Having seen the lengths some young people from poor communities have to go to receive an education, Audrey Wong is very grateful to be receiving her Master of Divinity degree from Regis College on Saturday, November 8.
“I see this education as a gift and hope it will enable me to give back something, especially when working with those who are poor and on the margins,” she says. “It’s not something I asked for, but it truly was a gift.”
She came to Toronto to study theology at the request of her religious community, the Society of Sisters, Faithful Companions of Jesus (FCJ). She first learnt about the FCJ sisters when she was working as a government lawyer in her native Singapore. After joining the FCJs, she worked for several years in the Philippines, where her sisters work particularly with women and children in urban poor communities.
“I vividly remember my first trip to the poor community where one of my sisters facilitates a women’s group. We could smell the place before we could see it, because it was right next to an active landfill where people scavenged for a living. It was really hot and there were hardly any trees. People lived in little houses, sometimes made out of recycled materials. The house we were sitting in was fenced in by mattress wire, but was decorated very nicely with plants. Instead of pots, though, it had recycled Coke bottles. That was my first experience seeing what destitute poverty looks like and I realized I had lived a very sheltered existence,” she says.
“These experiences raised the question in me – how can I really be in solidarity with people who are so different and whose lives are so different from the life I’ve had? What does it mean to be in solidarity?” she says. She cites not only differences in economic backgrounds, but levels of education, and language and cultural barriers as challenges to living in solidarity. These questions prompted her to write her thesis on the topic of ‘Transcending Differences: Solidarity as Response to the “Culture of Exclusion”’, supervised by Prof. John Dadosky.
Initially, Audrey preferred her active social justice work and did not have an interest in studying theology because she thought it was abstract and divorced from the real world. “However, once I was here, I realized that theology doesn’t have to be separate from the world. The way we talk about God has real world implications,” she says.
An unexpected turning point for her came during an intersectional feminist theology class, when the main textbook that was assigned was written by Asian feminist theologian Kwok Pui -lan. “I had never read anything by an Asian woman talking about God before. Suddenly, I could relate to what she was writing and for me that was so transformative, because I realized I had grown up reading Western writers – mostly men – write about Christianity and had never realized how that had alienated me both from myself and from God,” she says. “I suddenly realized that my experiences are also valid, and that I could also have something to say about God.”
While at RSM, she has continued to be involved with her community’s social justice initiatives, including working with refugees at the FCJ Refugee Centre in Toronto. “It was interesting because I was witnessing the difficulties that they face coming to a new country, but also the hope they carry for their new lives,” she says.
She has also been grateful for the opportunity to help build community at RSM. As part of the student council, of which she is currently the chair , she has enjoyed organizing social events, especially at the beginning of the semesters, as a way to make new students feel welcome and introduce them to the city in a fun way.
Having unexpectedly developed an interest in theology, Audrey is staying on at RSM to pursue a PhD. Her thesis topic will connect theology and drug policy. This arises from her experiences in the Philippines, where she witnessed some of the effects of a brutal war on drugs that resulted in thousands of extrajudicial killings, mostly of people from poor communities. She was involved in a research project there that revealed some correlation between people’s image of a punitive God and their support for the killings. “Through this example, I can see that the way we talk about God and the way that we form people can have real world consequences, some of which are quite deadly,” she says.
It is her hope that the gift of an education will help her to walk more faithfully in solidarity with those on the margins of society.