Kindred Spirits: Father Greg Boyle

God seems to be an unwilling participant in our efforts to pigeonhole [God]. The minute we think we've arrived at the most expansive sense of who God is, 'this Great, Wild God,' as the poet Hafez writes, breaks through the claustrophobia of our own articulation, and things get large again...

God's unwieldy love, which cannot be contained by our words, wants to accept all that we are and sees our humanity as the privileged place to encounter this magnanimous love. No part of our hardwiring or our messy selves is to be disparaged. Where we stand, in all our mistakes and imperfection, is holy ground. It is where God has chosen to be intimate with us and not in any way but this...

It is certainly true that you can't judge a book by its cover, nor can you judge a book by its first chapter- even if that chapter is twenty years long. When the vastness of God meets the restriction of our own humanity, words can't hold it. The best we can do is find the moments that rhyme with this expansive heart of God...

God, I guess, is more expansive than every image we think rhymes with God. How much greater is the God we have than the one we think we have. More than anything else, the truth of God seems to be about a joy that is a foreigner to disappointment and disapproval. This joy just doesn't know what we're talking about when we focus on the restriction of not measuring up.

From "God, I guess" in Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
by Father Greg Boyle, Founder of Homeboy Industries.

For more on this kindred spirit, you may want to check out his Tedx Talk: "Compassion and Kinship" or his interview "The Calling of Delight: Gangs, Service and Kinship" with Krista Tippett on the radio show On Being.