This is not a review of my friend Greg Boyle’s new book, Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times. Rather, it is a story about my friend who wrote a book that he said he was not ever going to write. But during the many years I have been Greg’s friend, I’ve accepted that he likes to tell me the many reasons why he is never going to write another book that he ends up writing. Or he says he is not really a writer, when, of course, the evidence is clearly not in his favor.
Sometime in early 2023, I got one of those e-mails from him. “I’m not sure I want to write another book. Ever. I think.” As he says, “Yikes!”
He’ll tell you himself, in Cherished Belonging, why he did decide to write it. But I will tell you that the timing of the book and its release on Election Day in America is the comforting hug we’ll all need at the end of the elections, no matter where we stand. While addressing social division was not what motivated Greg to write his first book, Tattoos on the Heart, today, 15 years later, it is clearly on his mind, as are issues like the escalating mental health crisis post-pandemic, increased worldwide demonization, and some unhealthy attitudes about holiness that are dividing American Catholics.
Readers will hear Greg’s voice in a more personal way than in his earlier books. He shares more vulnerable parts of himself. He’s doing so not to reminisce, but to point beyond himself to the God who loves without measure or regret every human being, born wanting the same thing and all experiencing the same humilities of being human (regardless of being called a living saint, receiving big awards, or having the city of Los Angeles name a day after him).
Greg does this all while talking from a place so intimate you will feel as though you are one of the thousands he ministers to that have sat across from him in his photo collage-filled office or a friend taking his morning walk alongside him as he tears up while watching the sunrise, “because it’s so beautiful,” as he once told me.
My advice in reading any of Greg’s books is to read them three times: first, to laugh and cry viscerally, second to note the things you want to remember, and lastly, to dive deeper into the more serious social and theological commentaries he layers in between his triple-layered entertaining prose. Like his mystic mentors, Greg is moving the dial in ways that might surprise.
In the end, you will feel so cherished that you can’t bear to close the last page. You’ll want to linger, and maybe scroll on Homeboy Industries’ Facebook page for the faces of the former gang members, now staff, that Greg writes of, or look up the poets he mentions, or, as I did, look up the root of the word cherish, which one dictionary says is “to keep fondly in mind.”
But then an alert chimes. You remember it’s your turn to cherish others now. And, if you’re like me, you will know the joy of coming upon that great e-mail from a friend, the one that says he’s writing a new book. You catch your breath and know such are the things to keep fondly in mind.
Gregory Boyle’s previous book, Forgive Everyone Everything, won multiple awards and is available from Loyola Press or wherever you get your books.
