Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
Written and Narrated By: Gregory Boyle
Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
Whazza? No longer available but through CDs?!? This is a gem, an epic of love hard-won! Beautiful!!!
Where to start, where to start? How about that this absolutely brutally beautiful audiobook appears to be gone, gone, gone on Audible, on Kobo, nary a sighting at Audiobooks.com? I mean, whattheheck?!?
Or that after this, my second listen, I was soooo in tears that I HAD to get the print version for my husband (I thiiiink I remember reading print schtuff—waaaay back when…!)?
Or that a wonderful fellow Accomplice sent word that she’d actually seen saint-in-training Gregory Boyle, the author and narrator? (And might I say that I’m in awe of such a happening?)
Okay, okay, okay. I’m horrible for touting this audiobook, Tattoos on the Heart, since it’s hard to find, but hear me out, cuz it’s very much worth looking for!
I’d earlier reviewed Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle’s second book, Barking to the Choir, stating I’d get around to listening to this one cuz I kinda sorta really liked that second book but kinda sorta thought it was jumbly and was snippets thrown together. It didn’t seem all that cohesive, and it lacks what this one has in spades:
Indelible lessons of growth, of love, of compassion—it DEFinitely has sooo much heart, and the stories will leave you broken and sobbing. Gregory Boyle, who once faltered and flailed in his sermons said in Spanish, here comes to Los Angeles where he preaches and teaches to an increasingly Hispanic community. That he narrates this audiobook himself only highlights what the man became after his first wobbly steps—A man who has become comfortable in joyously crying: Ese, mijo! Congratulations! when a young boy brings a report card, littered with Fs, and it’s seen that he had perfect attendance. Boyle, who might’ve been considered an outsider, has become the heart and soul of the community, its wondrous light beckoning all to a better, more hopeful, way.
Cuz he’s aaaaalllll about seeing Christ in his fellow man, be they gangbangers or mothers who grieve for the fallen. The book is chockfull of stories taken from the lives of those he serves, and it tells of his start with Homeboy Industries—that way of giving young men and women from even rival gangs a chance to stay off the streets or to re-enter society after stints in correctional facilities. What starts as looking for opportunities within the community turns into a bakery turns into so much more (I’ve even gone online to check out merchandising because I have a feeling my husband will be so taken with the book that he’ll want to support and bear witness to Boyle’s efforts).
Whereas Barking to the Choir seemed to be bits and pieces strung together with contemplations of God, this book is seeing God within the heart of even those who might be judged by their greatest offenses. We see just little kids, maybe promising to shoot the man who beat their mother senseless yet again, maybe fending for themselves on the streets as parents were too taken by drugs to even notice them, and we follow as they open up to G-dog as he came to be known. They’re given a chance, they’re given hope; at no point do we judge them as anything but the beauty they were born as.
But it’s not just the young here; we’re seeing the beauty in those who’ve committed horrible offenses, who struggle as they might turn away from assistance but who come to the fore as they tentatively seek a better life, seek redemption, who perhaps wish to be the parent they never had to their own children. They’re given second, third, fourth chances; Boyle never gives up—His heart is as open and as full of love and acceptance from the first thwarted attempt to the final hesitant steps taken.
And things often go terribly, terribly, awry. Because life on the street, even if you’re out of a gang, is not kind but can be brutal, can be unpredictable, can be unforgivingly random. Boyle has said MANY a funeral mass for those who walked the finer more loving and more hopeful path just as often as he has for those who just couldn’t manage to get away; it doesn’t matter, they’re all somebody’s son (or daughter). This is such a harshly real book, and I got caught up in listening to someone, some hard nobody who is given a name, a life, and dreams for the future even as they navigate better nows, only to be at the wrong place/wrong time. Or maybe it’s that they were never absolved by rival gangs and their pasts caught up with them in brutal acts of revenge.
Whatever the case, I loved the stories, the faces given to the marginalized. I loved getting caught up in Boyle’s irrepressibly hopeful style, his ability to openly shed tears, his exhaustion upon seeing to yet another funeral, his strength as he gets up after such falls, arms open wide to help the next troubled soul whom he sees the face of God in. And make no mistake: He’s not celebrated by all. There are those whose lives have been forever damaged by gang violence, who have had sons taken far too soon, daughters set on fire—they’re totally not into seeing anything but evil in the faces of those Boyle serves, those he celebrates.
So it’s up to us all to decide for ourselves what we want to see. Me? I saw the utter and broken sense of a shared humanity, a sense of kinship where before I’d seen only ugly choices, hopeless lives. This book made me chuckle and laugh—it’s very funny, but yes, it also made me cry ugly tears.
There’s the beauty of hope, the sorrow of lives brutally lived.
And then there’s the beauty of hope once again, if we but have the courage to grasp for it.
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