Barking to the Choir

Many of Boyle’s homies will begin their answer to the question “What ya up to?” with the phrase “Just right here,” which likely comes from the Spanish expression Aquí no más. Although the expression does not neatly translate, Boyle uses the English phrase to assert the following: “Jesus would insist that we are saved in the present moment. Just right here. So we choose to practice dwelling in the present moment. We need to find ourselves in the here and now” (73). He feels people often let happiness get away from them when they aren’t anchored in the present.

Boyle tells several stories to drive home his point. In one, a teen homie named Fabian finds what he calls Paradise when he and his girlfriend mutually decide to stop their constant arguing in order to tell each other how much they love each other. In another story, the actor Jim Carrey visits Homeboy Industries and generously stays present with everyone he meets. Boyle also invokes the Biblical story of Mary and Martha to prove his point. He sometimes feels he is more like Martha, bustling to attend to the people in her home, rather than Mary, who simply sat at the feet of Jesus in the present. Boyle feels being present in the moment is a decision everyone can make. “Scripture reminds us, constantly, that we are meant not to wait for salvation but to watch for it today. Heaven, then, is not a promise we await but a practice we fully engage in,” he writes (82). He feels that this orientation toward both God and life guides people to look “for moments of spaciousness and calm, when our hearts can be restored again to a place of beauty, innocence, and wholeness” (83). He feels this can only happen when people identify the things that “close their heart”—such as “anger, fear, and pride—and turn to our world, instead, with a tender heart” (83). A story of a juvenile inmate yelling “Drive safe, G!” to Boyle from his barred windows as Boyle left the detention facility demonstrates this tenderness (84). 

Boyle claims Homeboy Industries doesn’t rescue people: It receives them. It tells homies not that they do not measure up, but who they are is already enough. He writes:

It is difficult to truly and deeply listen. When a homie is sitting in front of my desk, the mantra on a continuous loop in my head is “Stay listening.” Another handy one is “Now. Here. This.” Listen here and now and only to this person (84).

He feels this approach allows hope to flourish and for love to become tenderness—“the connective tissue of love”—which in turn is transformational (85). 

Boyle says every big name interviewer with whom he ever spoke always reaches a point during the conversation when they want to press him about the criticism he receives—especially from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). When Anderson Cooper once told him the LAPD feels gang members take advantage of him, Boyle replied with “How can someone take my advantage when I’m giving it?” (86). Cooper liked this response so much he began using it himself—he told Boyle as much during their second interview and Cooper’s visit to Homeboy Industries. 

Boyle tells the story of a funeral he attended for two brothers, Miguel and Cesar, killed by gunfire in their neighborhood. Rain poured during the funeral, and their father told the congregation to never lose a day not loving their children. After the 20-mile procession to the cemetery during which the rain did not subside, the rain suddenly stopped upon the party’s arrival at the cemetery. Boyle writes, “The sun reminded us, as we laughed and held each other in this graveyard, that the only antidote to our misery is to stay in the present” (88). 

In another story, Boyle takes two homegirls named Shameeka and Abby to a speaking engagement in San Francisco. While on the phone, he calls Shameeka and Abby “wonderful women,” and Shameeka is quietly moved by this (89). “When you say it...I believe you,” she tells him (89). He uses this as proof that people should observe and uplift one another. He calls the present “The voice of the Beloved,” in an invocation of Sufi mysticism (83).