'You Are Everything I'd Want in a Son'

In his new book on mentoring, "Guiding Lights: The People Who Lead Us Toward Our Purpose in Life," author Eric Liu interviewed many of the country's best teachers to discover the qualities of true mentorship. The following excerpt tells of Father Greg, a Los Angeles priest who changes the lives of gang members through unconditional love.

Pico Gardens, Aliso Village. Two of the loveliest names to grace the roll of failed twentieth-century public housing experiments. These projects on the city's eastern edge make up the largest zone of subsidized housing west of the Mississippi. Within them, ten thousand Latino and black gangsters, clumped into sixty gangs, live a littered, empty-calorie imitation of life.

For six years, starting in 1986, Father Greg Boyle, SJ, was the pastor at Dolores Mission, in the heart of Pico/Aliso. It wasn't long before he saw how much more he needed to do than help the helpless mothers, or pray for their boys, or bury them. He started an alternative elementary school. Then he created Jobs for a Future, a program to teach these youth how to find and hold a job. Then he created Homeboy Industries, to help the hardest cases get work by running their own nonprofit businesses-first a bakery, then a silk-screening shop, now landscaping and graffiti-removal businesses. After his rotation in the parish ended, Greg returned to the neighborhood to run Homeboy. This would now be his ministry.

The saga of Homeboy Industries is something out of an after-school special. The Jesuit homeboy, the gangland priest: didn't we see that one on cable? Indeed, Greg has gotten a lot of media attention, particularly as he's criticized the LAPD's approach of hammering the gangs. He speaks with the polish of both a clergyman and a minor celebrity. Some of the lines he uses are, well, recycled. I'd read them in his clips. The stories of the founding, of the rescues and acts of salvation, gleam like stones many times held. Yet what made them refreshing still is that they were never meant to be anything more. They are like stories from the Bible. They are a daily record, a matter-of-fact accounting of the volume of flotsamed lives flowing past. They are a reminder of constant inadequacy. The day I met him he told me he had just buried his 114th child. Greg is free of pretense that what he does is visionary or saintly or world-changing. He is a single human, distributing sandbags against the flood; called to imagine that his labors, in the end, will matter.

With his shaved head and goatee, his unfocused drunken eyes, and his stump of a right arm (a birth defect), Hugo Jimenez was a picture of menace. The words he had for Father Greg at the elevator were hostile too. He said, "I know you-you're the one who doesn't help anyone from our neighborhood." It wasn't just cynicism. It was a geopolitical comment that Greg understood well. Hugo was a member of the Marvelosos, a "Mara Villa" gang at war with the "Sorrenos," gangs of the Mexican mafia, whom Greg more often worked with. He was a gang veteran, his compact body filled with scars and screws and rods from the three times he'd been shot (at thirteen, fifteen, and twenty; in the arm, stomach, and femur). Greg was taken aback by Hugo's hostility but quickly recovered. This was a chance to build a bridge to the Mara Villa. That's why he made sure to get Hugo's number, why he called Hugo early the next morning. Hugo came in at nine. He was twenty-five years old. He had never held a job in his life. He was, as he put it, "allergic to work." Greg put him on the payroll that very day, putting him to work in the office- covering the phones, doing small chores and odd jobs.

One month earlier, Hugo's father had died of complications from diabetes. Greg learned that in the course of their initial interview. It shaped his handling of Hugo, as it shapes his handling of so many ex-homies. The young men who pass through Greg's parish may lack motivation and work skills and capital. But what they lack prior to all of that is a primal attachment. Their "lethal absence of hope," as he calls it, comes from the fact that so many have never been loved and have never been able to love in return. "Gangs are bastions of conditional love," he says. "Homeboy is a community of unconditional love."

Hugo was one of the lucky ones; he'd had a father, he loved his father. Greg's work was to sustain that attachment. He told Hugo at every turn, "You are exactly what God had in mind," and waited for Hugo to inhabit that truth. He didn't tell Hugo or anyone else they could be the first Latino president if they applied themselves. He told them, "You are exactly enough." He didn't woof at Hugo with lectures. He said, "You are everything I would want in a son." If Hugo showed up late, Greg wouldn't yell. He would silently wait, until Hugo hurt inside from the forgiveness. If Greg said, "You're doing a good job, son," it made Hugo want to do a better job. When Hugo decided to get custody of his son, Angel, Greg brought the social worker to see Hugo's closets lined with baby clothes the next size up, ready to be grown into. Greg paid the three hundred dollars to file papers and accompanied Hugo to court. Hugo didn't understand what the judge was saying until he heard, "Full and sole custody to petitioner," and then the hair on the back of his neck stood on end and he looked at Greg and he wanted to cry.

At first, watching and listening to Greg, I was inclined to put some of his actions in a box called "strategic" and others in a box called "sincere." Then, gradually, the boxes became indistinguishable; or, at least, the distinction became irrelevant. Greg tells these lost sons, one after another, that they are in fact exactly enough, that they are everything he would want in a son. And he opens up something primordial in them, something that leads, almost on cue, to huge sobbing and release. The words he spoke to Hugo, the salve of unconditional love that he applied, he has applied to many others as well, often using the very same language. He knew too that Hugo's loyalty would help him broaden his reach to new gangs. What I realized after a while was: So what? So what if he wanted to reach more people? That is his job. So what if his love was produced and dispensed in large batches? Each dose felt real, and each one healed.

Hugo proved to be a diligent worker. Over the next two years he started taking on more responsibilities, using computers for data entry and record keeping, becoming more vital to the operation. The next challenge for him, Greg said, will be to assert his value in the world beyond Homeboy Industries. Every Saturday morning Hugo goes to the cemetery to visit his father. He said to Greg once, "I wish I could show him what I'm becoming. I wish I could see his face, because all I gave him when he was alive was grief." Greg answered, "He is seeing you now." And that was enough for Hugo. It was enough to keep him going that day, to get him out of bed the next morning and the morning after that, to help him take care of himself and his boy. It was enough to make Hugo resolve, silently, that he wanted to be for Angel the kind of father Greg had become for him.

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