Cherished Belonging, page 12
Then David asks, looking distressed, “They won’t mind?” The residents of Niagara Falls won’t “mind” the presence of two Los Angeles gang members witnessing this wonder of the world?
I pay the bill for dinner at a Denver restaurant with homies Jesús and Ashley. As we’re leaving the restaurant, our waiter sees us and says, “Thank you for coming.”
Ashley turns to him with a smile and some emphasis: “No, thank YOU for having us.” It was as if we were company in this waiter’s house, not paying customers. But “welcome” is unexpected for folks on the margins. They’re surprised by it. You fully expect people to cross the street. Like the Samaritan woman at the well with Jesus, we all thirst to belong and find welcome.
A homie whose two sons are autistic discovered early on that they were always trying to signal to him, “Welcome to our world.” It took him a while, but he learned to abandon his insistence that his sons become something other than autistic. Welcome. Enrique Flores, whose son is autistic, told me that the Maori word for “autism” means “in one’s own time and space.” Homies feel like strangers in somebody else’s home. Seeing the welcome mat in front of those who are on the margins leads us to a loving humility that jettisons insistence entirely. It calls us to listen and to truly see the other. Respect for one’s own time and space. The book of Sirach speaks of humility and kindness and then says: “Water quenches a flaming fire.” The flames that distance us from each other are humbly reduced so we can see as God does. God sees preciousness. So can we.
I’ve been at this a long time. Homies give me more credit than I deserve in remembering faces or folks who were detained in some place where I celebrated mass long ago. A homie, sitting for some time in the reception area, finally gets called by Julissa to come in to see me. I really don’t recall him at all, but I keep that to myself. His name is Martin and he remembers me. He was finally released from prison after a quarter of a century. He begins to cry and says, “Thank you for keeping your word to me so many years ago.” I can’t recall what word I uttered nor kept to him, but I only want to be as reverent as I can be as we both find some dignified honor in this precious beholding.
At a retreat with Navigators, all homies and homegirls who have come up through the program and are now senior staff each share a difficult moment we had to negotiate. I mentioned that many years earlier, after we had experienced our second murder of our second member of our Graffiti Removal team in less than three months, I sat each member of the crew down and individually polled them: Should we continue or discontinue this social enterprise? Every single one answered a resounding “yes” to continue. All the Navigators present, hearing me relate this, clearly admired the courage and raw bravery of these crew members who wanted the Graffiti Removal team to continue. As I observed their admiration of the crew, my eyes welled up with tears. Twenty years later, I could see why I decided to shut the crew down anyway, even after their expressed determination to continue. I realized now, two decades later, that they all said yes because they saw themselves… as disposable. Given all that they have been asked to carry through their lifetimes, they did not deem themselves worthy of eliminating risk. They were all expendable. I recognize now that’s why I said no.
As often as I can, I try to pull into our program the sons and daughters of folks who work at Homeboy so that these kids can witness their parents, with whom there can be great estrangement, as working adults. Personally, it was life-changing for me as a teenager to load trucks at the same milk distribution company where my father worked. It illuminated my relationship with him to observe his interactions with coworkers.
I pulled in a little homie, the son of one of our senior staff, to “prize” him a little. I ended our conversation by saying, “I will never get tired of calling you my grandson.”
He said to me: “You sure? Everyone gets tired of me.” The Buddhists say, “Whatever we resist, persists.” If we resist believing that God thinks we’re perfect, we fall back into thinking we’re tiresome.
Tara Brach talks about RAIN: Recognize what’s happening; Allow it to be; Investigate with curiosity; Nurture it and offer tenderness to it. This is easy to say as an acronym. Way harder to actually pull off. It is a worthy and sensible goal nonetheless. Mabel and Efrain have been together for ten years. Not exactly a conflict-free ten years. They are the Honeymooners, except Mabel is Ralph Kramden. The Bickersons might be another name for this particular marital TV sitcom. Efrain has a stroke and loses his consciousness for a time. When he comes to in the hospital, Mabel looks him in the eye and asks, “Do you remember who I am?”
