Being on Call, Learning to Love: Why Vocation is Good News for Us All

[...]vocation provides students (and perhaps their teachers as well) with a way "out of the labyrinth"-away from the treadmill of meaningless "busyness"-and onto a lifegiving journey, a pilgrimage of hope. Living More Meaningful Lives At the end of his 2020 book Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, Pope Francis suggests that the only way to find a path to a better future is first to "decenter and transcend" so that all may have life.2 But Francis does not tell us how to go about fulfilling this somewhat mysterious injunction. By doing so, we can make space for everyone to experience the life abundant that is the harvest of justice; and this, in turn, makes space for collective joy.6 By educating for vocation, and thereby making it possible for our students to live vocationally, we protect them (and ourselves) from what Pope Francis names the "virus of indifference. "7 "This attitude ends up armor-plating the soul; that is, indifference bulletproofs it, so that certain things just bounce off," Francis writes.