Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion by Gregory Boyle

(2010)

If you wanted to see my father’s eyes light up, you just had to get him talking about the Jesuits. For him, those guys walked on water.

Perhaps my father felt that way because he grew up poor and hungry in Jersey City, New Jersey, in the early twentieth century. His mother had died during the Depression when he was 17, leaving four children behind, the youngest of whom my grandfather farmed out to his wife’s sister to raise. My paternal grandfather allegedly drowned his sorrows in drink, but my father was able to use education and his faith to steer his life into stability and eventual prosperity. I suspect the ‘Jezzies’ played an important role.

Up until recently, I hadn't even heard of the author and Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle, which as the daughter of a man with such high regard for the Society of Jesus, surely counts as a personal failure of sorts. To my further discredit, on my first attempt, I ended up not reading much of Boyle’s 2017 title Barking to the Choir because the author, a middle-aged white guy, continually referred to former gang members as ‘homies,’ which I took to be an irritating cultural appropriation.

I can be ornery.

Yet once the name Father Gregory Boyle popped up on my radar, it just wouldn’t go away.

My Mississippi friend, like my father, a person of quiet but deep faith, had recently recommended Boyle’s 2010 book Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion. I was skeptical, but several months earlier, I had heard snippets of a Boyle interview on NPR, perhaps via Krista Tippett’s podcast On Being. Here was Boyle again, coming up in yet another context. Despite that, the book didn’t really seem like it was anything up my alley, but in deference to my friend’s good taste, I picked it up.

Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion is a collection of inspiring anecdotes based on Boyle’s decades-long work rehabilitating gang members in the barrios of East Los Angeles, the gang capital of the world. In it, Boyle also reveals that at the time of his earliest work there, East Los Angeles was also the murder capital of the world. Back then, in the 1980s, Boyle was assigned as the parish priest at Dolores Mission, where he bicycled into the projects to meet and minister. That he didn’t get killed was one form of minor miracle, that he effected a transformation in so many lives is a miracle of a whole other magnitude.

To meet the needs of his congregation, Boyle founded the nonprofit Homeboy Industries. “Nothing stops a bullet like a job,” is a tagline from the trailer to G-Dog, a documentary about Boyle.

Homeboy provides services such as tattoo removal, anger management classes, and job training. Most importantly, Homeboy offers employment, which for most convicted felons, is nearly impossible to secure. After all, who’s going to hire a tatt-covered criminal? The answer is: Boyle. When he does, Boyle makes a point of pairing trainees alongside their former gang rivals. He wants them to understand their common humanity. On the one hand, that strategy makes sense, on the other, it is counter intuitive. These people already have so many odds to surmount, why add to the pile?

Nowadays, Boyle says weekly mass at youth detention centers (eerily known as ‘camps’), handing out his card to ‘homies’ telling them to call him when they get out of prison. Miraculously, they often do. What is even more astounding is the fact that he later finds jobs for these former felons outside of Homeboy Industries, and some of them really do get a second chance at life.

Boyle is a respected worldwide as an expert on gang reform. Presidents, vice-presidents, and first ladies, are just the tip of the iceberg of public figures drawn to his work. G-Dog is Boyle’s nickname among the ‘homies,’ and the name of the documentary, in which now Vice President Kamala Harris, then likely California State Prosecutor, makes a cameo appearance as she sits with Boyle in his Homeboy Industries office.

After finding Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion quite transformative, I revisited the irresistibly titled Barking to the Choir and found it equally compelling.

Boyle’s 2017 Book

While Boyle’s writing focuses on his subjects’ tribulations and occasional successes, he also hones in on the communion he feels with his ‘homies,’ and that is the sweet spot of Tattoos. The essence of his work is providing community to people whose past efforts to feel bonded with others resulted in violence and ultimately, detention or even death. (One of the people he writes about was literally chained up in the backyard like a dog growing up. Neighbors would sneak the child food.) Unimaginable.

Boyle contends that connection and interdependence are what buoy people during life’s challenges. (This sentiment is also resoundingly echoed by United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in his 2020 book Together: Loneliness, Health and What Happens When We Find Connection. Murthy is a vice admiral in the United States Navy, and the unlikely author of such a work, but his research dovetails resoundingly with the evidence put forth by Boyle.)

Reading the many stories of the young people Boyle has worked with, I often found myself fully vested in an individual’s new lease on life, and a page later, devastated that the kid was gunned down and dead. This would make page-turning fiction.

Sadly, it’s not fiction. It’s real life. At the end of the day, Tattoos is nothing if not a lesson in love, acceptance, and most significantly, leaning into the difficult. It is of tremendous comfort to know that it’s not really important that any of us feel successful, it’s important that we feel connected to one another. 

While reading Tattoos as a difficult school year wound down, I tried to apply Boyle’s argument. Rather than feeling badly about not particularly enjoying my job or feeling confident in my ability to execute its responsibilities with the joy and seeming ease of my colleagues, I tried instead to feel the joy of being in it together with them.

That’s a nuanced distinction and not one we generally focus on, but I feel like it’s a better model for the way real life actually works. Real life is not a straight, smooth ride with a clear destination. Real life is getting lost, bad weather, flat tires, and heartaches along the way. Best to enjoy any companionship we have, to revel in the joys and seek succor in times of sorrow with those along with us.

Stories of redemption have wide appeal, and that may be part of the reason that unlike me until recently, Boyle is so universally well known. Although I cannot pinpoint the exact NPR interview that first made his name stick in my brain, one only has to take a brief online search to discover that he has been interviewed by everyone.

His work is extraordinary, and his books, life-affirming.