He nods and with some difficulty says, “Yes.”
And Mabel says, “Fuck.” Fardy Lardy Dover.
Still, nothing keeps us from recognition, allowing stuff to be, and choosing a nurturing curiosity through it all.
We are endlessly waiting for people. Paul writes in Corinthians that we should “wait for one another.” It’s like waiting to eat until everyone is seated at their place. I wish I knew how to accelerate healing and make folks return to themselves with more speed. But our whole being at Homeboy declares, “You know where you can find us.” Homies who surrender to the quest of well-being can sometimes be impatient with those who aren’t ready to tend to their wounds. I urge Edgar to tell his gang member brother to come in. “Tell him we’ll help. We’ll start him right away.”
Edgar is done trying to drag him in. “Come on, G, he’s a grown-ass man.” And for emphasis, he adds, “He’s got hair on his butthole. He BEEN grown already.” But Edgar had many the hiccup himself at Homeboy. After many starts and stops with us, he could finally say, “I left Homeboy all those times before because it was a lot of love to handle around here.” He finds a place of stillness and says, “I can handle it now.”
A homie was texting me for the umpteenth time, complaining about his coworkers in a warehouse where he often calls them “haters,” “stupid,” “evil,” and “worthless.” I responded simply: “People are wonderful.” This bothered him greatly. “No definitely NOT, Fr. G… what about Charles Manson or Ted Bundy or Jack the Ripper?” I wrote back and said that they were all unshakably good, but too deeply and profoundly ill to be able to see it. I used the example from the day before of the woman who threw her two young kids over the 405 freeway overpass because she was too freaked out by the eclipse. I don’t think he was buying it. We mistakenly think that crime is something criminals do, but that’s false. Crime is something born of despair, trauma, and mental illness. Addressing these things in people is what affectionate awe looks like in practice.
I would walk the yard, “doing laps” with inmates, as chaplain at Folsom State Prison. The guards hated this. On my last scheduled day as chaplain, I was finally told by the lieutenant to never do it again. I happily obliged, knowing it was my final day. Once, I was “taking a lap” with Puppet on the A yard when an old, gray-haired inmate was coming in the opposite direction. He saw me, and his head bobbed up and down. “East LA,” he said, much the same as Cheech would say it. I nodded in his direction.
I turned to Puppet, “Do I know that guy?”
“Best not to,” Puppet said. “That’s Angelo Buono… the Hillside Strangler.” Puppet told me that this guy was his first cellie, until he asked for a change. “I always slept with one eye open.” I saw Angelo many times after that. He always said, “East LA,” whenever we passed each other. He died in prison some seven years later, and I’m glad he was there. But his presence in the world begs the question: What would we have addressed with compassion when he was young and in need of healing that would have changed things? I am confident that more awe would have altered matters.
Beto had a puppy pit bull. He spoke of the dog as tender and gentle and loving to Beto’s kids. Someone stole the dog and sometime later Beto found him in a park. “Long story short, let’s just say, I got the dog back.” I didn’t ask any questions. “But the dog was changed. He was aggressive, and clearly he had been tortured. Finally, the dog could no longer be around the kids and we had to be put him to sleep.” Living in a wounded and wounding world changes things.
The homegirl Inez shared at a morning meeting that “what I found at Homeboy was beyond my wildest dreams. Before Homeboy, I didn’t sleep, let alone dream. And when I did sleep, I had nightmares.” The homies find their power in acting from the fullness of love in them. A great deal can delay that fullness. We learn so much from “eyes that have cried.”
The truth about “post-traumatic” is that it isn’t ever really “post-.” We have to find a way to move with it, as the wounded Jesus shows us. Perhaps Jesus was able to find some curiosity around what he suffered so he could allow it to be his teacher. Allen just took off on one of our in-house lawyers. He screamed at her with the foulest of palabrotas and reduced her to tears. She was assisting him in a very thorny child custody case and she delivered bad news—to him, an unacceptable impasse. When he had calmed down long enough for me to ask him about it, he assured me that blowing up was, in fact, a measure of how much he loved his daughters. We were then able to gently explore how the outburst had indicated more work he needed to do.
