The Voice of Those Who Sing

Carlos looks like he was dipped in ink. Twenty-four years old, just days out of Corcoran State Prison, his arms are covered with tattoos. His neck is blackened by designations of his gang. Head shaved, it is filled with tattooed threats and ominous markings. Most prominent, though, are two pronounced devil's horns situated alarmingly on his forehead. "You know," he says, "I'm having a hard time finding a job." I suggest that we put our heads together on this one, and gently guide him toward our tattoo removal program.

I run the largest gang intervention program in the country. For nearly two decades, many thousands of felons, gang members and those recently released from detention facilities have found jobs, counseling, and community service opportunities through Homeboy Industries, based in the Boyle Heights section of East Los Angeles. In addition to our job referral program, we currently have five businesses and a tattoo removal program.

"I've been locked up now since I was fourteen," Carlos continues. "I've never had a job in my life." This was a Monday afternoon, and I tell him, "You begin work tomorrow." I give him directions to our Homeboy Silkscreen factory and wish him luck.

On Wednesday, I call the Silkscreen plant and have the receptionist bring the new-hire to the phone. I ask Carlos how working makes him feel. "It feels proper. I'm holdin' my head up high. In fact, I'm like that vato on the commercial, you know the one. The guy who walks up to total strangers and says, 'I lowered my cholesterol'—well, that's me." He loses me here. "I mean," he explains, "yesterday, after work, I'm tired and on the bus—and I just couldn't help myself. I kept turning to total strangers and telling'em, "I'm just coming back from my first day at work. Just got off—my first day on the job."

My mind races to see the folks on the bus. Maybe people smile and greet the news warmly. Perhaps mothers clutch their kids more closely to themselves. Maybe, someone thinks: "Who the hell would hire this guy?" After all, a second chance for the once-felon is often seen as a waste of our collective time.

The prophet Isaiah writes, "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." Carlos, of the "lowered cholesterol," finds his voice in the dignity of work and in the sure promise of belonging.

Mother Theresa diagnosed correctly, I think, the ills of our modern world—"Our problem," she says, "is that we've just forgotten that we belong to each other." The kingdom of God, it seems to me, is less about membership or card-carrying elitism than it is an invitation to kinship and belonging. Jesus announces his formal ministry in Luke by echoing the words of the prophet and signals liberation for the oppressed, sight for the blind, and freedom for the prisoner. He promises the poor that their voice of "mirth and gladness" will be heard again. On top of it all, he declares that "today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing." His audience is impressed. Yet before you know it, he's being given the bum's rush to the edge of a cliff and the mob nearly hurls him over it. Their opposition was fueled, I suspect, not by the prospects of liberation, sight, freedom or good news. Who could be against that? I think the difficulty people have with Jesus is not rooted in his call to liberation, but in his preposterous insistence that kinship be the starting point.