photo: Bernie Brown
It was an emotional night in Skainos. I imagine not many in the packed out Church left without at some stage of the evening, wiping a little tear from their eye.
It was the 4 Corners Festival 2019 event Compassion, Radical Kinship and Forgiveness and Fr Greg Boyle was introducing us to his trophies of Compassion - his Homeboys. Steve, Hector and Jose were tough men, who had lived through the poorest most violent childhoods. It was tough listening.
The Homeboys took me back to a night in Cape Town. I had a team of students in town and they got broken into. We were there to build houses. We were serving that city and some of its wee thugs had come out from underneath that beautiful mountain and hit us. I was angry.
The next night we went to a Ronan Keating concert. Not my scene, you can imagine. The students loved it and my friend Steve was in Ronan’s band! Surprisingly prophetic, Keating sang an Elvis Presley song. One that the Colonel wasn’t that happy that he sang. Surely one of Elvis’s few songs on social justice - In The Ghetto.
What a beautiful piece of heartache In The Ghetto is. A baby born into poverty, growing up without help, ending up on the street and eventually killed. The question in the heart of it is a tough one, for an Elvis song:
People, don't you understand
The child needs a helping hand
Or he'll grow to be an angry young man some day
Take a look at you and me,
Are we too blind to see,
Do we simply turn our heads
And look the other way
Fr Greg wasn’t too blind to see. He didn’t turn his head. As a priest in the ghetto, he did something about it. He gave the children in the poorest LA ghettos hope and a job and ultimately a home.
Steve, Hector and Jose’s stories were the same as Elvis’s song apart from the ending. What was the key in their transformation or redemption was beginning to believe in themselves. Fr Greg would describe it as knowing the person God had created them to be. All three of them spoke about forgiving themselves of the shame and hopelessness they felt inside.
That bounced me across my playlists to a new song by Gretchen Peters. To a myriad of people among them prostitutes, drunks and homeless people she sings:
Say grace - say grace
Forgive yourself for all of your mistakes
You might find salvation in your neighbor's face
Come inside and set yourself a place
And say grace
“Salvation in your neighbour’s face.” I love that. Very 4 Corners Festival. If only we in Belfast could look across the corners and find that “good neighbourliness” as Alan McBride coined it, at the Guardians Of The Flame event.
Gretchen tweaks each chorus. The last one goes:
Say grace - say grace
Forgive yourself for all of your mistakes
You are not a loser, you are not a hopeless case
Come inside and set yourself a place
And say grace
That could actually be written above the door of every Homeboy Industries building. Losers and hopeless cases are what Fr Greg works among. Having them forgive themselves and then find their place in the world. That is what Steve, Hector and Jose had found. Say grace!