Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

Quotes that stood out to me:

CHAPTER 1: God, I Guess
“God can get tiny, if we're not careful. I'm certain we all have an image of God that becomes the touchstone, the controlling principle, to which we return when we stray”

“Anthony De Mello writes, “Behold the One beholding you, and smiling.”

“God would seem to be too occupied in being unable to take Her eyes off of us to spend any time raising an eyebrow in disapproval. What's true of Jesus is true for us, and so this voice breaks through the clouds and comes straight at us. “You are my Beloved, in whom I am wonderfully pleased.” There is not much “tiny” in that.”

“This is a chapter on God, I guess. Truth be told, the whole book is. Not much in my life makes any sense outside of God. Certainly, a place like Homeboy Industries is all folly and bad business unless the core of the endeavor seeks to imitate the kind of God one ought to believe in. In the end, I am helpless to explain why anyone would accompany those on the margins were it not for some anchored belief that the Ground of all Being thought this was a good idea.”

“Perhaps we should all marinate in the intimacy of God. Genesis, I suppose, got it right—“In the beginning, God.” Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, also spoke about the task of marinating in the “God who is always greater.” He writes, “Take care always to keep before your eyes, first, God.” The secret, of course, of the ministry of Jesus, was that God was at the center of it. Jesus chose to marinate in the God who is always greater than our tiny conception, the God who “loves without measure and without regret.” To anchor yourself in this, to keep always before your eyes this God is to choose to be intoxicated, marinated in the fullness of God. An Algerian Trappist, before his martyrdom, spoke to this fullness: “When you fill my heart, my eyes overflow.”

“So, son, tell me something,” I ask. “How do you see God?”
“God?” he says, “That's my dog right there.”
“And God?” I ask, “How does God see you?”
Willy doesn't answer at first. So I turn and watch as he rests his head on the recliner, staring at the ceiling of my car. A tear falls down his cheek. Heart full, eyes overflowing. “God... thinks... I'm... firme.”
To the homies, firme means, “could not be one bit better.”
Not only does God think we're firme, it is God's joy to have us marinate in that.

“The poet Kabir asks, “What is God?” Then he answers his own question: “God is the breath inside the breath.”
Willy found his way inside the breath and it was firme.”

“Meister Eckhart says “God is greater than God.” The hope is that our sense of God will grow as expansive as our God is. Each tiny conception gets obliterated as we discover more and more the God who is always greater”

“Behold the One beholding you and smiling.” It is precisely because we have such an overactive disapproval gland ourselves that we tend to create God in our own image. It is truly hard for us to see the truth that disapproval does not seem to be part of God's DNA. God is just too busy loving us to have any time left for disappointment”

“God seems to be an unwilling participant in our efforts to pigeonhole Him. 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. Richard Rohr writes in Everything Belongs that nothing of our humanity is to be discarded. 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”

“ 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. This joy, God's joy, is like a bunch of women lined up in the parish hall on your birthday, wanting only to dance with you—cheek to cheek. “First things, recognizably first,” as Daniel Berrigan says. The God, who is greater than God, has only one thing on Her mind, and that is to drop, endlessly, rose petals on our heads. Behold the One who can't take His eyes off of you. Marinate in the vastness of that.”

CHAPTER 2: Dis-Grace
“Author John Bradshaw claims that shame is at the root of all addictions. This would certainly seem to be true with the gang addiction. In the face of all this, the call is to allow the painful shame of others to have a purchase on our lives. Not to fix the pain but to feel it. Beldon Lane, the theologian, writes: “Divine love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty and all embarrassment into laughter.” (89)

“Guilt, is feeling bad about one's actions, but shame is feeling bad about oneself. Failure, embarrassment, weakness, overwhelming worthlessness, and feeling disgracefully “less than”—all permeating the marrow of the soul” (46)

“I watched this kid move, transformed, from Sniper to Gonzalez to Cabrón to Napoleón to Napito. We all just want to be called by the name our mom uses when she's not pissed off at us.
Names are important”

“Hey, the priest knows my name.”
“I have called you by your name. You are mine,” is how Isaiah gets God to articulate this truth. Who doesn't want to be called by name, known? The “knowing” and the “naming” seem to get at what Anne Lamott calls our “inner sense of disfigurement.”
As misshapen as we feel ourselves to be, attention from another reminds us of our true shape in God”

“Out of the wreck of our disfigured, misshapen selves, so darkened by shame and disgrace, indeed the Lord comes to us disguised as ourselves. And we don't grow into this—we just learn to pay better attention. The “no matter whatness” of God dissolves the toxicity of shame and fills us with tender mercy. Favorable, finally, and called by name—by the one your mom uses when she's not pissed off”

CHAPTER 3: Compassion

“God is compassionate, loving kindness. All we're asked to do is to be in the world who God is. Certainly compassion was the wallpaper of Jesus' soul, the contour of his heart, it was who he was. I heard someone say once, “Just assume the answer to every question is compassion.”
Jesus pulled this off. Compassion is no fleeting occasional emotion rising to the surface like eros or anger. It's full-throttled. Scripture scholars connect the word to the entrails, to the bowels, from the deepest part of the person. This was how Jesus was moved, from the entirety of his being. He was “moved with pity” when he saw folks who seemed like “sheep without a shepherd.” He had room for everybody in his compassion.”

