Each year the University of Alabama Honors College chooses one book to be read by the entire freshman class, and that author is invited to campus. Recent authors include Margaret Atwood, author of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and Trish O’Kane, author of “Birding to Change the World.”
This year’s book, “Tattoos on the Heart,” by Father Gregory Boyle, is the prize-winning story of his first twenty years working with gangs in Los Angeles and especially with his founding of Homeboy Industries, one of the several ways in which social workers and counselors of all kinds are trying to move young men out of the gangs, out of a life of crime and violence and into jobs, productive life, safety and happiness. The first jobs may involve removing graffiti or producing and selling T-shirts, but it is honest work and gives some pride in self where before there was shame.
The problem in LA is still acute but was even more so when Father Boyle wrote this book. In 1992 there were over 1,000 gang killings in L.A. The number is now much reduced but
There are still some 1,100 gangs in L.A., with a total membership of perhaps 120,000. He can only save a fraction but for Boyle and his colleagues it is not a matter of statistics, a success rate; the crucial thing is to “walk faithfully,” never give up. Each young man is a child of God and cannot be abandoned.
In “Tattoos” we do learn a good deal about that slice of culture. Young men join, not seeking family or security but because they have suffered poverty, abuse, drug-addicted parents and usually no father present. This produces young men with a sense of shame, of worthlessness, but not to Boyle.
He writes of a talk where he was advocating for compassion for gang members when a woman whose daughter had been set on fire by those gang members attempted to attack him. This is a tough moment but “isn’t the highest honing of compassion that which is hospitable to victim and victimizer both?”
Throughout Boyle’s story he repeats that the love from God and Jesus, in the gospels, is for absolutely everyone. There is a “radical equality.” In fact, he writes, Jesus, in his time, irritated the right because Jesus “aligned himself with the unclean, those outside,” and the left , who wanted to see “toppling of sinful social structures.”
And in a pretty serious book there is some oblique amusement, through malapropisms usually: one homie had lunch at the Starvation Army. And when the homies participate in the mass one said he has been led “beside resentful waters.” Another quotes a letter from Paul to the Phillipinos. A over-confident homie leading a responsorial psalm gets the entire congregation to chant: “The Lord is nothing I shall want.” This caused the most desired emotion possible: delight.
