This post marks the first reflection in our Advent series, Welcoming the Child, Welcoming One Another: Newcomer Reflections for the Season of Advent. Throughout the coming weeks, newcomers to Canada and to the Diocese of Algoma will share personal stories grounded in the four traditional Advent themes: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. Their voices invite us to remember that the coming of Christ is always an act of welcome — God arriving among us, and God drawing us toward one another.
This Sunday we will light the first candle on the Advent wreath, the candle of Hope. Today, as we prepare our hearts for that moment, we begin with a reflection from Benjamin Paul, whose newcomer journey shines a light on the many ways hope takes human shape in our lives.
—-
The way Benjamin Paul talks about hope, you get the sense it has never been an abstract idea for him. Hope, in his telling, is something that arrives in the shape of another human being—someone who steps in at the right moment, someone who sees what you cannot yet see, someone who makes room for you.
“I’ve always believed,” he says, “that if you want to see God in a tangible way, it is through the people God sends your way.” It is not a slogan. It’s how he has survived transitions that would have crushed someone with less faith or fewer allies.
When Benjamin and his family moved to Canada from Bangalore in the fall of 2018, he imagined that the hardest part would be adapting to winter. The reality was sharper: finding work as a trained counsellor in a system that required credentials he didn’t yet have.
It was the kind of job search—one that included more than a thousand applications—that can turn even the strongest person inward, but then people—those harbingers of hope!—began to appear. A friend from his graduate program, now a Catholic priest in Sudbury, invited him north for a visit. Benjamin and his family drove the Deer Trail, wound through the north’s surprising beauty, and stopped in Elliot Lake. Benjamin didn’t announce anything out loud, but he prayed quietly: God, this is a beautiful place. If I could ever work here…
A few weeks later, completely unconnected to any plan of his own, an online posting from Elliot Lake appeared in his inbox. Benjamin applied for a lower-level intake job, the kind offered to newcomers without Canadian credentials. During the interview, the supervisor surprised him: “I’m offering you the higher position. She saw something,” he says, “she believed in me.”
He tells the story without embellishment, but you can hear gratitude in every sentence. Elliot Lake became Benjamin’s new home, and the venue for more than just a job, but for the next movement in his fulfilling his sense of calling.
While working full time as a mental health counsellor, he is now a postulant in the Diocese of Algoma—living in the Sudbury–Manitoulin deanery but doing formation and Sunday support in the Algoma deanery, most notably at St. Luke’s Cathedral in Sault Ste. Marie, where he has recently led a series of pastoral visitors’ workshops along with Dean Jay.
Benjamin’s early months in northern Ontario included the kinds of moments newcomers remember forever. The December day he picked up the family’s first Canadian car—“I drove it out of the dealership into a blizzard,” he laughs—became its own kind of baptism by snow, a plunge into the climate which quickly inspired the courage needed to navigate it. His son’s adjustment to school has taken time. “He kept comparing everything to Toronto,” Benjamin says. “This year he’s finally beginning to like it. He’s getting used to the outdoors, the trails. We’re all getting used to the bears in the backyard,” he adds, half amused, half amazed.
The many hope-filled steps Benjamin has taken as a newcomer to Canada include a neighbour, a colleague, a priest, a new friend—people who made the new place feel less foreign.
Benjamin’s understanding of hope is deeply shaped by his work. As a counsellor, he knows how much despair is tied to isolation, and to the belief that no one sees, no one notices, no one extends a hand. “Hope is not only spiritual,” he says. “It is relational. God uses people. That’s how God comes near.”
Hope is the friend who says “Come visit.”
Hope is the supervisor who says “I see something in you.”
Hope is a church that makes room for a newcomer’s gifts.
Hope is a stranger on a beach whose story stirs your own.
Hope is a neighbour who knocks.
Hope is a bishop who listens.
Hope is the community at St. Luke’s, learning together how to care for one another.
Hope is God, close enough to touch, working through human hands.
As Advent arrives, Benjamin’s story brings the theme of hope up close and personal. Hope is not distant. It is not abstract. It is not a vague optimism. “It is people,” Benjamin says again, summing up his whole story. “God works through people. That’s where hope is.”