Compassion is Kinship
“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a covenant between equals. . . .
“Compassion is always, at its most authentic, about a shift from the cramped world of self-preoccupation into a more expensive place of fellowship, of true kinship.”
— Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
Feeling the Shame of Others
“Author John Bradshaw claims that shame is at the root of all addictions. This would certainly seem to be true with the gang addiction. In the face of all this, the call is to allow the painful shame of others to have a purchase on our lives. Not to fix the pain but to feel it.”
— Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
God’s Delight in Us
“Here is the Good News: the God we most deeply want IS the God we actually have, and the god we fear is, in fact, the partial god we've settled for. God looks at us and is ecstatic. This God loves the sound of our voices and thinks that all of us are a magnificent work of art. ‘You’re here.’ God's cheek resting on ours. God's singular agenda item.”
— Forgive Everyone Everything
Introducing People to Their Own Goodness
“I've learned from giving thousands of talks that you never appeal to the conscience of your audience but, rather, introduce them to their own goodness. I remember, in my earliest days, that I used to be so angry. In talks, in op-ed pieces, and radio interviews, I shook my fist a lot. My speeches would rail against indifference and how the young men and women I buried seemed to matter less in the world than other lives. I eventually learned that shaking one's fist at something doesn't change it. Only love gets fists to open. Only love leads to a conjuring of kinship within reach of the actual lives we live.”
— Forgive Everyone Everything
Kinship As the Only Effective Protest
“Our locating ourselves with those who have been endlessly excluded becomes an act of visible protest. For no amount of our screaming at the people in charge to change things can change them. The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them. The trickle-down theory doesn't really work here. The powers bent on waging war against the poor and the young and “the other” will only be moved to kinship when they observe it. Only when we can see a community where the outcast is valued and appreciated will we abandon the values that seek to exclude.
“Jesus was always too busy being faithful to worry about success. I'm not opposed to success; I just think we should accept it only if it is a by-product of our fidelity. If our primary concern is results, we will choose to work only with those who give us good ones.”
— Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
Living with the Poor
“Sr. Elaine Roulette, the founder of My Mother's House in New York, was asked, ‘How do you work with the poor?’ She answered, ‘You don't. You share your life with the poor.’ It's as basic as crying together. It is about ‘casting your lot’ before it ever becomes about ‘changing their lot.’”
— Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
The Necessity of Tenderness
“We talk about the Incarnation being necessary. Indeed, it was. Not because of sin — for God's sake. But because God's love needed to become tender. There was an urgency for it to become touch and smell and action and listening; to become tenderness in the flesh.”
— Forgive Everyone Everything
On Waiting
“Ours is a God who waits. Who are we not to? It takes what it takes for the great turnaround. Wait for it.”
— Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
Seeking Wholeness
“Everyone is just looking to be told that who he or she is is right and true and wholly acceptable. No need to tinker and tweak. Exactly right.”
— Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
Standing in Awe at the Poor
“Jesus says if you love those who love you, big wow (which I believe is the original Greek ). He doesn't suggest that we cease to love those who love us when he nudges us to love our enemies. Nor does Jesus think the harder thing is the better thing. He knows it's just the harder thing. But to love the enemy and to find some spaciousness for the victimizer, as well as the victim, resembles more the expansive compassion of God. That's why you do it.
“To be in the world who God is.
“Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.”
— Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
Standing in the Right Place
“Jesus was not a man for others. He was one with others. There is a world of difference in that. Jesus didn't seek the rights of lepers. He touched the leper even before he got around to curing him. He didn't champion the cause of the outcast. He was the outcast. He didn't fight for improved conditions for the prisoner. He simply said, ‘I was in prison.’
“The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place — with the outcast and those relegated to the margins.”
— Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
Where Love Has Not Yet Arrived
“Our frightened selves want only for the gathered to like us, to agree with us, or be intimidated by us. I suppose Jesus walks into a room and loves what He finds there. Delights in it, in fact. Maybe, He makes a beeline for the outcasts and chooses, in them, to go where love has not yet arrived. His ways aren't our ways, but they sure could be.”
— Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
Working with Enemies
“[W]e give homies a chance to work with their enemies. [Homeboy Industries] has become the ‘United Nations’ of gangs. When enemies work with one another, a valuable ‘disconnect’ is created on the streets. It forces a fellow active gang member to ask the employed homie, ‘How can you work with that guy?’ Answering that question will be awkward, clumsy, and always require courage, but the question itself jostles the status quo.”
— Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
