Love in Healing Doses
Friday, September 19, 2025
In conversation with Richard Rohr on the Everything Belongs podcast, founder of Homeboy Industries Father Greg Boyle describes how love heals us:
On a podcast the other day I said, “Love never fails,” and the interviewer said, “Our listeners are going to think you’re naive.” And I thought, well, I don’t know how you prove that [love never fails] except to say, I think that if anybody stops to think about how that’s been operative in their life, they realize, in fact, in the end, it’s never failed. If it feels like it has, it’s just not the end.
Somehow we don’t have confidence in it. We think that it’s more savvy to not embrace love somehow—that your head is in the clouds at a time when we need to be doing some things that are concrete. I don’t think love cancels out concrete action. This is sort of the marriage of contemplation and action…. When the ego interrupts you, you try to catch yourself, so that you can return to sweetness…. Hold out for sweetness and life because that’s what a confidence in love as “never failing” will usher in—that kind of moment of connection and kinship.
I always talk about “cherishing,” because the word “love” sort of gets lost. Cherishing is love with its sleeves rolled up. It’s about really seeing people. At Homeboy, we want to create a place that’s safe, where people are seen, so that they can be cherished because that’s what is healing.
Boyle recounts how his organization came to believe that love and cherishing are the path to healing:
In the early days, we were saying, “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.” We thought an employed gang member would never return to prison. Then, as we started a school, we thought, “Well, an educated gang member won’t ever go back to prison,” but that was proving not true. Then we kind of landed, maybe 20 or 25 years ago (out of our 37 years), where we said, “No, a healed gang member will not ever re-offend.” Period. And it’s been born out as truthful, so that’s the emphasis.
We do all the other things: employment, here’s money in your pocket, a gainful job, education and all these other things like tattoo removal and therapy. All those things are secondary to the primary community of healing where people are receiving doses [of love] constantly, in a very repetitive way. It’s the repetitive nature of reassurance, affirmation, affection, hugging—all these things. We used to fret if somebody relapsed with drugs or returned to gang life for a moment or went to jail. We used to say, “Well, maybe they’ll come back.” Nobody says that now. Everybody says, “He’ll be back”—and they all come back. I’m not really aware of an exception. They’ll come back because once you’ve had a taste of having been cherished in a way that’s authentic, it’s so compelling that [you surrender to it].
John Chaffee 5 On Friday
1.
“It isn’t enough to love; you have to prove it.”
– St. Therese of Lisieux, French Nun
We each likely fall for it when people first tell us that they love us. Perhaps it is part of our better angels that we want to believe others, and then there might also be a side of us that desperately wants to believe their words are true.
Although it is a start to tell others we love them, we must prove those words by the actions that follow.
And perhaps that is why the word “love” carries so much potency. The word itself is almost like a promissory note saying that we want, will, and are committed to the Good happening for the Beloved.
To say, “I love you,” is not merely a statement about the now; it is a foreshadowing of what to expect from us in the future.
2.
“Religion at its worst reinforces the status quo, often at the expense of our faith.”
– Seth Godin, American Businessman
To the best of my knowledge, Seth is not a religious person. And yet, I think he gets this absolutely right about religion at its worst.
I am of a generation that was taught that faith informs every part of our lives. We were taught that God cares about Justice and Mercy, speaking prophetically on behalf of the downtrodden and abused. We were taught that God is more on the side of the slaves of the world than the Pharaohs who dominate. Knowing all of this, it is little wonder to me that so many of my generation walked away from the church.
Especially if the faith has been hijacked to protect the status quo rather than challenge it.
At its best, religion can remind us of the duty and responsibility we have to one another. It can teach us how to love our neighbors as ourselves, and therefore highlight aspects of culture that are not very loving towards our neighbors.
3.
“Wash the plate not because it is dirty nor because you are told to wash it, but because you love the person who will use it next.”
The best of the Christian activists remind us of the importance of the little actions we do out of love for one another.
When born of hubris and a need to be important, we likely give too much focus on addressing the social issues that seem large enough to warrant our attention and effort.
However, that might come at the expense of doing the small actions of love, the little things that help ease the day of someone close to us, which can help shoulder some of their suffering and generally improve the quality of their lives.
I think what I enjoyed about this quote is that it gave a tangible expression to the commandment of “loving your neighbor as yourself.” Our acts of love do not need to be noticed or even celebrated for our Beloved to feel loved by us.
4.
“Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it.”
– Meister Eckhart, German Preacher and Mystic
A few nights ago, I finished reading Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak. It is a fantastic and small book that packs quite a punch if you are in the right season of life for it. It is devoted to the topic of vocation and calling, and how, over time, we can follow a golden thread that has been with us from the start of our lives and connects us to what we are here to do.
Every success and every failure, every door opening and every door closing, was a fork in the road that we either courageously took or foolishly avoided.
Parker Palmer reminds us that discerning our vocation and calling can be challenging if we are not attuned to our true selves. If we are still in the mode of living out the life that others demand of us, and if we do not dare to listen to our own soul subtly pulling us in a particular direction, then we will fail at finding our vocation.
However,
If we are true to ourselves, listen to the sound of the genuine within ourselves, and pay attention to the themes of every job we ever had, every interaction we enjoyed or hated, then we have plenty of signposts to help us discover what we are here to do.
And, it seems as though wisdom is a matter of figuring out what the “next right step” is and courageously taking it.
5.
“We are more fond of spiritual sweetness than crosses.”
– Teresa of Avila in Interior Castle
As I mentioned last week, I am undertaking another re-read of Interior Castle, the great spiritual classic of Spanish Catholic mysticism.
This time, I am using a blue highlighter, which is fun because it occasionally overlaps previous yellow highlighting and leaves most pages covered in green.
It is true, though, no matter how long we are on the path of Christ, we forget that it will invariably involve a cross. To follow Christ is a matter of ego-annihilation, a matter of submitting ourselves to the painful task of loving the world in the midst of all of its brokenness and then picking ourselves up and doing it all over again tomorrow.
