Compassion: The Secret to a Life of Faith?
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“You know,”
he said to Boyle, “I’m having a hard time finding a job.”
That brought
laughter to Fr. Boyle’s audience at a recent presentation at Drake University.
But the young man was deadly serious, indicating the difficulty of the
transition from gang member to “normal” society.
Fr. Boyle’s
presentation, entitled “The Spirituality of Compassion,” was mostly about his
30-year experiment in unreserved acceptance at Homeboy Industries. The
non-profit offers a variety of services to former gang members, including
counseling, help with addictions, tattoo removal, and classes on job seeking.
Staffed by Former Gang Members
It also
offers jobs at its various enterprises, which includes a bakery, restaurants,
electronics recycling and catering, all mostly staffed by former gang members.
Homeboy has been widely publicized nationally, “recognized as the largest and
most successful gang intervention and re-entry program in the world, and has
become a national model,” according to its web site.
But what it
offers goes far beyond tattoo removal and jobs, encompassing what for people
searching for God may be the most difficult challenge of faith: showing compassion and
loving people who are not like us.
“How do we obliterate
the idea that there’s an ‘us’ and a ‘them?’” Boyle asked in his Drake
presentation. “When everyone is drawing lines, we’re called to erase them.”
Tattoos cause
us to draw lines, but so do race, physical appearance, disabilities, religious
affiliation, economic status, past behavior and many other criteria whose use
are obstacles to the search for God.
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People
searching for God may think of belief as their biggest challenge, but it may
actually be acceptance of others, especially people on the margins of society.
If you want to be successful in the search for God, you have to be God-like and
to be God-like, you have to be accepting, compassionate and kind to all. And
that’s not easy.
The idea of
accepting many types of people shouldn’t make us squirm. For churchgoers, being accepting may mean that instead of praying for people “like us,” maybe we should be
praying for gang members, pornographers, extortionists, swindlers, murderers,
rapists and people who have done terrible things, as well as their victims.
“You have
heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,’” said Jesus.
"But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun
rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.”
Many of us simply ignore this advice, calling it unrealistic. But Jesus calls us to be "more than ourselves." Think about the lepers of Jesus’ time. No one in respectable society, including religious leaders, wanted to have anything to do with them. With their open sores and wounds, they were considered repugnant. But, said Pope Francis in a homily a few years ago:
Many of us simply ignore this advice, calling it unrealistic. But Jesus calls us to be "more than ourselves." Think about the lepers of Jesus’ time. No one in respectable society, including religious leaders, wanted to have anything to do with them. With their open sores and wounds, they were considered repugnant. But, said Pope Francis in a homily a few years ago:
Restoring Everyone to God's Family
“Jesus
responds immediately to the leper’s plea without waiting to study the situation
and all its possible consequences. For Jesus, what matters above all is
reaching out to save those far off, healing the wounds of the sick, restoring
everyone to God’s family. And this is scandalous to some people!
“Jesus is not
afraid of this kind of scandal,” Francis continued. “He does not think of
the close-minded who are scandalized even by a work of healing, scandalized
before any kind of openness, by any action outside of their mental and
spiritual boxes, by any caress or sign of tenderness which does not fit into their
usual thinking and their ritual purity.”
Boyle and the
people who work with him have a lot in common with the pope, and with Jesus. If
only more of us did!
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