We Heal Because We Are Cherished: What Does It Mean to Be Cherished? A Lesson in Love

What Father Greg Boyle taught me about love with its sleeves rolled up

“Love never fails.”

Father Greg Boyle said those words on a podcast recently, and the interviewer replied that his listeners might think he was naive. So what does it mean to be cherished? A Lesson in Love:

I understand the flinch. We’ve been taught it’s more sophisticated to stay guarded or composed, that love is a soft approach, and that what the world really needs is concrete action. We believe in standing tall and being strategic.

But after forty years of sitting with people and their relationships, I’ve landed exactly where Boyle has. I agree that love never fails. Love is the energy that makes our actions effective. Everybody can feel it. The experience of love encourages us to take a deep breath and trust the ray of hope that things can work out.

Boyle founded Homeboy Industries, which helps people leaving gangs and prisons build a different life. For years Homeboy believed a proper job would keep someone out of prison. Then they thought maybe it was education that would make the difference. Neither one held.

What they finally realized was that a healed person doesn’t re-offend, because one who is healed doesn’t return to the patterns of their former life. When a person changes so profoundly, their old habits don’t match them anymore. Those habits don’t pull at them.

And here is the part that stopped me. The way they heal people isn’t through a program. Instead, they give doses of love, over and over, day after day, no matter what happens. They give reassurance. Affection. They make sure their people feel seen and heard. They make sure everyone participating is being (to use Father Greg’s language) cherished.

“Cherishing is love with its sleeves rolled up.”

It’s love that shows up and does the work of truly seeing a person.

As a relationship coach, I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life saying that you cannot love anyone else more than you love yourself, and that all relationship healing starts in your own heart.

This is what Father Boyle is saying, too, that we don’t become better citizens or parents, or more responsible because we go to a program to finally understand why we’ve done the things we’ve done.

We heal because we are cherished, simple as that. We heal when we are cherished steadily by others and by ourselves. We heal when we allow being cherished into our very own heart, and we learn to trust that ever-present love.

So hold out for that. Give it. Receive it. Let it in.

— Terri Crosby

In Care of Relationships

From Father Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, in conversation with Richard Rohr on the Everything Belongs podcast.