We belong to each other
Review of "Cherished Belonging" by Father Gregory Boyle.
Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times
By Gregory Boyle
Simon & Schuster, 2024
“Everyone is unshakably good (no exceptions),” writes Father Gregory Boyle in his new book Cherished Belonging. He also says, “We belong to each other (no exceptions).” The statements by this Jesuit priest, founder of Homeboy Industries, a gang intervention program in Los Angeles, could be a bit shocking to those who grew up in a strict Calvinist setting.
I came to this book as someone who grew up attending two church services every Sunday, the second one focused on the questions and answers of the Heidelberg Catechism, a set for every Sunday in the year. Every Tuesday evening, I attended catechism, which involved memorizing these questions and answers. We were then tested prior to confessing Profession of Faith, which was expected at eighteen years of age, by a group of men sitting around a table in a smoke-filled consistory room.
My early church education did not sound like those quotes from Boyle. I learned statements from the Baptismal Form, such as: “Scripture teaches that we and our children are sinners from birth, sinful from the time our mothers conceived us” (Ps. 51:5). My beliefs were shaped by words from Article 15 of the Belgic Confession: “We believe… original sin has been spread through the whole human race. It is a corruption of all nature – an inherited depravity which even infects small infants in their mother’s womb, and the root which produces in man every sort of sin.”
Working with “Homies”
Boyle is the founder of the largest gang rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world. Ten thousand people (called “Homies”) walk through its doors each year. In 2024, President Biden awarded Boyle the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour, in recognition of his outstanding work.
In his new book, Boyle (or Father G, as he is known) is not writing about the good neighbours who shovel your sidewalk and work in soup kitchens. They are muscular ex-convicts with tattoos, many with long prison sentences. Some have committed murder. They do not fit the typical description of “nice.” And yet… Boyle thinks all people are fundamentally good. How does this add up?
He believes three things blindfold us from seeing the underlying goodness in all:
- Despair (the absence of hope)
- Trauma (wounds, brokenness)
- Mental illness (drug addiction)
Rip these blindfolds away, and goodness is evident. And what is the power that transforms these three blindfolds? Cherishing, Boyle says, and belonging.
“If you’re loving, you’re healthy. If you’re healthy, you’re loving,” Boyle writes. He sees humanity as one village of embracing and cherishing – where everyone belongs. “Love believes the best about people . . . There are no ‘good people’ or ‘bad people,’ only God’s people.” As God’s people, we belong to each other, and no one should be excluded.
To me, his approach sounds a lot like Jesus’ teaching. “Jesus doesn’t draw lines. He erases them,” Boyle says. Instead, Jesus spent energy on embracing people rather than drawing elaborate lines around those in and those out. This is a rather provocative thought as several denominations currently struggle (or don’t!) with demarcations of who’s in and who’s out.
What if, asks Boyle, we didn’t punish people but tried to heal them? What if we tried to treat them with compassion instead of building prisons to accommodate them?
Justice, in Boyle’s view, is not about punishment; justice is bringing people back into community. He quotes an old African proverb: “The child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”
Boyle cites example after example of how tribalism excludes and punishes, while a spirit of cherished belonging fosters hope and healing. Anecdote after anecdote shows how the most extremely damaged people find a place of compassion and wholeness.
“We know we don’t have enemies; we have injuries. That we don’t have hate; we have wounds,” he writes. “And, really, we don’t have fear. We only have shared ruin of our common, human brokenness.” Furthermore, God “wants us to widen the circle, and that’s our communal task in the Household of God.”
Loving because they are loved
This book gives voice to those who have found a home where they are cherished and can learn to love because they are loved. The stories are not pretty – there is the young five-year-old who watches his father regularly beat up his mother and who gets the beating himself when he defends his mother, and ends up with a pan of boiling beans poured over him. Can such a boy ever feel loved or cherished, or does he instead join a gang and learn to fight?
A previous book by Boyle is entitled Barking to the Choir. This book takes aim at the morality of churchgoers who are blinded to the needs of the wounded, whose loyalty is to the church as an institution rather than to the radical message of the gospel. Would you like these wounded in your neighbourhood? Do you cross the street to avoid eye contact with these convicts?
Transitions from one anecdote to another in Boyle’s book are fast, and it isn’t always clear who he is talking about (or the name of a place or a TV personality). But I suspect this might reflect the open-door policy of this Jesuit priest – always on the go, always opening his door to the next wounded person, always listening to the voice that longs to be cherished and to belong.
“Perhaps it’s time to recycle Christianity,” writes Boyle. “We need attentive hearts to make way for a universal, all-inclusive belonging. We need to step away from a Christianity that supports exclusion and superiority. It’s a head scratcher that so many Christians are frightened and rebuke the notion of ‘woke’ when the entirety of Advent is waking up.”
And what about all that talk of “total depravity” and “original sin”? Think about it. The implications are shattering.
