Gregory Boyle > Quotes

“You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.” I like even more what Jesus doesn’t say. He does not say, “One day, if you are more perfect and try really hard, you’ll be light.” He doesn’t say “If you play by the rules, cross your T’s and dot your I’s, then maybe you’ll become light.” No. He says, straight out, “You are light.” It is the truth of who you are, waiting only for you to discover it. So, for God’s sake, don’t move. No need to contort yourself to be anything other than who you are.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“With That Moon Language Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.” Of course you do not do this out loud; Otherwise, Someone would call the cops. Still though, think about this, This great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one Who lives with a full moon in each eye That is always saying With that sweet moon Language What every other eye in this world Is dying to Hear.”
― Gregory Boyle

“Jesus was not a man for others. He was one with others. There is a world of difference in that. Jesus didn't seek the rights of lepers. He touched the leper even before he got around to curing him. He didn't champion the cause of the outcast. He was the outcast. He didn't fight for improved conditions for the prisoner. He simply said, 'I was in prison.'

The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place—with the outcast and those relegated to the margins.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“The poet Rumi writes, 'Find the real world, give it endlessly away, grow rich flinging gold to all who ask. Live at the empty heart of paradox. I’ll dance there with you—cheek to cheek.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“Compassion isn't just about feeling the pain of others; it's about bringing them in toward yourself. If we love what God loves, then, in compassion, margins get erased. 'Be compassionate as God is compassionate,' means the dismantling of barriers that exclude.

In Scripture, Jesus is in a house so packed that no one can come through the door anymore. So the people open the roof and lower this paralytic down through it, so Jesus can heal him. The focus of the story is, understandably, the healing of the paralytic. But there is something more significant than that happening here. They're ripping the roof off the place, and those outside are being let in.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“What if we ceased to pledge our allegiance to the bottom line and stood, instead, with those who line the bottom?”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Human beings are settlers, but not in the pioneer sense. It is our human occupational hazard to settle for little. We settle for purity and piety when we are being invited to an exquisite holiness. We settle for the fear-driven when love longs to be our engine. We settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to this wildly inclusive, larger-than-any-life God. We allow our sense of God to atrophy. We settle for the illusion of separation when we are endlessly asked to enter into kinship with all.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Resilience is born by grounding yourself in your own loveliness, hitting notes you thought were way out of your range.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“How, then, to imagine, the expansive heart of this God—greater than God—who takes seven buses, just to arrive at us. We settle sometimes for less than intimacy with God when all God longs for is this solidarity with us. In Spanish, when you speak of your great friend, you describe the union and kinship as being de uña y mugre—our friendship is like the fingernail and the dirt under it. Our image of who God is and what’s on God’s mind is more tiny than it is troubled. It trips more on our puny sense of God than over conflicting creedal statements or theological considerations. The desire of God’s heart is immeasurably larger than our imaginations can conjure. This longing of God’s to give us peace and assurance and a sense of well-being only awaits our willingness to cooperate with God’s limitless magnanimity.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“believe that God protects me from nothing but sustains me in everything.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“See how they love one another.” Not a bad gauge of health. “There was no needy person among them.” A better metric would be hard to find. There is one line that stopped me in my tracks: “And awe came upon everyone.” It would seem that, quite possibly, the ultimate measure of health in any community might well reside in our ability to stand in awe at what folks have to carry rather than in judgment at how they carry it.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“How can someone take my advantage when I’m giving it?”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“But I know, with all the certainty of my being, that Jesus has no interest in my doing this. To just say, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, I'm your biggest fan," causes him to stare at his watch, tap his feet, and order a double Glenlivet on the rocks with a twist. Fandom is of no interest to Jesus. What matters to him is the authentic following of a disciple. We all settle for saying, "Jesus," but Jesus wants us to be in the world who he is.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Our culture is hostile only to the inauthentic living of the gospel. It sniffs out hypocrisy everywhere and knows when Christians aren’t taking seriously, what Jesus took seriously. It is, by and large, hostile to the right things. It actually longs to embrace the gospel of inclusion and nonviolence, of compassionate love and acceptance. Even atheists cherish such a prospect.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Moral outrage is the opposite of God; it only divides and separates what God wants for us, which is to be united in kinship. Moral outrage doesn't lead us to solutions - it keeps us from them. It keeps us from moving forward toward a fuller, more compassionate response to members of our community who belong to us, no matter what they've done.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“For unless love becomes tenderness—the connective tissue of love—it never becomes transformational. The tender doesn’t happen tomorrow . . . only now.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“The wrong idea has taken root in the world. And the idea is this: there just might be some lives out there that matter less than other lives.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“Homeboy receives people; it doesn’t rescue them. In being received rather than rescued, gang members come to find themselves at home in their own skin.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Paradise is not a place that awaits our arrival but a present we arrive at.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Guilt, of course, is feeling bad about one's actions, but shame is feeling bad about oneself.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place--with the outcast and those relegated to the margins.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“Living the gospel, then, is less about “thinking outside the box” than about choosing to live in this ever-widening circle of inclusion.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“The discovery that awaits us is that paradise is contained in the here and now.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Part of the spirit dies a little each time its asked to carry more than its weight in terror, violence, and betrayal.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“We simply need to change the lurking suspicion that some lives matter less than others. We are put on earth for a little space that we might learn to bear the beams of love. Turns out this is what we all have in common, we're just trying to learn how to bear those beams of love.”
― Gregory Boyle and William Blake

“Jesus was always too busy being faithful to worry about success. I'm not opposed to success; I just think we should accept it only if it is a by-product of our fidelity. If our primary concern is results, we will choose to work only with those who give us good ones.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“If you read Scripture scholar Marcus Borg and go to the index in search of 'sinner,' it'll say, 'see outcast.' This was a social grouping of people who felt wholly unacceptable. The world had deemed them disgraceful and shameful, and this toxic shame, as I have mentioned before, was brought inside and given a home in the outcast.

Jesus' strategy is a simple one: He eats with them. Precisely to those paralyzed in this toxic shame, Jesus says, 'I will eat with you.' He goes where love has not yet arrived, and he 'gets his grub on.' Eating with outcasts rendered them acceptable.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“Generosity in Buddhism is to be relieved of the “stain of stinginess.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship