In Weakness, Strength

In the early 1990s, while doing research in Central America and the Caribbean on the “preferential option for the poor,” I spent some time with Canadian Jesuits who worked in the slums of West Kingston in Jamaica. Jim Webb, the local superior and a native Nova Scotian, accompanied a colleague and me as we wended our way along unpaved roads in the unforgiving sun learning something of the unrelieved heaviness of ennui and the pent-up fury of the marginalized. Webb was manifestly loved by the locals, and the children and women in particular made their way to him not so much for a benediction as for a simple validation of their humanity. At one point, he stopped at a market stand and purchased a popsicle, which he then intentionally and in full view gave to a child he singled out for special attention among the horde that trooped behind him. When I asked him why, he replied that because the young boy was mentally challenged he was the poorest of the poor and by showing him such...