Tattoos on the Heart - Gregory Boyle - Part 1

Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of
Boundless Compassion
Gregory Boyle

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 34

 February 3, 2017 

Book 10 - Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
by Gregory Boyle (2010)
 Part 1 - Pages xi-xv, 1-60
Reading Time - 70 minutes

Not sure how this book came to be on my reading list for 2017 but there it is. Gregory Boyle is a Jesuit priest who, in the mid 1980s, was assigned to Dolores Mission parish in Los Angeles. If LA is the gang-capital of the US... then the Dolores Mission area is the gang-capital of LA!

Working with gang members who want to get out... Boyle takes the opportunity to reflect on the boundless compassion of love. Most particularly that of God. Boyle is pretty clear that God is far bigger than we think God is, or rather, in his own words - "How much greater is the God we have, than the one we think we have."

I rather liked this quote too - "It is only because we have such an overactive disapproval gland ourselves that we tend to create God in our own image". If only we could all really get that. God isn't disappointed in us. God isn't standing over us whipping us to get up and do better. We are perfect, just the way we are.

What Boyle recognized early on was that the principal suffering of the poor is not poverty but shame and disgrace. The shame comes from an utter failure of self-love. And yet, so often, the Church doesn't promote our own self-love but rather urges us to "do better". If only we could love ourselves the way that God loves us... the world would be a very different place. For really... our own lack of self-love is what drives the evil in the world. Love really is the answer.