Pride goes before destruction…— Proverbs 16:18 (NAS)

The recession was continuing to take its toll. When more of the decorating magazines I’d worked for ceased publication, I took another good, hard look around my cabin. In the twenty years I’d styled homes for photography, I’d seriously blurred the boundaries between work and home. Besides the countless props I owned, my shelves were lined with hundreds of books on interior design and my basement served as a library of photographs of clients’ homes and published articles.

Somewhere along the way, I’d lost my sense of priorities. Worst of all, the clutter—all necessary for the job I’d held—drained my physical, mental and creative energy. I learned that clutter makes everything more complicated. It also makes you disorganized, lowers your self-esteem, robs your peace, takes a toll on your most precious relationships and leaves little room for new ones.

The first step in reclaiming my cabin meant relinquishing my pride. For two decades I’d prided myself on having any reference an editor or client requested. When a call came to style a home, I could do it with props I single-handedly owned. I also prided myself on being a perfectionist.

But now all that stuff simply defeated me. Making decisions as to what to keep and what to throw away, sell or give away is hard work. In my struggle to rid myself of meaningless materials, the fear of not “doing it right” immobilized me.

Then a wiser Voice broke through my prideful confusion: If you can begin it, you can do it, Roberta. Don’t sabotage yourself before you even start. By taking that first, tentative step, I was energized to take another, and then another.

I give my pride to You, Lord Jesus. Help me to strive for excellence, not perfection.

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I was barely six years old when the conversation around our dining room table began to revolve around a man named Adolf Hitler.

Dinner came in the middle of the day, and there were always 15 to 20 people present, including workmen from the water-powered flour mill that had been in our family for six generations. I can see them now, troop-hag in from work, still white with flour even after a scrubbing.

The talk about Hitler didn’t start right away: Fast came Scripture reading and prayer. But when the Bible was put on the sideboard and the covers came off the steaming tureens, the excited discussions would begin.

Tunes had been hard in Germany for many years. But Hitler was going to change all that, the grown-ups said. His latest radio address would be discussed point by point.

Papa noted that when Hitler talked about his plans, he would always add, “… insofar as the Almighty will help us.” It was always the Almighty, never God, but still… “He sounds like a believer,” Mama agreed.

Later, of course, Hitler’s true colors came out. He began an unstated campaign against any loyalty other than to himself—especially among the young. At the age of 10 I had to start attending Jungvolk meetings; these “happened” to be scheduled on Sunday mornings, right at church time. At 14 I graduated to the Hitler Youth. Sunday after Sunday I’d put on my brown shirt and get on my bike and pedal off to march and sing and swear undying allegiance to the Führer.

My parents said little to me about their misgivings—to do so would put us all in danger. Occasionally, though, their feelings would show through.

By this time every business letter had to close with the words Heil Hitler. One day my father and I were alone in the mill office as he went through his mail. “In this family,” he burst out suddenly, “we don’t say, ‘Heil Hitler!’ We say, ‘Heil Jesus!’”

But though they seldom put their feelings into words, my parents’ actions spoke for them. Every Sunday evening a group met for worship in our home.

One day the police arrived to enforce a new law closing such independent churches and confiscating their property. They carted away the hymn books, the portable pulpit, the banner saying “Jesus is Lord,” even the broom Mama used to get the room ready for the meeting.

“The Führer is not against religion,” the police chief read from the new regulations, “You may continue to meet, but never in groups of more than three.”

My father and mother did not hesitate. They shifted the now-illegal worship services to the mill, where the roar of the water and the clank of machinery drowned out the songs and prayers.

I was 15 years old now and tall for my age, blond and blue-eyed, the very type Hitler associated with his fantasies of a “master race”—and the kind he wanted for his elite SS. Sure enough, one day an SS team arrived in our small town of Plüderhausen, seeking recruits.

A dozen of us boys were driven to a nearby castle, where we were met by an SS officer, splendid in gleaming boots, braided epaulettes and soft-crowned cap. He set our pulses pounding as he described the glorious exploits of his unit in the liberation of neighboring lands.

Stressing the honor being done us, he urged us to enlist then and there.

However, I did not understand the resistance rising within me. To a youngster of 15 brought up on Nazi doctrine, as sensitive to peer pressure as any teenager, everything this dashing hero-figure said seemed undeniable. Yet I felt a need for caution.

Was it my parents’ prayers? Again they said little—but I knew they prayed for me every day. And in the secret church meeting in the mill, we sang that “prayer removes mountains.”

