by Fr. Sami Helewa, SJ
I am privileged this year to be on administrative leave after a seven-year role as president of Campion College in Regina. I am taking time this year to engage with artworks, travels and academic research on a theme of “belonging.” The latter emerged through my short story writings in the past three years. Stories that came out of me through a tapestry of words. I am at a turning point of my life, at 65 years this month that includes 28 years of committed Jesuit life and 20 years of priesthood; I am grateful.
Lent has been part of my faith-journey, and this year I am reflecting on the ups and downs of a life lived in statelessness, civil war, immigration, citizenship, professional career and ministry, rigorous education, and religious calling, all initiated by God, blessed with strong friendships, and graced with health and fellowship. Each of these experiences constitute a jigsaw piece of affirmative belonging. Our Christian faith expresses the reality of belonging in the Body of Christ and Communion of Saints. I am also privileged that Lent brings me closer to the suffering Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is always a major throne of yearning for belonging.
Why do I choose belonging as a Lenten theme? Our pain has a voice of unprecedented alienation that we are caught by in a world of isolation fuelled by individualism. Human connections have increasingly become superficial, and even people of goodwill struggle to fully participate in the healing of our world. Wars keep persisting on our globe, wasting human resources and showing how ineffective world leadership has become. Customer service in almost every service industry is no longer available with a message to “do it yourself.”
We need to revitalize the community of human connections back into our politics, economy, institutions and into our lives. Without such community, the poor among us suffer the most because they do not have the promised land of stable prosperity and resource sharing. However unrealistic, in each Lenten season I am reminded by Jesus’ responses that it is the poor who initiate healing because when they express their suffering, they know to whom they belong: A suffering Christ who prioritizes pain in his mission of prayer and ministry. Love has a mission towards pain.
On the first Sunday of Lent, we meet Jesus in his heartbreaking temptation in the wilderness. I call such temptation at his vulnerable moments today’s twin regions of Gaza and Ukraine that bleed before him as he stands alone at the hill of his compassion. I say alone because humanitarian aids are prevented to reach out. He speaks truth to the power of evil: “Away with you, Satan! For it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” Jesus’ words are collectively a statement of belonging with the clarity of wisdom: Whom we worship forms our sense of belonging, and whom we serve affirms it. Identity and mission are rooted in the truth of belonging. We belong, by the variety of our vocations, by knowing that evil wastes valuable resources and by the fact that authentic poverty re-orients us to a magnified goodness. The Two Standards of the Spiritual Exercises differentiate alliances and strategically link understanding our world to the human bases of abusive domination versus belonging to leadership that serves and heals.
Going back to the tapestry of words, the literary structure of the Gospel of Matthew models our Lent: Jesus shared his strategic Sermon on the Mount after he confronted Satan. This chronology is ours too, advising us to speak boldly against dark forces of our contexts to clear the way to rebuild a world thirsty for human connections — courage.
