the stand, a defendant, who in my estimation was not mentally ill. The minute you start to hear the profile, and they always give you the profile, you go, wow, this is a deeply disturbed, mentally ill person.
No one wants you to say that. The prosecution refuses you to say anything like that. Even the defense says, “Don’t say anything like that.” Why? Because then you’re forced to — in the face of somebody who’s mentally ill, you can only have one response, and that’s compassion. And this freaks us out, because we go, “Oh, what happens to responsibility?” and “He knew what he was doing.” Prosecutors always say to me, “Well, he could choose.” I go, gosh, not all choices are created equal, and a person’s ability to choose is not created equal.
I don’t know, if we were more sensible, at an early age we’d be somehow infusing kids with hope when they can’t imagine their future, and they’re planning their funerals. Or we’d heal kids who are so damaged that they can’t see their way clear to transform their pain, so they continue to transmit it or to deliver mental health services in a timely, effective, appropriate way. If we did those things …
[applause]
If, as a society, we did those things, we wouldn’t be at the place we’re at.
[music: “Lo Duca Brothers” by Spaghetti Western]
Ms. Tippett:I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, with Fr. Greg Boyle on his longtime, unusually successful work with former gang members in Los Angeles. I interviewed him in the outdoor Hall of Philosophy at the Chautauqua Institution, and we also took questions from the audience.
Audience Member 4:Hello. I probably have 50 questions, and it’ll be interesting to see which one …
Fr. Boyle:Do 49 of them and …
[laughter]
Audience Member 4:Which one comes out. I teach in a community college on the West Coast. And kind of similarly, I teach culinary arts, so I see a whole range of individuals and hear stories that would cripple most of us, what people are dealing with. But I think one of my key questions for you is, when I hear you use the word “homie,” could you define what that means to you? As you give these talks around the country, I think about, what are other people taking away from that word, versus what it is that that word means to you.
Fr. Boyle:Yeah, sometimes when I go to other parts of the country — I was on a radio show from Chicago where a caller came in who took quite exception to the word, “homeboy.” You don’t find that so much in Los Angeles. And no thought went into this at all. With a movie producer, I’m trying to get money out of him, and he says, “What do you think I should do?” And he had proposed a lot of ideas, and I said, “Well, I don’t know, why don’t you buy this old abandoned bakery across the street? We’ll call it ‘Homeboy Bakery.’” That’s how much thought went into this. So I wasn’t kind of measuring and calculating: “Will this have…?”
But in the end, I’m OK with it, because it’s sort of like walking in a door and coming out another door. You’ll hear homeboys say, “Hey, do you know Mr. Sanchez? He’s my math teacher.” I said, “No, I don’t.” “Oh, that’s the homie, right there.” It’s a way of connecting. In the end, it’s a word that is soaked with kinship. And if Mother Teresa says the problem in the world is that we’ve just forgotten that we belong to each other, there’s the potential, anyway, I think, for the word “homeboy” and “homegirl” to say that we’re connected. It’s a way of saying, “We belong to each other,” and it doesn’t have to do with “He’s in my gang, and he isn’t.” And that’s why the homeboy community — and homegirls, as well — are folks who experience this connection and sense of belonging with each other.
Audience Member 5:I’m particularly impressed with your using the words “walking in the lowly places.” That’s where Jesus would stand. But the question I have is, you also talk about the prophetic and the hilarious. And I recall that if you look at the Dalai Lama, Thomas Merton — many of them have this wonderful sense of joy. And you seem to have this sense of humor.
I often find that peacemakers, peacekeepers, are so intense, and the weight is so heavy that there’s very little time for laughter. I would like to know how it comes that you have this wonderful spirit of joy, or what I’d call “healthy” humor. And could you explain a little bit how you got that?
Fr. Boyle:It’s like — I don’t know who talked about it — discussing humor is like dissecting a frog. You can do it, but the frog dies in the process.
[laughter]
So I don’t know. Again, it’s about joy and that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete. You want to have a light grasp on life. And then in the end, it’s precisely those kinds of moments that teach you something.
