Bringing together
a community with love
God doesn’t discriminate
you because he is too busy loving you no
matter what actions you take and knows you as a human being and what makes you
genuine.
Tattoos to the Heart, written by
Father Gregory Boyle, talks about how different experiences he has had working
with the homies has influenced on how he views and sees God and how he works on
the humans that we are. One of the ideas that he has been thought working with these
people is the idea of “Dis-grace”, or why we have the feeling of shame. One of
the experiences that help him understand why homies dress and do whatever they
do was when he asked a homie in prison if he had any brothers and sisters. The homie said that they were good and he wasn’t
because the fact that he was locked up. Father Gregory explains and says that “…
they strut around in protective shells of posturing, which stunts their real
and complete selves” (52), after having the thought that Jesuit scholar said
that “the principal suffering of the poor is shame and disgrace” (52). The whole
event there made things clear on why people wear what they wear in general and
act on actions that lead to their own avenue of emptiness and loneliness. A lot
of the homies in the vignettes that father Gregory tells in most of them are missing
one thing that they feels they don’t have and that is: love.
Love is what is missing in these homies and it
is what changes completely. In one of
the vignettes; Rigo, the character in it says that his mom comes from very far to
see him. “She… takes… seven…buses” (27) just to see him every Sunday after
church. That action that she takes is what is meant when something is done with
love.
Another thing love does is get rid of the
shame they have or change their view on what they consider the enemy or in
general just change. According to Boyle, this “change” happens to everyone and
it sometimes takes a long time for the action to happen but it will happen.
Joey, a chubby cholo at the age of twenty one experienced this radical change.
He would stay all the time hanging out, but one day he tells Boyle that he
applied for a job and is working at Chuck E. Cheese as the mouse because Joey
said that “in two months, my son’s gonna be born. I want him to come into this
world and meet his father- a working man” (119). This story showed how one event
in someone’s life can have an impact on what they believe in. The persona doesn’t
change because the feeling of love is deep inside the tattoos and loose clothes
of them that the only thing they need transpire to them is something to make
them push it out and make their expressions show it.
A lot of us need change in our lives, and
that is what father Gregory is trying to emphasize in this book based on what
he believes in. You need to allow all these feelings like love and compassion and
kinship in order to have your conscience clear and live a good life with
morality. Understanding others is understanding yourself because the way you
view a person is the reflection of what you think of yourself. That is how the
concept of morality works, what a person views as wrong is what someone else
views as right. That is the reason you have the power to choose when to let the
feeling of love come out because only you know your limits and what is harmful to
you and what isn’t. Only you can decide when to bring your community into your
life and not be an outcast. Because your persona reflects on the buildup of a
community as a whole, making the community genuine and that is why others envy
it. They are missing that in their lives and that is why those people try to
break that apart. The whole idea of reflection takes place most of the time.
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