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By José Sanchez and Fannie Dionne
Some people speak of dramatic conversion moments or wrestling with their path. But what if the deepest transformations happen in quiet moments — around a campfire watching a hoop dancer, serving meals to strangers, or finding unexpected brotherhood in a prison hall? These ordinary encounters often reveal life’s most profound truths.
In an age of carefully curated social media personas and professional networking, we often struggle to find genuine connection. We yearn for something real, something that cuts through the superficial and touches our core humanity. Yet authenticity often reveals itself in the most unexpected details.
When you first meet Fr. Jeffrey S. Burwell, SJ, you notice the cowboy boots — an unlikely choice for the newly appointed Provincial Superior of the Jesuits of Canada. Yet they seem perfectly fitting for someone who moves effortlessly between meetings with Indigenous leaders and casual conversations, between university halls and prison corridors.
“If he just comes up to you in his jeans and sweatshirt … you wouldn’t know he’s a priest,” recalls St. Paul’s College professor Daniel MacLeod. “Once, when he came to pick me up for my first day of work, my kids kept asking ‘When’s the priest coming?’ He was here and gone before they realized it was him. He’s not like an austere priest from some 19th-century novel. He’s in the mix.”
From Prairie Fires to Prison Halls
As a kid, Fr. Burwell frequently went to Grayson, a city next to the Indigenous community of Cowessess. “One of my earliest memories was sitting around a fire, at age 14. Someone’s uncle came back, a hoop dancer, and he made himself into an eagle. I remember thinking it was the most amazing thing that I’d ever seen.” In the years that followed, Fr. Burwell would often return to the community.
A speeding ticket led Fr. Burwell to Souls Harbour Mission at age 16. Between cleaning toilets and serving meals, mainly to inner-city Indigenous people, something shifted. “I fell in love with service to those who were broken and in need, but I also realized the human dignity and the challenge it takes to come and say, ‘I need a meal.’” These early experiences shaped his understanding of the world and the transformative power of humility and service.
“Every person has something to teach us when we open ourselves to real conversation.”
Building Bridges: Where Tradition Meets Real Life
The path that began with traditional Catholic formation would wind through unexpected terrain. During an exchange program, he had a chance encounter with Soeur Olivette Poulin, a nun with the Augustines de la Miséricorde de Jésus at the Monastère de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec. She had an uncanny ability to inspire. “Without missing a beat, she said, ‘If you’re going to be a priest, you should be a Jesuit,’” he recalls. Her passionate recounting of Jesuit missionaries in New France struck a chord: “It seemed adventurous and fit my personality,” he adds, reflecting on how that conversation changed the course of his life.
MacLeod witnessed Fr. Burwell’s diverse engagements firsthand: “He always did something else — literally another job. In the jails, with the RCMP, in rural communities teaching. When I first got my job interview from him, I Googled him and found out he was getting his pilot’s license while getting his Ph.D. in education and teaching at the university.”
“The world is our monastery” — this phrase emerged during Fr. Burwell’s experience at a Trappist monastery during his novitiate. This realization anchored him more deeply in his Jesuit calling — a life of service, grounded in relationship and action, where the boundaries between prayer and presence dissolve.
The Power of Presence
Fr. Burwell’s ministry has taken him to places most people would never venture — such as the stark halls of the Stony Mountain Penitentiary outside Winnipeg. He speaks with reverence about the wisdom he found there. “They embody the sorts of qualities that make perhaps the best Christians,” he says of the incarcerated individuals he met. “They have lost their freedom, reputation and finances: everything the world says is important. They are forced to ask, ‘What now is important to me?’ The deepest transformations often happen when we’re loved in our brokenness, when everything the world says is important falls away.”
In his work with Indigenous communities in northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Fr. Burwell demonstrates how presence can heal and unite. MacLeod notes: “His work was almost entirely practical in nature. He knew these people personally and nurtured relationships with them over the years. He was a light for those communities who might seem cut off from the Church. He’d give sacraments while out fishing or snowmobiling before Easter Mass.”
Fr. Burwell’s Saskatchewan upbringing gave him natural points of connection. “There is hardly an Indigenous person that I encountered that didn’t like hockey, ice fishing, hunting or trucks,” Fr. Burwell reflects. “Given that I come from Saskatchewan, these are my brothers.” One month after a Christmas service, someone grabbed him from behind in a Regina jail. “You were there for the community when the community was in great need. You don’t know how much that meant.”
“The deepest transformations often happen when we’re loved in our brokenness, when everything the world says is important falls away.”
“I have always just liked being with people,” Fr. Burwell reflects, “and if the Society of Jesus, after I am done being Provincial, sends me back to working with the poor and the fragile, it would not bother me a bit. Because I am loved, I can share that love with everyone. Becoming a Jesuit means you’re never going to be number one in any one person’s life. But it means you’re going to be number two in more people’s lives than you could ever imagine. For me, that is beautiful.”
