As a first-year Jesuit novice, Ben Osborne set out in April 1998 on a five-week pilgrimage. Instructed to make his way alone into the Deep South and work with the poor, his encounters with racism and injustice opened his heart and eyes. Upon his return, he discovered God was calling him to work with at risk African-American youths in Omaha. This account of his journey explains why.

Most of the rest of my class were really looking forward to pilgrimage. I was not. They were all excited by the stories of guys who had gone ahead of them and had graces heaped upon them over the course of five or six weeks.

I thought these stories were pretty cool too, but I still dreaded being kicked out of the house for five weeks with only my backpack, $35 and a one-way bus ticket to Honey Hill, Mississippi. Images of myself hungry and huddled by the side of the road praying in the cold and rain, tormented me.

Yet I knew that God would continue to take care of me and deepen the graces of my long retreat of just a couple of months past. So with fears intact, but faith aplenty, I set out in late April along with my fellow Jesuit novices. Within a week I found myself in Cowerton, a little town in northeastern Mississippi about three hours southeast of Memphis.

I showed up at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church where I knew of a small community of women religious who had been hospitable to pilgrim novices in the past. They welcomed me and immediately put me to work. In a town of 3,000 with only a handful of Catholics, these women were extremely active witnesses to the Gospel against the dominant culture of racism and oppression.

Besides running the parish (a priest came out on Saturday nights for Mass), they were in the process of building a community center that would, among other things, house a job-training program for teenage moms. They also ran a second-hand store and a tutoring program.

While tutoring in the after-school program, I met Levon, a 7-year-old African-American boy. Of all the people I met on pilgrimage, he made the most lasting impact. His story inflamed my spirit and my passions at the injustice I saw.

The seeds of segregation and underlying roots of racism are as alive and well as ever in Cowerton. The town has two sit-down restaurants (and a couple of others that are carryout only to avoid interracial mingling). Of those religious denominations present, all have two churches, one for blacks and one for whites. Tiny St. Joan of Arc, our Catholic parish, was the exception.

A public park appeared to get mowed monthly. The city pool, which closed when it was forced to integrate in the 1960s, reopened only recently, and with reluctance, as a result of the efforts of the sisters and a group of volunteers they put together. The town also has a private park with a separate swimming pool for "members." In reality there are also separate school systems, with the black kids all in the grossly under-funded public schools and many of the white kids in private "Christian" academies.

Not long after she arrived in 1985, Sr. Darlene, assisted by members of the community, identified education as the greatest need she could most readily address. By 1987, the sisters had started their highly organized tutoring program to help support parents in the education of their children. It was there that I spent my afternoons from about 3 to 6:30 p.m.

Levon would come to the second session, which began at 5 p.m. We usually went over his spelling words, practiced reading the story he was working on in school, and reviewed some addition and subtraction flashcards.

He impressed me as an extremely bright kid. Eager to learn, Levon was a master at sounding out words he didn't know. After two weeks of math drills together, he could readily add and subtract, rarely counting on his fingers.

I was shocked, then, to learn that he was in danger of having to repeat first grade. The school system required teachers to give percentage grades to each student and then average them together for the whole year to determine whether the student advances to the next grade level.

Levon had some trouble in spelling at the beginning of the year, presumably because he hadn't gone to kindergarten and was a little behind everybody else. It didn't seem to matter that by the spring he was reading and doing math at a second grade level. Moreover, he earned perfect scores on his spelling tests all three weeks we worked together.

Disbelief, tears, and then rage welled up in me when I learned about Levon's predicament. Here was a first grader getting hit with the residual effects of centuries of racism. Poor and black, Levon was stuck in an under-funded public school with ridiculously antiquated policies because the people in power don't have children in the public school system.

Working with Levon, all the things I'd studied over the fall and the graces of long retreat became even more real. I witnessed first-hand that injustice isn't an abstract concept. Injustice has the face of a 7-year-old who is going to have to struggle against forces he doesn't even understand yet just to get through school. While the more fortunate children he must compete against in the race of life get head starts, kids like Levon are weighted down by slow-to-die handicaps deeply rooted in injustices most of us presume are long-gone.

Instead of patting Levon on the back for a job well done and sending him on, the system was prepared to push Levon down, kick him hard, and hold him back - discourage him rather than encourage him. God is calling me as a Jesuit, the Society as a body, and the Church as a whole to insist on better.

As I look back on pilgrimage, I am beginning to see more clearly that the Christ I encountered on long retreat, the Christ I followed through the villages, the Christ I watched preach, teach, and heal was inviting me to follow him and to do as he did. Jesus was inviting me to take that overwhelming love he had shared with me in retreat and to share it with others in very concrete ways.

Sharing that love through teaching, preaching, healing, or just being there is the only way to bring about the Kingdom of God, particularly in places where hope for the future is besieged by fear and hatred every day.

Note: With the help of program staff, concerned members of the community, and Levon's parents, Levon successfully completed first grade and advanced to second grade for the 1998-99 school year.