“Post-” can sometimes suggest “over,” but in community, we aren’t sidelined by behavior—we are eager to understand what it means. Through it all, the affection does not wane.
I officiate a backyard wedding for Tudy. He works at Homeboy and only invited some thirty-five people. He sets up a nice tent behind the house and several rows of white plastic chairs. Tudy is chain-smoking and taking occasional swigs from a Modelo before getting hitched. When the ceremony is over, I signal a thumbs-up to the DJ to play some song to get the couple out of the tent. It’s an informal affair. The DJ yells out, “What song?”
There’s silence, until a homie yells back, “ ‘Nowhere to Run.’ ” The tent nearly blows over from the laughter.
An old man walks up to me after the wedding. “I’m Tudy’s father.” I shake his hand and tell him how happy I am to meet him. He says, “I understand that Tudy calls you Pops.”
I downplay it. “Well, everyone there calls me Pops.”
He looks steadily at me. “You’ve been a better father to him than I ever was.” It was heartbreaking. The last thing in the world I would have ever wanted was for this man to feel in any way diminished. But he carried himself as one who had long ago transformed his pain and had learned to live by love alone.
Over thirty years ago, when gang members were constantly running up to cars and competing in the sale of crack cocaine, the customers who would walk up to them on foot were often homeless. When these folks had no money, they’d offer themselves as human punching bags for sport and in lieu of payment, homies would just pummel them. Occasionally, I’d walk into these scenes and interrupt them, or bump into a “customer” with his face rearranged. I would often confront one of the “older heads,” and the response was nearly always the same. “Come on, G. He’s just a basehead.” Disposable. Wounding and wounded.
The gang members who are gathered across the street from the church are out of control. I am overseeing the afternoon wake of one their homies inside the church and have to make regular visits outside to quiet down the raucous gang members posted up near our parking lot. I have known these guys for many years. On one of my forays outside, a homie named Speedy has written the name of his gang with a spray can on a side wall of the church. This is a breach beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Meth, alcohol, and PCP were calling shots that afternoon.
A very drunken Leo managed to paint over the egregious violation. He is insistent with me: “I’ve changed, G.” Leo tells me this because he thinks I’d never acknowledge this.
Maybe he has changed. But he hasn’t healed. He’s never been to Homeboy, though I’ve known him for forty years. He still calls shots for his gang, even as he holds down a job and tries to be a husband and father. He has never known the experience of healing in a community. Not sure the wounds can close otherwise.
Many years ago, five homies return to work after lunch. It turns out they had a liquid lunch. They’re all quite staggering and pedo. Hector Verdugo calmly tells four of them that they are suspended for five days. Each of the four are deeply repentant and all hoping against hope to hold on to their jobs after the suspension. We keep trying to model discipline rather than “discipline” folks. Beyond imposition is a tender “modeling.”
David is another story. When Hector locates him, he is barely standing in the small garden by himself in front of our back curriculum building. He’s a very large guy, chiseled, and his fully “sleeved out” tattooed arms are revealed by the muscle shirt he’s wearing. He’s in high belligerent mode and is not having any of it. Hector tells him that he, along with the others, is suspended for five days. David tells him he can go fuck himself. Hector gulps. “Five days,” he repeats.
David lifts his muscle shirt to reveal a gun tucked into the front of his pants. “I’ll take three days,” then lets his shirt fall to conceal the gun once again.
Hector takes in a deep breath. “No, David. Five days.”
At this point, three members of our security team walk slowly toward the scene. It ignites David: “I’ll smoke you and all your fuckin’ security guards.”
This moves Hector to swing around and scream, “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HERE!” They back up completely.
