While the Soup’s On! Chefs (Brian Luscher of 33 Restaurant Group, Arturo Aguilar of Salum’s, J. Chastain of Duro Hospitality, Omar Flores of Muchacho Tex-Mex and Whistle Britches, Danyele McPherson of Purple Collar Kitchen, Janice Provost of Parigi, Anastacia Quiñones-Pittman of Jose, Jeramie Robison of Thompson Dallas and Juan Sierra of The Stewpot) were behind the scene prepping the day’s soups, guests like Ellen McStay, Margie and Ray Francis, Venise Stuart, Sandra Estess and Kay and Gene Lunceford checked out the artwork by The Stewpot Alliance clients in the Thompson Dallas lobby on Monday, February 5. Why, even some of the guests appeared to be fashionable artwork.
In the ballroom was a whiskered fellow who didn’t look familiar but he still looked right at home. Perhaps it was because he was far from a stranger for such a fundraiser for the homeless and helpless. While he could have easily been mistaken for a Santa with his eyes twinkling behind a pair of glasses and the welcoming smile, he was far from one who dealt with good little boys and girls.
But unlike the jolly old soul in the sled with the reindeer, Jesuit Father Gregory “Greg” Boyle had spent more than five decades working with Los Angeles gangs and creating Homeboy Industries.
In the beginning, while the pastor of Dolores Mission Church, he would ride his bicycle through the poorest Catholic Parish in Los Angeles, where gangs dominated the neighborhood, to try to calm the troubled waters. It was no surprise for a hospitalized gang member to find Greg bedside to offer comfort and help the recovery.
While Homeboy has evolved into a multi-department company offering everything from tattoo removal to solar panel training and workforce development, Greg’s mission is still to help one person at a time.
But on this day, Greg was celebrating the long-term accomplishments of the North Texas grassroots Stewpot Alliance.
Following a mic check and a meeting with Luncheon Co-Chairs Leah Jordan and Eric Swindle and Michelle and Rudy Segura, the doors to the ballroom opened, with the Dallas Street Choir performing on stage. Guests took their seats and Emcee Ivy Winfrey introduced Rev. Amos Disasa to provide the invocation, and the co-chairs welcomed the crowd, revealing that an anonymous $100,000 match was being offered.
Following a brief break for the meals to be served, Celebrity Chef Brian Luscher came on stage and introduced the chefs, adding that Salum’s Chef Abraham Salum had been called out of town, but “he wanted to send his love to everyone.” For their soups and providing recipes for the guests, last year’s Co-Chairs Christy Coltrin and Brad Oldham had once again created unique spoons as gifts for the chefs. This year’s silver spoon featured a turtle named “Steady Eddie” because “the turtle shell, serving as both skeleton and sanctuary, symbolizes the idea that our sense of home is something we carry with us.”
As the chefs left the stage for their annual group photo, The Stewpot Executive Director Brenda Snitzer continued the program, thanking many and updating the crowd with the past year’s accomplishments that included “serving 230,000 meals to hungry-at-risk neighbors, providing 1,200 IDs so that folks can start a new life, stabilizing 175 individuals and families through near-term and long-term housing support and empowering 120 at-risk children to break the cycle of poverty.”
To put a face on The Stewpot mission, a video was shown, with one of the people being “Darrell.” As the video ended the Seguras returned, with Rudy saying, “I know this from experience. A little over 10 years ago, I walked into my first AA meeting. Another man was also there that night for his first meeting. He would become my dear friend and a huge support on my journey to sobriety. That man was Darrell who you just saw on the screen, and he’s here with us today. Over the years of attending AA meetings together, I would give Darrell an occasional ride home or to the grocery store. And he helped me during the traumas that led me to AA. I know that I can count on Darrell and he knows I’m there for him. We’re both imperfect and we’re both working on ourselves.”
Michelle recalled how at the age of 18 and single, she ” became pregnant with my oldest child. I couldn’t afford a place to live. I couldn’t afford childcare. If it hadn’t been for my mom, I would have had no place to live. We’ve all been in positions where we’ve needed a little help.”
Rudy then pointed out that there are “four situation that could put any of us at risk of homelessness” — loss of a job, a medical emergency, battling addiction or mental health.
He closed saying, “Whatever you do, before you leave for the day, we ask that you get involved with The Stewpot community in a way that makes the most sense for you. It will change someone’s life and make a change.”
As the Seguras exited the stage, Ivy returned to introduce Fr. Greg, who opened with self-deprecating humor: “Once I was invited to speak at this foster grandparents gathering in Orange County and it was a huge gathering that I had spoken to the summer before. I don’t know why they invited me again. But I went and it was the same kind of audience and afterwards a woman came up to it. She was a foster grandmother and she had tears in her eyes. So I think she liked the talk and she grabbed hold of my hands and said, ‘I heard you last year. It never gets better.'”
He then turned to The Soup’s On! event, saying, “It’s a little bit like what Martin Luther King used to say about church — ‘It’s not the place you come to; it’s the place you go from.’ And you go from here to do something very specific. You go from here to dismantle the barriers that exclude. You go from here to imagine a circle of compassion and then imagine nobody’s standing outside that circle. … You go from here to stand with the poor, the powerless and the voiceless and to stand with those whose dignity has been denied and those whose burdens are more than they can bear. You go from here to stand with the easily despised and the readily left out. You go from here to stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop and to stand with the disposables so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away. And I suspect that our efforts are really about creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. And The Stewpot creates exactly that kind of community, a place of cherished belonging, where there is no us and them, there’s just us. And if kinship happened to be our goal, we would no longer be promoting justice, we’d be celebrating it.