“Pema Chödrön, an ordained Buddhist nun, writes of compassion and suggests that its truest measure lies not in our service of those on the margins, but in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them”

“When they were caught and I found I knew them, it was excruciating not to be able to hate them. Sheep without a shepherd. And no less the real deal. But for lack of someone to reveal the truth to them, they had evaded healing, and the task of returning them to themselves got more hardened and difficult. But are they less worthy of compassion than Betito?”

“The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place—with the outcast and those relegated to the margins.”

“Outcast. Victim and victimizer. Sheep without a shepherd. Memo finds his core wound and joins it to the Pritchard core wound. Entrails, involving the bowels, the deepest place in Memo finds solidarity in the starkest wound of others. Compassion is God. The pain of others having a purchase on his life. Memo would return, with other homies, to Pritchard many times. A beloved community of equals has been fostered and forged there, and the roofs just keep getting ripped off. Soon enough, there won't be anyone left outside.”

Chapter 6: Jurisdiction

“Sometimes you're thrown into each other's jurisdiction, and that feels better than living, as the Buddhists say, in the “illusion of separateness.” It is in this place where we judge the other and feel the impossibility of anything getting bridged. The gulf too wide and the gap too distant, the walls grow higher, and we forget who we are meant to be to each other.”

“Maybe there are eight of us or so when the meal finally gets served. Plenty to go around and just as tasty as it could be. Everyone brought his flavor to this forbidden pot of iguana stew, and keeping anyone away and excluded was unthinkable to this band of prisoners. Alone, they didn't have much, but together, they had a potful of plenty.”

“it always becomes impossible to demonize someone you know”

“Close both eyes; see with the other one. Then, we are no longer saddled by the burden of our persistent judgments, our ceaseless withholding, our constant exclusion. Our sphere has widened, and we find ourselves, quite unexpectedly, in a new, expansive location, in a place of endless acceptance and infinite love.
We've wandered into God's own “jurisdiction.”

Chapter 7: Gladness

“Dorothy Day loved to quote Ruskin, who urged us all to the “Duty to Delight.” It was an admonition, really, to be watchful for the hilarious and the heartwarming, the silly and the sublime. This way will not pass again, and so there is a duty to be mindful of that which delights and keeps joy at the center, distilled from all that happens to us in a day”

“We bask in God's unalloyed joy, and we let loose with that same joy in whoever is in front of us”

“We breathe in the spirit that delights in our being—the fragrance of it. And it works on us. Then we exhale (for that breath has to go somewhere)—to breathe into the world this same spirit of delight, confident that this is God's only agenda.
We want to cover our bets, though. A battle gets waged between disparate takes on God's hidden agenda. What seems to vex us is our tendency to conjure up a tiny God”

“Leon Dufour, a world-renowned Jesuit theologian and Scripture scholar, a year before he died at ninety-nine, confided in a Jesuit who was caring for him, “I have written so many books on God, but after all that, what do I really know? I think, in the end, God is the person you're talking to, the one right in front of you.” A mantra I use often, to keep me focused in delight on the person in front of me, comes from an unlikely place. I find it in Jesus' words to the good ladrón nailed next to him. He essentially says, “This day . . . with me . . . Paradise.” It's not just a promise of things to come; it is a promise for the here and now . . . with Him . . . on this day, in fact . . . Paradise”

“Thich Nhat Hahn writes that “our true home is the present moment, the miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment.” The ancient Desert Fathers, when they were disconsolate and without hope, would repeat one word, over and over, as a kind of soothing mantra. And the word wasn't “Jesus” or “God” or “Love.” The word was “Today.” It kept them where they needed to be.”

“Thomas Merton writes, “No despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there . . . We are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.” The cosmic dance is simply always happening, and you'll want to be there when it happens. For it is there in the birth of your first child, in roundhouse bagging, in watching your crew eat, in an owl's surprising appearance, and in a “digested” frog. Rascally inventions of holiness abounding—today, awaiting the attention of our delight. Yes, yes, yes. God so loved the world that He thought we'd find the poetry in it. Music. Nothing playing”

Chapter 8: Success
“I find myself heartened by Mother Teresa's take: “We are not called to be successful, but faithful”

“If you surrender your need for results and outcomes, success becomes God's business. I find it hard enough to just be faithful”

“Sr. Elaine Roulette, the founder of My Mother's House in New York, was asked, “How do you work with the poor?” She answered, “You don't. You share your life with the poor.” It's as basic as crying together. It is about “casting your lot” before it ever becomes about “changing their lot.”
Success and failure, ultimately, have little to do with living the gospel. Jesus just stood with the outcasts until they were welcomed or until he was crucified—whichever came first”

“as Mark Torres, S.J., beloved spiritual guide at Homeboy Industries, says, “We see in the homies what they don't see in themselves until they do.”

Chapter 9: Kinship
“Greg writes, “Kinship [is] not serving the other, but being one with the other. Jesus was not ‘a man for others'; he was one with them.” How are the two different, and how does Greg integrate this distinction into his work?”

“Mother Teresa diagnosed the world's ills in this way: we've just “forgotten that we belong to each other”

“Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away”