Quotes from Gregory Boyle

Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.

Close both eyes see with the other one. Then we are no longer saddled by the burden of our persistent judgments our ceaseless withholding our constant exclusion. Our sphere has widened and we find ourselves quite unexpectedly in a new expansive location in a place of endless acceptance and infinite love.

Kindness is the only strength there is.

If there is a fundamental challenge within these stories, it is simply to change our lurking suspicion that some lives matter less than other lives.

Sometimes resilience arrives in the moment you discover your own unshakeable goodness.

Kinship– not serving the other, but being one with the other. Jesus was not "a man for others"; he was one with them. There is a world of difference in that.

God would seem to be too occupied in being unable to take Her eyes off of us to spend any time raising an eyebrow in disapproval.

Success and failure, ultimately, have little to do with living the gospel. Jesus just stood with the outcasts until they were welcomed or until he was crucified — whichever came first.

There is no force in the world better able to alter anything from its course than love.

It's my first day teaching," I say to her, "Give me some advice." "Two things," she says, "One: know all their names by tomorrow. Two: It's more important that they know you than that they know what you know.

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a covenant between equals. Al Sharpton always says, "We're all created equal, but we don't all end up equal.

God can get tiny, if we're not careful.

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.

The God, who is greater than God, has only one thing on Her mind, and that is to drop, endlessly, rose petals on our heads. Behold the One who can't take His eyes off of you. Marinate in the vastness of that.

Scripture scholars contend that the original language of the Beatitudes should not be rendered as "Blessed are the single-hearted" or "Blessed are the peacemakers" or "Blessed are those who struggle for justice." Greater precision in translation would say, "You're in the right place if...you are single-hearted or work for peace." The Beatitudes is not a spirituality, after all. It's a geography. It tells us where to stand.

Behold the One beholding you and smiling." It is precisely because we have such an overactive disapproval gland ourselves that we tend to create God in our own image. It is truly hard for us to see the truth that disapproval does not seem to be part of God's DNA. God is just too busy loving us to have any time left for disappointment.

The principle suffering of the poor is shame and disgrace. It is a toxic shame -- a global sense of failure of the whole self. This shame can seep so deep down... To this end, one hopes (against all human inclination) to model not the "one false move" God but the "no matter whatness" of God. You seek to imitate the kind of God you believe in, where disappointment is, well, Greek to Him. You strive to live the black spiritual that says, "God looks beyond our fault and sees our need.

How much greater is the God we have than the one we think we have.

Can we stay faithful and persistent in our fidelity even when things seem not to succeed? I suppose Jesus could have chosen a strategy that worked better (evidence-based outcomes) — that didn't end in the Cross — but he couldn't find a strategy more soaked with fidelity that the one he embraced

Terror melting into wonder, then slipping into peace.

You don't really keep vigil; it keeps you-suspended in awkward silence and dead air-desperate for anything at all to stir some hope out of these murky waters and make things vital again.

We constantly lived in the paradox of precariousness. The money was never there when you needed it, and it was always on time.

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.

The poet Kabir asks, "What is God?" Then he answers his own question: "God is the breath inside the breath.