Reading Francis

To love is to pay joyful attention to another in ways that communicate mutual belonging, inherent mattering, and gratitude.

After finishing Fr. Greg Boyle’s latest book, Cherished Belonging, I found myself searching for a better definition of love. The classical Christian definition from St. Thomas Aquinas, to love is to will the good of another, has the benefit of making love a verb rather than a feeling, but on the whole it feels insufficient in the presence of loving examples. It’s a detached, philosophical response that is handy for curing people of the confusion that loving is an emotion over which we have little control (countering the idea of “falling in and out of love”), but it’s easy to see how you can satisfy the Thomistic definition of love without creating the world of cherished belonging that Fr. Boyle has created at Homeboy Industries, which is more a prophetic witness to the possibilities of love than simply the world’s largest gang intervention program (which it also is).

Cherished Belonging, Boyle’s fourth book, seems poised to answer the question that I and many others have: If Homeboy can create an environment in which people who used to shoot at each other, people who murdered each other’s friends and family as members of rival gangs, can become a beloved community and source of transformational healing, how can we translate that magic to our divided country whose cultural divisions seem deeper yet only slightly more civil than those of Los Angeles’ rival gangs? How do we follow the Homeboy recipe to reunite a divided country?

The book doesn’t directly answer this question, unfortunately. Much as the Gospel narratives show Jesus responding to questions from religious leaders indirectly through parables, Cherished Belonging uses story upon story of the kinship between “Homies” and the new lives that grow in that nurturing soil of mutuality to reinforce that the answer to the question of how we can heal, like the answer to every other question that matters, is Love.

But the love at Homeboy does not look or feel like simply willing the good of the other. For one thing, that Thomistic love is too thin; by wringing emotion out of the term, Aquinas’ version of love leaves out the embodiedness of love, the tears and hugs and screams and cheers. Loving is heartfelt to the point of messiness. The corrective value of love-as-choice forgets that, even if love isn’t defined as an uncontrollable emotion, it still rests on and requires emotion to stick. “Willing the good of the other” can inspire an ethical impulse that prompts us to love those who we don’t actually like. That thin love falls short of the cherishing that Boyle sees at work in Homeboy (and that defines who God is for him).

It’s also too easy to see a paternalistic bias in St. Thomas’ definition that ends up warping the true nature of love. The Scholastic world in which Aquinas lived was one of hierarchies of power, knowledge and virtue. “To will the good of another” often translates into preachiness; a parent may know what is good for a child more than the child herself does (though not always); while Boyle doesn’t invoke Aquinas, he clearly disagrees with models of “service” that rest on one group of privileged servers reaching down to tell the disadvantaged how to better themselves. “We should stand in awe at the burdens they carry, rather than in judgement at the way they carry them,” is a mantra that Boyle returns to often in his writing and speaking. “Willing the good of the other” skips over that awe and can slip easily into judgement.

I don’t think Fr. Boyle formally defines love in any of his books, even though virtually every page includes stories that point to love’s power. To help me better grasp what the love of Homeboy looks like, I came up with this definition:

To love is to pay joyful attention to another in ways that communicate mutual belonging, inherent mattering, and gratitude.

It’s a lot wordier, I know. But let me break it down.

I’ve said before (and it’s by no means original to me) that attention and love are already pretty close to the same thing. It’s said that in some cultures, the traditional greeting is not “hello” but “I see you,” and in modern parlance, “I feel seen” is a powerful expression of being valued. We all know the experience of encountering someone who never seems to pay attention to who we really are, because they’re hung up on prejudices or presumptions, and many of us know the pain we have caused others by not giving them our full attention at a time when that’s what they most needed. (If Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” is echoing in your ears … I see you, Gen Xer.) “To love is to pay attention” might have been sufficient on its own.

I added “joyful” to distinguish the attention we give to a perceived threat from the attention we give a welcome visitor. When I shared this definition, I was surprised by the fact that it was the one word people most resisted. Perhaps that’s because we associate joy with happiness, and know that neither we nor our situations are always pre-wired for happiness. “Open” was a good suggested alternative. I might offer “warmhearted” instead, a term Boyle pulls in from the Dalai Lama, if “joyful” trips you up. Even if the encounter is tough, the situation sad, the mood crappy, I think a cherishing love feels some bit of joy in going through the toughness, sadness and crap with the other, and communicates that good feeling. If you’ve felt the spark of relief from welcoming a true friend to accompany you in a moment of grief, even a friend who sometimes makes you a little crazy, that’s a version of joy I think love imbues in the attention.

“Mutual belonging”, of course, stems from St. Teresa of Calcutta’s “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” “Inherent mattering” may not be an actual English phrase, but the traditional Catholic principle of universal human dignity – that we have immense value, not because of anything that we have done or any circumstance we have inherited, but simply because we exist – is the same idea. I use “mattering” instead to avoid saddling the concept with the formality or baggage of centuries of Catholic social teaching. You matter, not only to me, but simply because. And being able to attend to someone we belong to, and who belongs to us, someone who matters, is eminently worth being grateful for.

One friend who saw this definition asked, “Do you think this exists?” I told them that this is the love that God has for each of us, the love that we are invited to have for God, and the love we are called to give each other. 

While it’s easy to flatten all forms of love into the romantic dimension, if long-term prisoners and gang members can reflect this kind of love for former enemies, it’s applicable in a much broader range of relationships than simply a mate. Whenever we treat someone – a friend, a coworker, a sibling, the person who hands us our order at the drive-through – as a protagonist in their own, interesting story, rather than simply as an uncredited extra in our story, we offer warmhearted attention, mutual belonging, inherent mattering. This is scalable, as the nonprofits like to say.

What it is not, though, is a program for action. Fr. Boyle’s decades-long experience with gang members has convinced him that this sort of cherishing love doesn’t just soften up the “hardened criminal” so that they can then acquiesce to life changing; the cherishing is the transformation. The therapy, tattoo removal, job training, and all the rest are important, but they are downstream from transformation, tools to help reintegrate people who have been cured by cherishing from “a lethal absence of hope” into a new way of living out a reality grounded in mutuality and mattering. 

I suspect that those like me who pick up Cherished Belonging looking for answers to fix our ailing country will wish there was a clearer recipe for weaving ourselves together into a new wholeness. Gang members come to Homeboy when they’re ready, and sometimes that means they politely decline Boyle’s offers of help for decades. They stick with it only when they’re tired of their old lives, so much so that they are willing to work side by side with (literal) sworn enemies. I suspect it was (and maybe still is) maddening for Boyle and his fellow Homeboy compatriots to watch and wait for those who clearly need their cherishing, but just aren’t ready to accept it.

The hope is this: we are predisposed for belonging and purpose. While our society, like gang culture, offers facsimiles of both belonging and purpose, they’re flawed, transactional knockoffs of belonging and provisional versions of mattering. You can belong if … You matter when you … Cherished belonging, and the changes it makes to your soul, stand out as something different. When a truly beloved community shows up somewhere, it attracts like a beacon. “They will know we are Christians by our love,” the old hymn says, not by our doctrine or liturgy or preaching or buildings or service projects. If you have to choose between those who radiate cherishing love and those who carry a doctrinal brand, go with the Homies.

It’s the beginning of Advent, and the new year is around the corner. Maybe the challenge for the year is to get out of our own heads enough that we can pay more warmhearted attention to those we belong to (which is everybody), when they matter (which is always). Cherished Belonging may be about Homeboy, but cherished belonging, for us, can start at home.