I refused to volunteer. The officer told me I did not love my country and called me a coward. I knew the first was not true and I hoped the second was not true. But still I would not join the SS.

Two years passed, years of growing loneliness. I was 17, enrolled in millers school, when in the spring of 1944, along with other teenagers and men too infirm to have been called up before, I was drafted into the army.

The fact that the military was making do with such unpromising material would have alerted wiser heads to the fact that Hitler’s 1,000-Year Reich was in trouble. But our radio and newspapers carried only accounts of victory.

My first night in basic-training camp, the other draftees rode me when I brought out my Bible. “You’re crazy,” one boy mocked. “That’s just the Jews’ book of lies. In a few years no one will read it anymore. We’ll all be reading Mein Kampf.”

From then, on, when I wanted to talk to God, I’d go out into the fields, or find an empty storeroom, or pull the blanket over my head at night. Maybe the SS officer had been right when he called me a coward.

At the camp, we were taught to shoot. Our rifles, the sergeant told us, would be everything to us. He warned us never, never to lose the ones we were about to be issued. Anyone who did would be court-martialed.

Only after this speech did he hand out our rifles, writing down the serial number in the Soldbuch that every soldier had to carry.

To my great surprise I turned out to be an excellent shot. When the instructor collected the paper targets from the firing range, mine would always have the highest score. I was tremendously proud.

It wasn’t until one night during my prayer time that I began to think about the purpose of all this practice. Suppose that were not a piece of paper in the sights of my rifle, but a man…

I thought about my father and mother and their remnant church—mostly women and old men now—meeting three times a week in the noisy mill, risking arrest, which had already happened to some of our Christian friends.

“Lord Jesus,” I prayed beneath my blanket, “let me never kill a man for a government that makes people hide to worship You.”

In May 1944, after a mere two weeks of training, we raw recruits were sent to the French coast to help man Hitler’s “impregnable” Atlantic wall. My unit was assigned to a bunker in Normandy, just east of the River Seine.

We had been told that our air force would support us if the Allies were so foolish as to attempt an invasion. But although Allied planes flew overhead often, we saw no German ones.

In early June the Allied bombing raids increased. On the night of June 5 the sky throbbed with more planes than I dreamed existed. Toward morning we saw shell flashes in the distance and realized there must be ships offshore.

By daylight the rumors were confirmed: The “impossible” invasion had begun.

Our sector was not hit in the initial assault, and our confidence remained high. Each night we climbed out of the bunker and stood scanning the sides. Surely this was the time when the Führer would launch his Secret Weapon!

In mid-June we left the coast and began a tactical maneuver back up the Seine. Not a retreat, our officers stressed—a strategic repositioning for the counter-offensive the Führer would soon be mounting.

Now that we were billeted on French farms rather than in fortified bunkers, our wariness over our rifles increased. Each night we placed them beneath the straw we used for beds—each man sleeping on top of his weapon.

Although the din of battle was all around us, our unit had so far done no fighting. Across the Seine, as we moved upriver, we occasionally caught sight of a gray-green tank with a white star on the side. Americans.

Once we saw German soldiers struggling toward us across the river, some paddling inflated rafts, others swimming, weapons abandoned. Why didn’t Hitler unloose the Secret Weapon?

And then one day tanks opened fire at us from across the river. We scrambled into the fields. I crouched in some waist-high wheat, ran through an apple orchard, stumbled past an area marked Land Mines and ran some more.

That night, I joined a unit made up of men from other scattered companies. From then on I moved with such makeshift groups, stopping at a farmhouse for a night or a week, sleeping on my rifle.

Although I had now been fired at a number of times, no unit that I’d been with had yet been in a position to return the fire. Was God answering my prayer that I never shoot at a human being?

One night we bedded down in a great stone barn with sentries posted outside. I shaped a pallet of straw, placed my rifle beneath it as usual, and lay down, as always, right on top.

Next morning when the corporal roused us we groped under the straw to retrieve our rifles, then lined up stiffly for inspection.

Except me. I was still on hands and knees sifting through my little heap of straw.

“On your feet, soldier!” the corporal barked. “With your rifle!” he snapped as I obeyed.

“I—it—” I stammered. “It’s not here!”

“What do you mean, ‘not here’?”

I gestured helplessly at the scattered straw. “It was there last night, right underneath me. Only—now it’s not.”

