Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“What if we were to invest in gang members, rather than just seek to incarcerate our way out of this problem?”

Boyle poses this rhetorical question in order to suggest that it makes far more sense to help gang members than to imprison as many of them as possible, as imprisonment only perpetuates a cycle of crime and incarceration in the barrios. 

“Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century female English mystic, saw the life struggle as coming to discover that we are ‘clothed in God’s goodness.’” 

Boyle uses Julian’s quote to make sense of Luis’s journey and death. Luis had previously been a drug dealer, but he found it within himself to make a change and found a job baking bread instead. Boyle maintains that Luis found his inner “goodness” before he passed. 

“Can I admit something? I came here expecting monsters. But that’s not what I found.”

Reporter Mike Wallace from 60 Minutes utters this statement to Boyle when he is in town filming an episode on Boyle’s gang outreach efforts. Wallace comes from a completely different world, so he arrives expecting monsters but only finds “regular” people instead.

“God…I guess.” 

During Mike Wallace’s filming session, he tells Boyle’s students that Boyle would not turn them into the police. Wallace asks one of the boys why, and the boy offers this response in reply. The boy understands that Boyle is motivated by something higher than the law.

“‘God is greater than God.’ The hope is that our sense of God will grow as expansive as our God is.” 

Boyle utters this statement in regard to his belief that God grows greater and greater as you come to know Him more and more, and ultimately transcends any mortal conceptions that may be harbored towards Him.

“Divine love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty and all embarrassment into laughter.” 

Boyle quotes the theologian Belden Lane in order to make the point that people who feel disgraceful must come to accept the fact that they are and always will be accepted by God’s love. 

“But do we really grow in favor with God? Did Jesus become increasingly more favorable to God, or did he just discover, over time, that he was wholly favorable?” 

Boyle poses this rhetorical question to suggest the fact that we never fall from God’s favor, regardless of our moral transgressions and that the depth of God’s love for humanity is constant and unwavering. 

“I…just close my eyes, sitting in my recliner…listening to my kids…read…out loud.” 

Here, former gang member Speedy gets emotional as he relays to Boyle that his greatest pleasure in life now is to listen to his daughters read Harry Potter out loud each night before bed. His life has completely changed, and his daughters have softened his heart. 

“Cause…That’s what Jesus did. I mean, Compassion…IS…God.”

Boyle askes some of his prison students what sympathy and empathy mean, which they answer aptly. But when he asks them what compassion is, they are stumped. Finally, an old-timer stands up and utters this statement. Boyle uses this quote to make the point that compassion is God’s most fundamental characteristic. 

“Jesus says, ‘I will eat with you.” He goes where love has not yet arrived, and he ‘gets his grub on.’ Eating with outcasts rendered them acceptable.”

Boyle is musing on how sinners are widely considered as outcasts; but Boyle states that we should not push sinners to the margins of society, as Jesus accepted anyone he came into contact with. He would break bread with any outcast.

“Pema Chödrön, an ordained Buddhist nun, writes of compassion and suggests that its truest measure lies not in our service of those on the margins, but in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them.” 

Boyle uses the writings of a Buddhist nun to make clear his own stance on compassion: True compassion lies not only in helping outcasts and the downtrodden, but in seeing ourselves as their brothers and sisters.

“Poet Galway Kinnell writes, ‘Sometimes it’s necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.’” 

Boyle uses Kinnell’s quote to make the point that many homies and homegirls have fallen into gang lifestyles because they thought they had no other options. Boyle claims the best way to reach a gang member’s heart and mind is through showing them their worth again. 

“Resilience is born by grounding yourself in your own loveliness, hitting notes that you thought were way out of your range.” 

Boyle says that many homies and homegirls do not strive to achieve their potential because they do not think they are capable of it. But he claims that through recognizing your own talents and wonder, you are capable of achieving things you never thought possible. 

“Homeboy Industries seeks to be a community of unconditional love. Community will always trump gang any day. Derek Walcott writes, ‘Either I am a nobody or I am a nation.’” 

Here, Boyle declares the ultimate mission of Homeboy Industries: to accept, help, and love anyone no matter who they are. He also expresses his belief that this type of community will always eventually succeed where gang life cannot, as his community breeds love and not death. 

“I mean, damn…when’s it gonna end?” 

Boyle visits a young man named Omar in a juvenile detention facility, and Omar asks Boyle how many young men has he had to bury due to gang violence. Boyle tells him 75 so far, to which Omar utters this question. Boyle tells him the violence will stop as soon as Omar decides it should, which causes Omar to cry. 

“I guess…my brother…just never found the light switch.”

Pedro’s brother has committed suicide, so as Boyle drives him to the funeral, Pedro relays a dream that he has had in which he and Boyle were sitting in a dark room until Boyle turned on a flashlight and shined it on the room’s light switch. After relaying the dream, Pedro utters this grim statement in regard to the dream’s symbolic undertones.

“We don’t belong here. We should go someplace else.”

Boyle has taken gang members Richie and Chepe to a local diner, and the other customers greet them with dirty looks. The hostess is rude, but Boyle refuses to not be served. Richie and Chepe feel uncomfortable due to the social tension, so Chepe sadly tells Boyle that they should go. This quote underscores gang members’ feelings of worthlessness in the eyes of others.

“She is Jesus in an apron.”

Richie and Chepe are upset after the hostess’s rudeness and the other guests’ gazes, but they and Boyle are presently surprised to find their waitress to be absolutely delightful. She shows nothing but extreme kindness to the young men, which leads to Boyle claiming her to be nothing less than “Jesus in an apron.”

“My director of novices, Leo Rock, used to say, ‘God created us—because He thought we would enjoy it.” 

Boyle uses this quote from his good friend Leo Rock to illustrate that God’s only agenda is to let humanity, His children, enjoy the splendor of existence; He delights in our being as we delight in His world.

“Apparently, FDR had a sign on his desk that read: ‘Let unconquerable gladness dwell.’ Our search to know what’s on God’s mind ends in the discovery of this same unconquerable gladness.” 

Boyle uses this anecdote to express his sentiment that as we strive to learn more and more about God, a growing sense of “unconquerable gladness” comes to fill our hearts and makes us yearn for an even deeper connection with Him. 

“And the truth…sometimes there’s food left and sometimes there isn’t…it’s a father thing.” 

Spider, an ex-homie, tells Boyle that he sits and delights in watching his children eat each night at dinner. He waits for them to get full before he eats himself, which means sometimes he goes without eating. But Boyle claims such altruism leads to the greatest and purest joy that can be experienced. 

“I find myself heartened by Mother Teresa’s take: ‘We are not called to be successful, but faithful.’” 

Boyle gives this statement as he muses on how people always ask him if his gang outreach efforts are successful. Boyle describes the difficulty in trying to measure something so intangible and claims he is not working to succeed but merely to please his God. 

“Mother Teresa diagnosed the world’s ills in this way: we’ve just ‘forgotten that we belong to each other.’”

Boyles uses this saying from Mother Teresa to explain that true kinship occurs when we refuse to forget that we are all human. Boyle thus states that with such kinship also comes peace and justice.