The Blade, Toledo, Ohio, column

Feb. 12--Father Gregory Boyle, founder and head of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, is a saint, a real honest-to-God saint, with a sense of humor as wicked as that of Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, or Louis C.K.

In fact, the good father could have done very well at stand-up. He's got the stories, the sense of absurdity, and the timing.

Instead, he has worked, for most of his adult life, with current and former gang members in L.A. -- in the most gang-centric part of the city -- East L.A. The people he works with expect that he will do this until the end of his days. They know he will not abandon them.

Father Boyle wrote a book about his life and work, and the lives of the young people he loves, called Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, which is at once an extended prose poem about the compassion of kinship (as opposed to the compassion of pity), and a documentation of the Homeboy Industries experiment.

A few days ago, Father Boyle spoke at St. John's Jesuit, where, appropriately, the motto is "men for others."

Homeboy Industries is now a $14.7 million enterprise that employs 200 men and women at any given time and serves roughly 15,000 people per year. It is often called a "high-risk youth program" -- it serves ex-gang members and the formerly incarcerated. Its services include legal assistance, mental health counseling, tattoo removal, schooling, and work readiness training -- all free. Clients find services and jobs in one place, an innovation 20 years ago.

But Homeboy's truly unique contribution is the creation of jobs through its own entrepreneurial endeavors. It all started with a bakery, and other businesses grew out of need and experiment: Homegirl Cafe, Homeboy/Girl Merchandise (T-shirts and the like), Homeboy farmers markets; Homeboy Silkscreen, Homeboy Grocery, and Homeboy Cafe and Bakery at the American Airlines Terminal of LAX.

All of these enterprises employ former gang members, indeed, in most cases, members of formerly rival gangs laboring side by side. It works -- eventually. For "boundless compassion" means that Homeboy never gives up on individuals who want to keep trying. You can come straight from the slammer and start again. But, you have to show up for work and be a reliable employee. One of the early Homeboy slogans was "nothing stops a bullet like a job." Because a job brings self-respect.

But Father Boyle told the St. John's audience: "We also discovered that that was not enough."

What Homeboy also strives to provide is a support system -- a family.

Many years ago, I interviewed another profoundly good man who found Jesus in the soup kitchens and juvenile detention halls of greater Boston. He too worked with kids but on a much smaller scale than Homeboy. But his model was essentially the same. He said three things make it possible to "save" at-risk youth: a job; the knowledge that they will never be cut loose; and the creation of a second, substitute family. In short, practical love.

So, love and work, as Freud said, and the work of love.

"Nobody ever met a hopeful kid who joined a gang," says Father Boyle.

He also says that most kids who join gangs are in the grip of trauma, addiction, mental illness, or some confluence of all three.

He brought two of his guys with him to St. John's -- Nick and Luis. What got them to Homeboy and Father Boyle ("G" as they call him) in the first place? "I just got tired of my life," said Nick, who was living on the street. What kept them? "I didn't know I had a voice. I never had a life." Father Boyle and Homeboy helped make these things visible.

Both men knew addiction and trauma. Both men felt deep shame. Homeboy gave them a path out of isolation and shame. "Damn G," said one young man to Father Boyle years ago, "this paycheck makes me feel proper."

Father Boyle told an amazing story about being out on the road at a speech much like this one, with one of his guys. A woman asked the young man, let's call him Joey, what advice he would give his own child. Joey lost it. "I just don't want him to be like me," he said through tears. But, said the questioner, you are now a productive citizen, you have turned your life around, you are a kind man. I want your son to be like you!

Father Boyle stressed two things that most of us just don't get:

First, trauma for "at-risk" youth is often an event, or a pattern of events, that most of us could never recover from. He told of a young man whose mother beat him daily through his childhood and how this man, a large, burly, tattoo-covered gang member, was his mother's daily, and only, caregiver as she slowly died of cancer. Father Boyle told of another man whose mother stood in a doorway and slit both her wrists, saying: "Look what you made me do." The boy was 5 or 6 at the time.

Second, Father Boyle says that, truly, he receives more than he gives from his flock. It's that matter of kinship again: He quotes Cesar Chavez, when Mr. Chavez was told, "Cesar, the farm workers really love you." "The feeling is mutual," he said.

So, work and love is the formula that "saves" youth at risk. Greg Boyle and his cathedral of small businesses is proof. And love, as my own father used to tell me, is itself "a hell of a lot of work."

Keith C. Burris is editorial page editor of The Blade. Contact him at:kburris@theblade.com or 419-724-6266.

Related Items

Father Gregory Boyle, op-ed columns, Keith Burris, St. John's Jesuit

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