“So we don’t go to the margins to make a difference. You go to the margins, so that the folks there make you different. And that’s how we achieve, I think, a sense of kinship and a connection. And you brace yourselves, because people may well accuse you of wasting your time in there. But the prophet Jeremiah writes, ‘For in this place of which you say it is a waste, there will be heard again, the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness. The voices of those who sing. The Stewpot goes to the margins, and other voices suddenly get heard. And we’re all enriched because of it.”
In discussing Homeboys Industries, which receives 10,000 gang members a year who want to redirect their lives, he said that a psychologist would call their situation a result of “disorganized attachment. Mom was either frightened or frightening. And you can’t calm yourself down if you’ve never been soothed. Every man and woman who walks through our doors in our Los Angeles headquarters comes barricaded behind a wall of shame and disgrace. And the only thing that can scale that wall is tenderness.
- “I was talking to a friend of mine who works with homeless in Virginia, and for many, many years, and she said, ‘The homeless don’t become homeless because they run out of money. They become homeless because they run out of relationships.’ At Homeboy, you want to make sure folks don’t run out of relationships.”
- “There are 120,000 gang members in LA County and 1,100 gangs.”
- “We have tours [at Homeboys] from all over the world. People come to our headquarters to see tattoo removal. Visit our Home Girl Cafe and watch rival enemy gang members making croissants in our bakery.”
- “My office is glass-enclosed, so I can look out onto the floor of this huge reception area… So I’m in my office one day and I had two homies sitting in front of my desk and a huge group of like 20 are on a tour being led by a gang member that works there. And I kind of wave as I’m trying to have this conversation. And it’s one of those, you know, observe our founder in his natural habitat. The tour guide has a loud voice you know and says, ‘So, this is Fr. Greg Boyle. He is founder of Homeboy Industries. He a jujitsu priest.’ So did my best jujitsu hand gesture.”
- “The founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius of Loyola, on February 27, 1544, entered one word in his journal — ‘acatamiento.’ For the remaining 12 years of his life he continued to use the word. And before he died, he went back and he circled the word. Now I speak Spanish, but I have never heard this word before. It comes from an archaic Word of God, which means to look at something with attention. And it’s translated as ‘affectionate awe.’… And that’s the stance that Stewpot has in Dallas. They stand at the margins with affectionate awe.”
His final story of the day took place many years ago, when Fr. Greg was invited to speak to 600 in Richmond, Virgina. He knew the drill: ballroom filled with social workers who would get credit for attending workshop, breakout sessions, etc. No problem. But then the week before he was to fly out, he read the original letter inviting him and “discovered that I was the only speaker from nine to five all damn day.” He recruited two of his homies, Andre and Jose, and told them he wanted them to fly to Richmond with him and tell their stories to 600 social workers. “Take your time. It’s gonna be a long-ass day.”
Fr. Greg had never heard their stories. Jose had been in prison, gotten tattooed, a shock collar, become a homeless man and a heroin addict. Jose first stood up and said, “I guess you could say, ‘My mom and me, we didn’t get along so good.’ I think I was six when she looked at me, and she said, ‘Why don’t you just kill yourself? You’re such a burden to me.'”
The social workers gasped. Jose said, “It sounds worser in Spanish.” Just as the social workers laughed at the comment, so did the Soup’s On! guests.
But Jose’s journey would only continue into darkness. “I think I was nine when my mom drove down to the deepest part of Baja, California, and she walks me up to an orphanage and she knocks on the door and the guy comes to the door and she says, ‘I found this kid.’ And she left me there for 90 days until my grandmother can get out of her where she had dumped me and my grandmother came and rescued me.”
Still the youngster’s life would now face physical abuse at the hands of his mother.
“My mom beat me every single day of my elementary school years with things you could imagine, and a lot of things you couldn’t. Every day my back was bloodied and scarred. In fact, I had to wear three t-shirts to school each day.
“First t-shirt because the blood would seep through and the second t-shirt, you could still see the blood. Finally a third shirt, you couldn’t see any blood. Kids at school would make fun of me, ‘Hey fool, it’s 100 degrees. Why are you wearing three t-shirts?'”
Jose “stopped speaking, so overwhelmed with emotion, and he seemed to be staring at a piece of his story that only he can see. And when he could reclaim his voice, he said through his tears, “I even wore three t-shirts well into my adult years because I was ashamed of my wounds. I didn’t want anybody to see them.
“But now I welcome my wounds. I rub my fingers over my scars. My wounds are my friends. After all, how can I help heal the wounded, if I don’t welcome my own wounds.”
Fr. Greg described the reaction of the 600 in the Richmond ballroom as an “awe came upon everyone… acatamiento, affectionate awe, and that’s our stance at the margins. That’s how we dismantle the messages of shame of disgrace that keep people burdened. That’s how we dismantle everything that limits us and keeps people out. That’s how we widen the circle of compassion so that no one is standing outside of it. Acatamiento, affectionate awe. We don’t go to the marches to make a difference. We go so that the folks there make us different. And so we proceed with attention.
“This luncheon is not the place you come to. It was always going to be the place you go from, so that our sisters and brothers don’t run out of relationships. So that we can create a community where people feel good and whole and beloved because that’s the truth of who they are. You go from this place, knowing that love and loving is your home and once you know that, you’re never homesick. And once you know that, you make sure that you give attention. Affectionate awe is how we stand, so that the margins can erase and opened up, none of us need to brace ourselves as people accuse us of wasting our time. For in this place of which you say it is a waste, there will be heard again the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness — the voices of those who sing and thank The Stewpot for allowing those voices to be heard.”
As guests responded to Fr. Greg’s talk with a standing ovation, Ivy returned to the podium to report, “So, I have some good news. Thanks to all of you and others, we are well on the way to reaching the goal of $200,000.”