A poignant commencement speech…
Fr. Greg “G-Dog” Boyle, S.J. recently addressed the graduates of Notre Dame. Part of his talk is quoted below, but his full 11-minute speech is well worth the listen at this link: http://news.nd.edu/news/rev-gregory-j-boyle-sj-2017-laetare-address/
After his ordination in 1984, Fr. Greg was assigned to serve the poorest Catholic parish in Los Angeles, located between two large public housing projects with the highest concentration of gang activity in the city. In response to witnessing the devastating impact of gang violence, he led the community to launch their first social enterprise business in an abandoned bakery and called it Homeboy Bakery. Today, Homeboy Industries is the largest gang intervention, rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world.
Fr. Boyle is the author of the New York Times-bestseller Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (A profoundly inspirational graduation gift!) and is the subject of the 2012 documentary, G-Dog.
Fr. Boyle says “What Martin Luther King says about church could well be said about your time here at Notre Dame: “It’s not the place you’ve come to, it’s the place you go from,” and you go from here to create a community of kinship such that God, in fact, might recognize it. You imagine with God a circle of compassion and then you imagine nobody standing outside that circle. You go from here to dismantle the barriers that exclude.
And there’s only one way to do that: and that is to go where the joy is, which is at the margins, for if you stand at the margins, that’s the only way they’ll get erased...when you stand with the poor, and the powerless and the voiceless…with those whose dignity has been denied, whose burdens are more than they can bear…you will go from here and have this exquisite privilege to stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop…with the disposable, so the day will come when we stop throwing people away….
He goes on to share the witness of a “gentle, kind soul,” 25-year-old José, a former gang member who in his short life had spent time homeless, in prison, and as a heroin addict and is now a valued member of the substance abuse team.
José said “I was six years old, and I guess you could say my mom and I, we didn’t get along so good. She said to me once, ‘I wish you would just kill yourself. You’re such a burden to me.’” I was nine when my mom took me to an orphanage and said, ‘I found this kid’’ and she left me there for 90 days until my grandmother could come rescue me from where she had dumped me.
My mom beat me every single day of my elementary school years with things you could imagine and a lot of things you couldn’t. Every day my back was bloodied and scarred. I had to wear three t-shirts to school each day: first t-shirt because the blood would seep through; second t-shirt you could still see it; finally the third t-shirt you couldn’t see any blood. Kids at school, they’d make fun of me, ‘Hey, fool, it’s 100 degrees, why you wearing three t-shirts?’”
And then he stopped speaking, so overwhelmed with emotion, and he seemed to be staring at a piece of his story that only he could see. When he could regain his speech, he said through his tears, “I wore three t-shirts well into my adult years because I was ashamed of my wounds. I didn’t want anybody to see them. But now I welcome my wounds. I run my fingers over my scars. My wounds are my friends. After all, how can I help heal the wounded if I don’t welcome my own wounds?”
May we all go from this place to create a community of kinship such that God might recognize it...
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