In The World Who God Is (Tattoos on the Heart, p. 67)
I am a spiritual non-theist who has come to treasure a parable-filled memoir celebrating a vision of God in the world, authored by a Jesuit Priest. In 2010, Father Gregory Boyle, pastor of Dolores Mission since 1986 and founder of Homeboy Industries, serving to uplift the lives of gang members in Boyle Heights near downtown Los Angeles—a thoroughly savvy, engaging, astonishing writer and man, who holds degrees in English, and has been awarded the California Peace Prize—published his memoir. Tattoos on the Heart is a collection of stories/essays/sermons from the hot core of life in the barrio, and is like nothing I have read before. Boyle offers compassionate inclusion as the path to awakening …show more content…
He loses patience, temper; he loses focus. He once lost his missalette before officiating in a remote, unfamiliar location at a wedding and mass. It was in the subsequent shame of perceived dismal failure that the young priest, isolated in Tirani, Bolivia among the Quechua Indians, was awakened under a baptism of rose petals, an unexpected shower of acceptance, drawn from the worn pockets of some old compañero and scattered lovingly over his bent and weeping head. This tender act, Boyle reveals, healed the priest’s shame, dissolving hubris; it joined him to the spirit indwelling in all humanity, enlightening him, and it set him on his life’s evangelical mission. [pp. 37-8] An awakened presence, Boyle uncovers and shares this revelation repeatedly in the raw material of everyday living.
As a language craftsman, Boyle excels at supplying salient descriptive detail and deftly reproduced dialogue that combine with his keen observations to draw his reader into intimate engagement. As a result, his characters come alive. He supports this with shifts in verbal tense usage. In his chapter, Dis-Grace, for example, he writes:
I know an inmate, Lefty, at Folsom State Prison, whose father would, when Lefty was a child, get drunk and beat his mom. One Saturday night Lefty’s father beat his mother so badly that the next day she had to be led around by his sisters, as if she were blind. Both of her
I am a spiritual non-theist who has come to treasure a parable-filled memoir celebrating a vision of God in the world, authored by a Jesuit Priest. In 2010, Father Gregory Boyle, pastor of Dolores Mission since 1986 and founder of Homeboy Industries, serving to uplift the lives of gang members in Boyle Heights near downtown Los Angeles—a thoroughly savvy, engaging, astonishing writer and man, who holds degrees in English, and has been awarded the California Peace Prize—published his memoir. Tattoos on the Heart is a collection of stories/essays/sermons from the hot core of life in the barrio, and is like nothing I have read before. Boyle offers compassionate inclusion as the path to awakening …show more content…
He loses patience, temper; he loses focus. He once lost his missalette before officiating in a remote, unfamiliar location at a wedding and mass. It was in the subsequent shame of perceived dismal failure that the young priest, isolated in Tirani, Bolivia among the Quechua Indians, was awakened under a baptism of rose petals, an unexpected shower of acceptance, drawn from the worn pockets of some old compañero and scattered lovingly over his bent and weeping head. This tender act, Boyle reveals, healed the priest’s shame, dissolving hubris; it joined him to the spirit indwelling in all humanity, enlightening him, and it set him on his life’s evangelical mission. [pp. 37-8] An awakened presence, Boyle uncovers and shares this revelation repeatedly in the raw material of everyday living.
As a language craftsman, Boyle excels at supplying salient descriptive detail and deftly reproduced dialogue that combine with his keen observations to draw his reader into intimate engagement. As a result, his characters come alive. He supports this with shifts in verbal tense usage. In his chapter, Dis-Grace, for example, he writes:
I know an inmate, Lefty, at Folsom State Prison, whose father would, when Lefty was a child, get drunk and beat his mom. One Saturday night Lefty’s father beat his mother so badly that the next day she had to be led around by his sisters, as if she were blind. Both of her