When Hector wheels around, David is on the phone. It’s never good when homies, during some confrontation, get on the phone. More often than not, the enraged one is calling for backup. David tries to enter the back building, and Hector blocks him. “I can’t let you in there with that gun.” Hector then surmises that David must have been “drinking hard stuff” because he is getting progressively drunker in his presence. He marvels at the delayed reaction of it all as David slurs his speech and becomes even more wobbly.
David unleashes a torrent of invective and Hector feels this great churning in his stomach. His entire body is sending him this message: You are going to die now. In the telling of this story years later, he reflects at that moment: “I knew it would be a good death.” He feels at peace. “It wouldn’t have been a bad death, like from my years on the streets, gangbanging.” He’s resigned himself to this.
David leaves. Later that evening, he bumps into the cops, they find the gun, and he ends up going to prison.
Two years later David walks into Homeboy and approaches Hector in the reception area. Hector inhales deeply. “I want to apologize to you for what happened,” David says. “I hope you’ll forgive me. And… I want to know if I can have another chance?”
Hector embraces him. “Welcome home, David. We’ve been waiting for you.” Don’t erase the board so soon.
It was the large family gatherings that underscored the wound. Sammy would notice that all his little cousins had a father’s knee to sit on. He would play it off that he was too old or too cool and had no need of anyone’s knee. His lament and rage, however, was mainly on his kid brother’s behalf. He needed a knee. It was not until years later that he recognized this vague ache that seemed to saturate his longing and occasionally short-circuit his own flourishing. Sammy found a way, in walking with others, to do what the Buddhists say: “Tend to the part of the garden you can reach.” He could reach the ache and welcome it. He let it be light to bring clarity to so much.
All of Miguel’s older siblings were in foster care already. His mom had a brief respite from her addiction, long enough for baby Miguel to stay in her care. By the two-month mark, his mom was arrested for a very large amount of cocaine—kilos and kilos—and Miguel was also swept up and put in a foster home until he was two years old. “I was abused in that house. Though I was tiny, I remember this woman putting a hot iron on me.” He was volleyed to many places after that.
When he was ten, he returned to his mother, who again had achieved some short-lived bout of recovery and remained jail-free. All his other sibs had been adopted out. By age fourteen, his mother had returned to a constant state of getting high. Food wasn’t even put on the table. Miguel was arguing with her in the passenger seat of the car, promising he would now go to Child Protective Services to report her. He got out of the car, and before he could reach the sidewalk, “She ranned me over.” This sent him to the hospital with severe head injuries. His mother was mandated to prison for two years.
So many more years passed before Miguel could settle into comfort with himself. After the birth of his son and several violent outbursts at Homeboy, he went to rehab and has now allowed himself to be held in a community where wounds can close. Relationship itself. We are called to belong to the Beloved, and we walk with each other in a constant state of reminder. We invite others to belonging and remind them of this long-standing invitation. It’s what we all try to model.
I don’t know the homie sitting in front of me. I don’t think he has taken a playa in a minute, and he looks bereft. His tattoos alone say that he qualifies to be here with us. He shows me a large bandage on his right arm, where days before he had been stabbed at a Metro station. “I almost bled to death, until someone found me and called for help.” He seems as tired as a soul can be. I write the note indicating “Drug test any Friday at 10:00” and give it to him.
“Now, don’t lose this,” I tell him. “It’s how they’ll know I’ve approved you.” I hand him the note, folded, with my card and “40 bones” tucked in there. I tell him, “You will love it here, and we’ll love you back.” Who can explain fully the convergence of things, but he just dissolves in tears. When he can look up at me from this crying bout, he says, “I’m gonna bring my light here.”
“Please do,” I tell him. “We could use it.” I am so heartened that he knows he has light. It’s a good place to start.
Oscar has a searing memory from when he was five. His mom places him on the couch, along with his kid brother, and puts a video on. It’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. Oscar is planted there, his brother sound asleep, while his mother goes into the bedroom. Oscar takes in every frightening image and keeps his eyes transfixed on the disfigured midnight mangler, Freddy Krueger. The only light filling the living room comes from the terror on the TV.
