Reading Francis

Love is a whisper, necessary even when it is insufficient.

A couple of threads converged this week in a way that is unusual enough that I wanted to share them.

Early this week, a good friend and committed advocate for justice sent me a quote from Sister Helen Prejean, the advocate for abolishing the death penalty who wrote the book “Dead Man Walking.” It said:

“It took me a long time to understand how systems inflict pain and hardship in people’s lives and to learn that being kind in an unjust system is not enough.”

She’s right, of course. Anyone who has dealt with a truly kind customer service agent in a system in which they can’t actually help you knows as much, to cite a common if trivial example. An empathetic executioner doesn’t excuse an unjust death sentence, to cite a more significant one.

But kindness ain’t nothing, either, I thought at the time.

Catholics (like Sister Prejean) are called to pursue love of neighbor both through personal charity and through the pursuit of a justice that honors the essential dignity of every single person (as well as that of creation as a whole). One way we get this wrong is by making this an either/or proposition.

This week, the chapter of Ronald Rolheiser’s “The Holy Longing” was on a spirituality of justice and peacemaking, and he made exactly this point. Part of his argument is that, too often, those who engage in the quest for justice on behalf of the marginalized lose sight of the goal, a vision of “justness” and wholeness that includes all of us in loving relationship, including our enemies. When we forget that, it’s too easy to get sucked into the mindset of our opponents, and we slide into a “win at all costs” fueled by self-righteousness that closes off compassion for the other side and more or less ensures that the battle never ends. Our goal as followers of Jesus, Rolheiser says, is “not to win over our enemies, but to win our enemies over.” And that approach doesn’t happen without kindness, as far as I can tell.

But what does that look like? 

Before I got around to the Rolheiser chapter this week, I detoured into “Forgive Everyone Everything,” by Fr. Gregory Boyle, S.J. If you have known me for a minute, you probably know who Greg Boyle is – the Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries, the largest gang intervention program in the country. I have shared a bunch of videos of his various talks on Facebook over the years, from his brief reflections at Homeboy’s morning meetings to the many commencement addresses he’s been asked to give to longer presentations. I’ve pushed his three books, “Tattoos on the Heart,” “Barking at the Choir,” and “The Whole Language,” enough that it’s reasonable to ask whether I’m on commission. (I am not.) “Forgive Everyone Everything” is a compilation of 52 excerpts from those books, paired with original art by Fabian Debora, Executive Director of Homeboy Academy and a former trainee at Homeboy.

This week, the excerpt was called “Opening Fists,” and here’s what it said:

“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, in 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.”

That sounds hopelessly naive, coming from anyone other than someone who has spent the last 35 years living with gang members in East LA, offering mass in some two dozen penal institutions in the area, and burying several hundred victims of gang violence while serving and living with thousands of other former gang members who have participated in that same violence. The throughline of Boyle’s outlook is to create a circle of kinship such that nobody stands outside of it. And it is through that lens that he and Homeboy not only build up the community of former gang members but advocate for policy changes that address the injustices which create a world in which gang membership is ever attractive to begin with.

The Scripture readings for Mass this week aren’t about this, really, but if you squint, you can see the threads connect. The headline is the Gospel, from Matthew, of Jesus calling Peter to walk on water, which he does, before he gets distracted and sinks into the sea. But the Psalm includes this:

“Kindness and truth shall meet;

Justice and peace shall kiss.

Truth shall spring out of the earth,

And justice shall look down from heaven.”

And the first reading from 1 Kings is that of Elijah climbing Mount Horeb to meet God, not in the howling wind or crushing rocks or earthquake or fire, but in the tiny whisper.

That whisper, that is so easy to miss but is more powerful and essential than all the fireworks nature can offer, is Love itself.

When you think about the Gospel reading, maybe it fits, too. If Jesus is calling Peter, and by extension all of us, to pursue loving justice, walking on water is perhaps a good metaphor. Like Peter, people like Sister Prejean or Father Boyle seem to pull it off for a while. For most of us, also like Peter, we can make it a step or two in the right direction, before we get distracted by the waves, lose our balance, and sink into the morass. We forget that true justice requires kindness, even as true peace requires justice.

Maybe, if, unlike Peter, we can tune out the waves, or, like Elijah, not fall for the earthquakes and winds and fires, we can hear the tiny whisper that is love, leading us to kindness and justice together. Because that is the only thing that will ever be enough.