The entire unit searched that barn from end to end. Those who’d slept nearest me confirmed that I’d placed the weapon where I said. The corporal checked every rifle in the barn against the number in my Soldbuch.

No other soldier had taken it—and no one from outside could have got in past the guards. How could a rifle disappear into thin air?

The corporal was fuming. Our orders were to march out, and I’d delayed us all! Nor was there a spare rifle to give me. Our troops were short of everything—ammunition, weapons, medicine.

All that day we marched, followed by our horse-drawn supply cart, while I saw myself standing in front of a firing squad, my parents getting the news…

Late that same afternoon we engaged in our first exchange of fire. The Allies were on the other side of a small valley. Our squad took cover and began firing.

Except me. With no rifle to shoot, I was put in charge of the terrified horse. As bullets whined around us I tried to calm the panicky animal, though I was easily as frightened as he.

It wasn’t until that night, reading my Bible in a solitary corner of yet another barn, that I realized what had happened. That day, for the first time, the order had come to shoot. That day, for the first time, I had been unable to obey.

For the next several days I marched and bivouacked and carried equipment, but I never fired a weapon because I did not have one. The threat of court-martial hung heavy over me, but we were regrouping too often for official procedures to be followed through.

One morning in July my current unit was approaching a bridge when two Canadians armed with submachine guns jumped up on either side of the road.

“Halt! Hands up!”

Our lieutenant had an automatic pistol, which he let drop as he raised his hands. The rest of us threw our rifles clattering to the ground. All, of course, except me.

The mystery of the missing rifle was never solved. I spent the final 10 months of the war as a prisoner in England, working on a farm owned by a family that reminded me a lot of my own.

I worried about my parents, of course, as the Allied forces pushed on into Germany and the fighting drew near to Plüderhausen. All I could do was pray that they be kept safe (and they were!), as they had prayed for me.

Praying was a lot, though. That was a truth I’d learned at age 17, groping about in some straw on a stone floor. Prayer could indeed remove mountains—and rifles too.

We called it Black Thursday.

A group of us gathered in my office on a warm spring morning last year at Homeboy Industries, a gang-intervention program started nearly two decades ago in a tiny East Los Angeles church.

Crowding the walls was evidence of our work—photos of gang members who’d turned their lives around, drawings and paintings by kids from the projects, even a proclamation from one of East L.A.’s most notorious street gangs thanking us for our “efforts to make our lives and our community better.” Outside my office we saw gang members coming off the street for job training, counseling, maybe to apply to work in the bakery and café we run, or to have their tattoos removed by volunteer doctors.

The street was desolate, a neglected corner next to a bus storage depot less than half a mile from the Los Angeles Men’s Central Jail. Inside, though, everything hummed with life, with prayers and warm greetings, sometimes with tears of joy.

Except today we were meeting to practically shut the whole operation down. The recession had hit hard and much of our funding had dried up. We’d cobbled together the payroll money for the past few months but now the well was dry. We had more than 300 employees, most of them former gang members, counseling addicts, answering phones and teaching classes. They’d all have to go. The senior staff would be laid off. I would be laid off, and I’d helped found the place. We talked all morning about what to do.

We were desperate for another solution but there seemed to be only one course of action.

Finally we stopped for lunch. “We’ll break the bad news this afternoon,” I said. Silently I gave one last frantic prayer for help.

When I returned, word had already spread. The parking lot, sidewalk and lobby were mobbed. Huge guys covered in tattoos were sobbing. Homeboy Industries is the largest gang-intervention program in the country and the only operation of its kind in Los Angeles, America’s gang capital. For these guys it was a lifeline. And I was taking it away.

Worse, I blamed myself. We’d recently built a new headquarters that let us bring all of our programs under one roof. It was paid for but I hadn’t anticipated the increase in costs our expansion would generate. The number of gang members, or “homies,” as they call themselves, coming to us had quadrupled to 12,000 per year. (There are an estimated 100,000 gang members in the L.A. area.) I walked through that swarm of homies in a miserable daze.

I thought about all the kids who’d come to us over the years broken down and brokenhearted. That’s the real reason kids join gangs. They’re not natural-born criminals. They’re just out of options—no jobs in sight, dysfunctional schools and families, no sense of belonging in society. Yet these kids had taught me so much—more, it sometimes seemed, than I’d ever taught them.

