Tattoo Your Heart!

  “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded.  It’s a covenant between equals…Compassion is always, at its most authentic, about a shift from the cramped world of self-preoccupation into a more expansive place of fellowship, of true kinship.
             - Fr. Gregory “G” Boyle

 

     This book should come with a warning label:

 WARNING: This book has been known to induce both uncontrollable laughter and tears, often at the same time.  This book will force you to examine your own heart.  Reading this book may cause you to experience an overwhelming sense of God’s compassion.  Do not attempt to read all pages at once.

     I recently finished readhing Karen Armstrong’s book, Twelve Stepos To A Compassionate Life.  Armstrong, with all of her knowledge of the many religions of the world clearly demonstrates how compassion is a central theme in most faiths.  It was a wonderful book and I finished it intent on implementing her twelve step plan.  Soon thereafter I chose to get started on this book, Tattoos on the Heart.  I had heard Fr. Gregory Boyle speak recently at an event and was moved to purchase his book.  “What a storyteller.  I bet this is going to be a great book!”, I thought to myself.  I don’t think I could have picked a more perfect book to follow Armstrong’s.  Fr. Boyle and his ministry with gang members is a living testimony that could most easily define compassion in it’s full meaning.

     Fr. Boyle has served as the pastor at Delorres Mission in Boyle Heights, California.  His parish is at the heart of the most concentrated gang activity in Los Angeles.  For twenty-one years he has served this community; helping gang members to discover who God is and who God created them to be.  He has walked with them and built a kinship with them.  He has suffered with them and for them.  His life devotion to serving these folks is an amazing testimony and what a story his life is to hear. 

     But that is not what this book is about.  This book is filled with the stories of the homeboys with whom he has worked.  The pages are filled with their triumphs, their failures, their discoveries and their tragedies.  In Tattoos on the Heart, Father Boyle or “Gee” as he is called shares the human-ness of those whom many of us would think of as something less than human.  He shares their hearts.  He shares their passions.  He tells of their struggle to find any sense of worth in a world that tends to shun them and he does it in such a way that rivots your heart.

     I think this has been the most inpiring book I have read in years.  This past week has been a roller coaster of emotion as I have been consumed by this book for only an hour or so at a time.  Although this book is short and very easy to read, you cannot finish it in one, or even two sittings.  The raw emotion that is shared, consumed and evoked as you read cannot be taken in all at once.  In fact, now that I have finished this book, I am not quite sure how I will fill the void.  I don’t think I am ready to pick up another book just yet.  I am not done “marinating” in the compassion of God this book revealed to me.

     I have the hardcover edition of this book, but highly recommend the investment in the audio version (I downloaded that one later).  It is read by Fr. Boyle and is so powerful as you can hear his wonderful storytelling and sense in his voice much of the emotion of the book.  Remember my warning above; this book, if you allow it to, will place you into the center of God’s compassion.

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