Required Reading

It isn't often that you read a book that changes your life. For me, there have really only been two: The Bible and Steinbeck's East of Eden.

Now there are three.

When I was in my early twenties I worked with a few girls who have remained lifetime friends. Meg was one of them. This was in the very late 70's and early 80's. She came from a large Catholic family and her eldest brother, Greg, a Jesuit priest, had recently begun work in the hardest of the hardcore gang infested neighborhoods of east Los Angeles. She told me of her brother's dangerous work, trying to reach gang members to give them hope in what seemed to be hopeless lives in the midst of daily gang warfare. He routinely put himself in danger. He had compassion for people who scared the hell out of me. In the early days, the police were not fond of Greg.

Father Gregory Boyle is now known across the country and the world. He is regularly awarded with honors and prizes for his extraordinary work and the founding and development of Homeboy Industries. He has been asked to speak in front of dignitaries and presidents. He has been a guest of the White House. I have only met him a few times. He would not remember me. But he strikes you as an unassuming, "regular" guy who happens to wear a collar. You probably would never pick him out of a crowd as an extraordinary person, yet his singular life, his mission, his passion is the kind that can, and likely will, change the world.

As a Christian, I have struggled with my desire to follow Christ and follow His commandments to love Him first and foremost, and then my neighbor as myself. As Jesus said, follow these two and all the rest will follow. The rest are no problem. The first two are difficult - because they require that we set aside our own plans and desires in pursuit of jumping into whatever God throws in our path. It isn't that we aren't supposed to want a nice life, enjoy our homes, our possessions, our careers, our plans - but they are to become secondary in priority to God's plans. It is a perspective that is difficult to embrace. Enjoying our own lives and following a self imposed plan can, I imagine, co-exist with experiencing what God would want for us - but the fear that God might ask us to "give it all up" keeps us (or at least me) from always being available to what God might ask me to do.

I finally read Father Greg's acclaimed book Tattoos on the Heart. It bears a truth that I would like to describe but cannot. I couldn't possible do it justice. It is a book you must experience. Because it does, in fact, burn a tattoo on your own heart. This is not a book about being a Christian. But I will say that it speaks more truth about what a Christian life looks like than any book I've ever read before. And as a Christian, it is something I wish more people could understand.

We do great disservice to Christianity by getting it wrong ourselves. It isn't really about what we do. We can spend a life doing "service" or "works" but that isn't really what it is about.  It is the tenderness of our hearts that matters. From that tenderness, "service" is born.  Father Boyle is able to articulate what that looks like, what it means in such as way that you cannot leave that book and forget about it. I have only one book that I have highlighted and underlined and marked. This is that book. He suggests that we "be in the world who God is" and that we seek "a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgement at how they carry it." He tells story after story of the pain and trials of people we believe not to be like you and I, but who really are just like you and I and talks of the transforming power of "[locking] on to the singularity of  love that melts you. It doesn't melt who you are, but who you are not."

And for me, the most profound statement of this book is summarized when he says that we must stand with our brothers and sisters in their hardships in order to understand them and that "All Jesus asks is, 'Where are you standing?' And after chilling defeat and soul-numbing failure, He asks again, 'Are you still standing there?'"


Christian or not, this book should be required reading for everyone in middle or high school. And everyone on my Christmas list is getting a copy.

Read it.