The Lenten Book for 2025

My City & Spire Lenten Book selection for 2025 is Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times by Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest and founder of Homeboy Industries who has accompanied gang members in Los Angeles for some forty years.

Beginning with his groundbreaking first book, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, Fr. Boyle serves up a generous and gritty “urban spirituality.” He weaves together arresting language from gang culture with transformational stories from Homeboy Industries, along with well-chosen quotations from a variety of religious traditions.

Cherished Belonging is a book for contemplation and slow digestion, perfectly attuned to the great themes of Lent and to living in these contentious days.

As an avid “underliner,” there are few pages in this book that have escaped my pen. I want to note just a few of the themes and ideas in the book that spoke to me.

Beyond the moral quest

Responding to a question raised in a packed church hall, Boyle gives this provocative reply:

“I’ve never met anyone evil . . . and neither have you.”

He goes on to challenge the reader:

“Is the God of love looking down on a sinful world in need of salvation, or does our God see a broken world in pain and in need of healing?”

“The moral quest has never kept us moral; it’s just kept us from each other. So maybe we should abandon the moral quest . . . and embrace instead the journey to wholeness, flourishing love, and defiant joy.”

However we may wish to think about sin in our day, we can clearly see before us a broken world. So Boyle’s book can serve as an invitation during these Lenten weeks to consider how we might become more fully engaged in God’s work of healing.

Acatamiento

Boyle introduces a word found in the spiritual journal of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. The word is acatamiento which gets translated as “affectionate awe.”

“As we stand in affectionate awe of what folks have to carry, it has the potential to ignite a movement, an insurrection of kindness.”

What an intriguing thought to consider during Lent—to become part of “an insurrection of kindness.”

Domination or love

Keeping with the theme of healing we are brought to a place of decision:

“It would seem that our choice in the world is either domination or love. Healthy people are able to love . . . When folks aren't healthy, they want to dominate. . . It would seem certain that our prayer and meditation strengthen neural pathways. It helps us to love a great deal and to let go of control and power and the need to dominate.”

A community of cherished belonging

Boyle sees that the way the Christian gospel seeks to shape the order of things is through the kinship of God, creating a community of cherished belonging. This also means for Boyle avoiding the language of the “Kingdom of God.”

“I don't say ‘Kingdom.’ The ‘King’ keeps me from saying that. I don't say ‘Kin-dom’ because it feels ‘dom.’ I say ‘kinship’ because it's not a place but a stance. It's not a position; it's a disposition and a temperament. It's where we abide, an anchor. It's acatamiento.”

Marked by ashes, Lent is a time for discovery and decision, but most of all Lent is a homecoming. As Gregory Boyle puts it:

“All of authentic spirituality is a homecoming. Home is the place where abandonment can't ever happen.”

Cherished Belonging can offer us a path for that Lenten journey home.