Among the inspiring documents of GC 36 is a letter with a prayer for the Jesuits living amidst war and conflict across the world, braving life-threatening situations. It is a moving message that expresses solidarity with our very Jesuit brothers who have chosen to risk their lives and be on “difficult frontiers”. We salute them! Listening to the testimonies of the delegates from war-ridden countries turned out to be one of the most heart-warming sessions at the GC 36, we were told. Such testimonies and the hammering of the daily news of violence that leaves so many dead or homeless jolts us into examining our own secured life and makes that hymn resound: “So I leave my boats behind, leave them on familiar shores.” We are challenged to feel the gory realities from the virtual flashed on digital screens, to the actual on fatal fields.

The Jesuit Curia, then, received huge number of letters from Jesuits across the world volunteering to fill the vacuum left by the martyrdom of the El Salvador Jesuits and their co-workers. In Syria, the killing of a Dutch Jesuit and the abduction of an Italian Jesuit are but recent examples. Life-risking has been characteristic of Jesuit vocation and its missionary tradition. North American martyrs Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brebeuf and companions ventured into native-American terrains in narrow, wobbly canoes entering thick forests only to be mutilated and beheaded later by the warring Indian tribes. The end of the “Paraguay reductions” saw bullets of the colonisers piercing the Spanish missionaries walking upfront holding just the monstrance with the Blessed Sacrament.

Back home, we have the radical witnesses of A.T. Thomas and Prem Kumar. We know Jesuits are involved in movements against the establishment in favour of the displaced Adivasis, or are fighting cases in the Supreme Court in favour of atrocity victims. All of this in the face of looming threats of elimination by vested interests!

We seem on the threshold of a less peaceful and less safe world torn apart by a variety of political conflicts. More and more world leaders seem less and less assuring about world peace in their craze for the security of their own nation. Apostolic entrepreneurship today demands exploring anew the risk factor characteristic of our ministerial choices. It, perhaps, is the time to choose Baptism by blood besides the Baptism by water. War and violence stricken Syria, Africa, Colombia, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other regions that live in terror are our new apostolic frontiers. JRS is a living example of comforting the most insecure while taking upon them all insecurities.

The history of the Church and the Society of Jesus is blessed by the missionaries who explored unknown lands for the sake of the Gospel never to see their motherland again. Holy Father Pope Francis wants Jesuits to be “men of the frontiers”: “There is always the lurking danger of living in a laboratory. Ours is not a ‘lab faith’, but a ‘journey faith’, a historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths. I am afraid of laboratories because in the laboratory you take the problems and then you bring them home to tame them, to paint them artificially, out of their context. You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious.” (Interview to La Civilta Cattolica by Antonio Spadaro, SJ)

In a world ever more threatened by war and violence, shouldn’t risk factor become a key feature of our apostolic discernment today?

Vinayak Jadav, SJ