How I learned solidarity in action

By Hilary Titus

In some ways, my journey towards living a life true to Santa Clara's values has seemed like a long one, but other times it feels like a crash-landing.

I did not choose Santa Clara for its Jesuit values, but those values have become perhaps the most life-changing aspect of my time at the university.

It's true, I'd always wanted to do something with my life that held some kind of bigger purpose, but at the end of high school, I thought that it would mean simply working for an environmentally or socially conscious company.

I didn't know it could mean making radical decisions about the way I would live every part of my life, and I certainly didn't think my faith had much to do with it all. I wasn't aware that faith could call so strongly on every aspect of a person's life.

When I arrived at Santa Clara, I discovered a whole new way to think about and act in faith. I lived in Loyola, the Jesuit values-themed dorm, and participated in the Lenten Simple Meals in Campus Ministry, where each week we ate a traditional, simple meal from a different country around the world and learned a little about their socio-economic situation.

I participated in the Challenge where guests offered weekly meditations and reflections which opened up into group discussions all based in living out the Christian-faith.

I had an amazing group of friends and mentors who engaged each other in conversation about big life questions every day.

In this time, I was introduced to an entirely new vocabulary of faith—one that called for real action. I realized that faith didn't have to be a lonely prayer between an individual and God, that faith in God has a profound relationship with the call for social justice.

What really caught my curiosity, and has haunted me ever since, was my introduction to the word "solidarity." I had never heard it before and really didn't understand what it meant.

From that point, I took just about every opportunity I could to get to the meaning of this, "solidarity." I spent five days in a kind of "urban plunge" in San Francisco that hit me hard and left me reeling.

This was my first encounter with really trying to act in solidarity, and it reverberated deep inside my soul, but left me too stunned to know where or how to move next.  

After a couple of months, a new opportunity was laid before me. My next big step was proposing a Jean Donovan Fellowship to volunteer for a grassroots NGO in rural Tanzania the summer after my sophomore year.

That longer commitment showed me some of the depths of poverty, but I ultimately lost sight of what it meant to live in solidarity while I was there.

It was difficult to keep myself centered on that question when the rest of my community there had different priorities.

It was the fall after my experience in Tanzania that I first heard the quote, "If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."  

Perhaps I had heard this or something similar before, but that day something clicked differently. I think it was then that I realized that I no longer believed that my liberation, my salvation, lived in one prayer — my incessant search for solidarity sprang from somewhere inside that knew that my liberation is bound up in the liberation of others.

It has been the times I've been amongst the poor and marginalized, whether in San Francisco, Tanzania, or El Salvador, that have been the most life-giving for me.

If I'm going to be worrying, I would rather be worrying about whether another female student at Orkeeswa Secondary School will become pregnant or what will happen to the garbage dumped in the ravines alongside my praxis community on the volcano of San Salvador, than my GPA.

It's in communities like these where I'm pushed to really pay attention to my sisters and brothers around me and learn, little by little, to how to truly live in community and in solidarity.

I want to continue my education in what life is truly like for the majority of the world, and I want to do that living in a community of others committed to similar ideals.

I've fallen in love with the education of the whole person, through my experience of simple living and social justice, spirituality and community living.

Hilary Titus is a senior English major.