If you are in a place, #3: Father Boyle at Notre Dame

Notre Dame Commencement 2017: Rev. Gregory J. Boyle, S. J.'s Laetare Speech - YouTube

Father Boyle at Notre Dame

If you are in a place, watch Father Gregory Boyle’s Notre Dame Commencement speech. If you’ve read any of his books or watched any of his talks, he touches on similar, sometimes identical, ideas here, but I think this is the most concise version of those ideas.

Father G, founder of Homeboy Industries and author of Tattoos on the Heart, believes something very simple: that the best thing we can do for ourselves, for the marginalized, for our society is to have limitless compassion for each other and ourselves.

It’s a tough ideal to live by, especially in times like these, so I started small. I try every day to see the entirety of my students and the often overwhelming burdens they have to carry. This is not an excuse for giving me less than their best, but I find that planting this context in my mind I’ve has helped me understand them more when they have a tough day in my class. When they are made more whole, so am I.

What if everyone was born exactly as they were meant to be? And what if we treated them as such from that day they were born? I don’t know.