I remembered one year in particular, when I was as depressed and anxious as I was that Black Thursday afternoon. It was 1992, six years after I’d been assigned as pastor of Delores Mission Church in East Los Angeles. Delores Mission was the poorest parish in all of L.A., basically two sprawling public-housing projects right next door to each other. The projects were home to eight different warring gangs.

Even though I was a middle-class white guy who spoke little Spanish, dealing with those gangs became a major part of my ministry. Mothers and grandmothers in my parish were distraught at the constant shootings, stabbings and drug dealing going on every day right outside their doors. They hated the violence but they loved their children. Maybe, they reasoned, if we made our church a place of love and refuge and helped these kids find jobs and mentors they’d leave the gang life. By fits and starts we put together a program that placed kids in local jobs and taught them basic life skills. We even bought them suits for interviews. We started our own businesses and we hired homies to run them.

I wasn’t smart enough to let it all take its own time. Instead I tried to solve the gang problem single-handedly. I never slept. Late at night I’d get on my bicycle and pedal through the projects. If I saw homies with guns drawn I confronted them. I escorted kids to their doors. I pleaded with gang members to leave the life and come to us for counseling. I shooed away drug dealers and even tried to broker truces between rival gangs. The truces were worse than useless. Gangs never fight about anything real. It’s all turf and posturing and desperate efforts to mask despair and fear.

As a Jesuit I was mandated to take a long retreat that year. I spent 30 days in silent prayer and realized that all of my efforts had come to little. The housing projects were more torn up by violence than ever. I was burned out. I returned wondering if I’d ever find a way to make a difference.

That’s when I met Pedro, a young guy addicted to crack. Every time I saw him in the projects I offered to get him into rehab. “I’m okay, G,” he’d say and slink off. (The homies call me “Father G” or just “G.”) One day, to my total surprise, Pedro said yes.

I drove him to a rehab center north of L.A. A month later his younger brother, Jovan, also a gang member, committed suicide. I picked Pedro up from rehab for the funeral. I had no idea what to say but Pedro launched into conversation the minute he got in the car. “It’s a trip, G,” he said. “I had this dream last night and you were in it.”

Pedro said he and I were standing in a large, empty, pitch-black room when suddenly I lifted up a flashlight and turned it on, illuminating a light switch on the wall. I didn’t speak, didn’t move, just held the beam steady. “All of a sudden,” said Pedro, “I realized I was the only one who could flip that switch. You couldn’t do it. I had to do it. So I walked over there and I took a breath and I flipped it on. And the room got light.” He paused and I saw he was crying. “And, G,” he choked out, “I realized that the light…is better…than the darkness.”

That was all. We didn’t say much more. After the funeral Pedro returned to rehab. His story, though, flipped a switch in my own mind. I realized what I’d been doing wrong—I’d been going around trying to turn on lights for everyone in the projects when in fact all I could do was aim the flashlight. I couldn’t save those kids. Only God could save them. My job was simply to point the way.

My work changed after that. No more bike patrols. No more brokering truces. I focused more on Homeboy Industries and made it clear to kids that I was ready to work with them only when they were ready to work with us. We sometimes joke that our motto (“Nothing stops a bullet like a job”) should be changed to “You just can’t disappoint us enough.” But that doesn’t mean we let kids off the hook. If they slack off or drift back into the life, we send them packing. We pray hard they’ll come back. But in the end that’s their decision.

The day after the layoffs I arrived at the office to find the place as noisy and busy as ever. “We’re still working,” the staff told me. “Maybe you’ll be able to pay us someday.” Pretty much everyone showed up, including Pedro, who’s a case manager.

Homies went to Dodger Stadium to collect donations from fans lining up for games. They took to the streets to sell copies of a book I’d recently written. They called newspapers and television stations and soon the place was swarming with reporters. “Your terrific press person, Melissa, called us,” a television cameraman told me. He meant a homegirl who works in the tattoo-removal clinic and had never spoken to the media before in her life.

Donations trickled in, then snowballed. In a few months we’d raised $3.5 million. Los Angeles County gave us $1.3 million to serve kids on probation. It’s still not enough. Our businesses, staffed almost entirely by homies, are self-sustaining. But the rest of what we do is slow, expensive work. So far we’ve managed to put about a hundred people back on the payroll.

I have no idea what we’ll do come June, when the county contract runs out. Still, I don’t despair. God brought us this far and he’ll carry us along. I may be shining the flashlight and the homies may be flipping the switch. But it’s God who provides the illumination. On Black Thursday and every day.

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