Jon Sobrino, S.J. offers us a deeply personal and penetrating way to understand the kind of encounters we might seek if we are to deepen our commitments and clarify our vision: “…from the point of view of the poor we will see more and see more clearly than from any other position.” Our faith in Jesus calls us to encounter the poor, to listen to the excluded. We get a better look at EVERYTHING when we stand with the poor, where they are, on their terms. This is the way of truth and life. We have to stand somewhere. When we stand with the poor we are more likely to see it like it is - in truth, for life.

Jesus of Nazareth stood in the heat of midday at Jacob’s well with a Samaritan woman (cite) and asked her for water in a moment of encounter which disrupted legally and culturally predicated manners of exclusion and segregation - not unlike the mid 20th-century sit-ins at ‘white-only’ lunch-counters. 

St. Ignatius walked alongside a muslim traveler (cite) in the early days of his own conversion and was tempted to violent reaction over a theological dispute (at this point still moving between the ego-driven pride of his foolhardy battle cries in Pamplona and the Spirit-haunted humility of his midnight cries and mystical surrender in Montserrat) when he learned a lesson in patient acceptance from the grace and dignity of the Moor and the steady humility of his own mule. 

Over the past year hundreds of delegates from across the Jesuits West province came together across differences of institution, region, generation, gender and race in the FDJDS. During a global pandemic these delegates quickly adapted to video conferences and spontaneous BLM protests, immigration advocacy actions and inter-community prayers where carefully planned discernment processes gave way to various levels of disruption and prophetic action, moving the group well beyond the comfort zones of some but surely closer to the heart of pain and suffering of many. 

Each of these encounters - in first century Samaria/Palestine, sixteenth century Iberia, and twenty-first century North America - became the occasion of powerful learning and deep conversion - not so much to the adoption or appropriation of the perspective of the other, but rather to the greater glory of divine kinship - a beloved community, of spirit and truth,  of reconciliation and right-relationship, of unity without uniformity - each encounter a new communion - each encounter a revelation of true universality discovered in a sacred plurality at the heart of all creation and realized always in Christ.  

This toolkit is about us doing that work.

Inside of each section, you’ll discover materials and methods to do the work of racial justice in your context. Every response across the province will not, cannot, look the same. In fact, we’ve learned hard lessons as a spiritual community about painting with too broad of a brush, insisting everyone get on board with one ideology, or just retreating completely from the tension. But there is good work for you to do toward racial justice, adapted to the “joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties” of your community, that you can, and should start on, now. Everyone needs a different kind of push.