Real quickly, one of my favorites recently was, Diane Keaton showed up for lunch at a Homegirl Café — the Oscar-winning actress, Annie Hall and Godfather movies. And she’s there with a regular guy who’s there once a week, and her waitress is Glenda. And Glenda is a homegirl — been there, done that; tattooed, felon, parolee. She doesn’t know who Diane Keaton is. And so she’s taking her order, and Diane Keaton says, “Well, what do you recommend?” And Glenda rattles off the three platillos that she really likes, and Diane Keaton says, “Oh, I’ll have that second one. That one sounds good.”
And then it was, suddenly, at that moment, that something dawns on Glenda, and she looks at Diane Keaton. She goes, “Wait a minute. I feel like I know you, like maybe we’ve met somewhere.” And Diane Keaton decides to sort of deflect it humbly and say, “Oh, gosh, I don’t know. I suppose I have one of those faces that people think they’ve seen before.” And then Glenda goes, “No, now I know. We were locked up together.”
[laughter]
And aside from the fact that that story absolutely took my breath away when I heard it — and I don’t believe we’ve had any further Diane Keaton sightings, now that I think of it — that in the end, it’s about something. It’s about kinship. It’s about Oscar-winning actress, attitudinal waitress — that you may be one; that’s the whole thing — that God has created this otherness so that you might bump into each other and find that you’re homies, that you were locked up together.
[applause]
Ms. Tippett:[laughs] I just want to say, as we close, you said, at the beginning — and I pushed back and said how hard that is — that the job is to be who God is, in the world. As you tell these stories of this life you lead — you told this story in your book about how — and you touched on this a minute ago — you first arrived in the neighborhood, and you expected people to come to you. And you would walk around, and that didn’t work. It was when you started visiting people when they were in hospital or visiting people when they were in prison that they then acknowledged you as a member of the community.
And that’s so resonant with that beautiful passage in Matthew 25, about God saying, “You visited me when I was sick. You clothed me, you fed me.” And they said, “When was that?” “When you fed, clothed, visited the least of these.” So I think it’s wonderful how you show that that is doable, incarnating this incarnational message at the heart of Christianity. And you probably are too humble to want to take that in.
Fr. Boyle:Well, thank you for that. But I also feel like in the end, it is about imitating the kind of — trying to imitate the kind of God you believe in. And it’s natural for us to push back on that. But the truth is, we’re so used to a God — a one-false-move God, and so we’re not really accustomed to the no-matter-whatness of God, to the God who’s just plain-old too busy loving us to be disappointed in us. And that is, I think, the hardest thing to believe, but everybody in this space knows it’s the truest thing you can say about God.
Ms. Tippett:I wondered if, in closing, you would read this little poem by the 14th-century Persian poet Hafiz, and why you put that in your book. And the fact that it’s from the 14th century, I love, because it reminds us that we’ve always been this way, as human beings.
Fr. Boyle:Yeah, I don’t know why I put it in my book.
[laughter]
And so now I’m living my nightmare of my interview with Krista Tippett.
[laughter]
Now proven myself shallow and uninteresting. Anyway, it’s called “With That Moon Language.”
“Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, ‘Love me.’ / Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops. / Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. / Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying, / with that sweet moon language, what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?”
Ms. Tippett:Thank you, Greg Boyle.
[applause]
Fr. Greg Boyle is founder and executive director of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles. His books include Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion and more recently, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship.
[music: “Diferente” by Gotan Project]
Staff:The On Being Project is Chris Heagle, Lily Percy, Marie Sambilay, Erinn Farrell, Laurén Dørdal, Tony Liu, Erin Colasacco, Kristin Lin, Profit Idowu, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Lucas Johnson, Damon Lee, Suzette Burley, Zack Rose, Serri Graslie, Nicole Finn, Colleen Scheck, and Christiane Wartell.
Ms. Tippett:The On Being Project is located on Dakota Land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.
On Being is an independent production of The On Being Project. It is distributed to public radio stations by PRX. I created this show at American Public Media.
Our funding partners include:
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