Published June 2025
On May 15th, 2025, we had the pleasure of meeting with Fr. Greg Boyle who was in town to present a Lecture in Catholic Experience at St. Jerome’s University. The following is an excerpt from Fr. Greg’s talk:
Circle of Compassion
A lecture like this always makes me think of Martin Luther King, what he said about church, that it’s not the place you come to, it’s the place you go from. For this talk tonight, we go from here to imagine a circle of compassion and then imagine nobody standing outside that circle. You go from here to dismantle the barriers that exclude.
Standing at the Margins
I have to say that I spent the most amazing several hours with the people from The Working Centre and I was so moved by them and how powerful their presence is in announcing what kind of God we have. I really won’t forget having been with you this morning. That’s exactly what you do for a living, the people at The Working Centre have stood at the margins knowing that the only way to erase them is to stand out on those margins. That’s how you end up creating a community of kinship such that God in fact might recognize it.
To be able to stand with the easily despised and the readily left out
And there is a particularity to that invitation which is to stand with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. And to stand with those whose dignity has been denied and to stand with those whose burdens are more than they can bear. Every once in a while, and I know the folks at The Working Centre have a palpable sense of this, that you feel this extraordinary privilege, in all its exquisite mutuality, to be able to stand with the easily despised and the readily left out. To get to stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop and with the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away. And you brace yourselves when you go to the margins, because the world will accuse you of wasting your time there.
The God of Love
My friend, Mirabai Star, and I really recommend her books to you, she’s a magnificent person but a great writer and she says, “Once you know the God of love, you fire all the other Gods.” Which I think is a good task of maturing spirituality. Once I had a spiritual director many years ago, he said to me, “You know we need a better God than the one we have”. He was a Jesuit, but of course it’s true we do need a better one, because we’ve settled for this tiny one and you know we project onto God all our stuff. Richard Rohr says “Yeah it’s true that we’re created in the image and likeness of God but it’s equally true that our image of God creates us.” And so we want to kind of get beyond that. Anne Lamott says, “You know you’ve created God in your own image when God hates the same people you do.” So we don’t want to fall for that. For 40 years I’ve worked, walked with gang members and the day won’t ever come when I have more courage or I am more noble or I’m closer to God than the thousands and thousands of gang members I’ve been privileged to know.
Inclusion, Nonviolence, Unconditional Loving Kindness and Compassionate Acceptance
Not long ago, a homie ended an early morning email to me, “Today I will choose to surrender into the arms of God. Then choose to be those arms.” I think that’s exactly how this is supposed to work and then and only then can you choose to take seriously what Jesus took seriously, which happens to be four things, which happens to be what The Working Centre does for a living – inclusion, nonviolence, unconditional loving kindness and compassionate acceptance. So this talk is not the place you’ve come to, it’s always going to be the place you go from. To take those things seriously and to receive the tender glance, and then to become that glance in the world.
