By Rev. Abby King-Kaiser
“I’m currently discerning a year of service or a communication job at a nonprofit, both of which would position me along a career path of social change. Xavier — and the values and commitments I’ve learned here — has helped me realize this fire in me to enact change. As Dorothy Day put it: “No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.” ”
At Xavier University’s Dorothy Day Center for Faith and Justice, we do many things: campus ministry (for both Catholics and non-Catholics), co-curricular service and justice initiatives, interfaith work, programming on race, and more. Through it all, our hope is that students gain tools for discernment and are prodded to consider their vocation along the way. We hope that by graduation, “students will be able to evaluate choices through a process of discernment in order to promote good in their personal life and in the world.”
This is easier said — and developed into a rubric — than done. Students who reflect on transformation often haven’t had one or two experiences, but a whole series of experiences that brought about their transformation. Sometimes a retreat, a major internship, or some other kind of mountaintop moment comes at the right time and changes everything.
But more often, the process of dipping in and out of action and reflection over a prolonged period of time, with institutional support and with Ignatian tools of reflection, allows them to claim a vocation that is not just for their own good but for the good of the world.
The Dorothy Day Center assesses our work at the broadest level by inviting seniors who are applying to our alumni society to write essays about their learning. They choose four of our seven learning outcomes to write about, and we ask them to offer this prompt with an exercise in discernment: "Describe how you plan to create a life after graduation that enables you to further develop the values and commitments you forged or deepened at Xavier.”
Over the years, this assessment hasn’t just helped us to understand individual students, but it’s also challenged us to incorporate vocational discernment into all the work we do. It has helped us to recognize how many service, immersion, and other justice-related learning will challenge students to embrace how their vocation can impact the world around them and has helped us to better understand how our Jesuit, Catholic tradition invites students of faith to consider the common good, no matter how they engage.
Campus ministry student leaders at Loyola Marymount University (above) prepare sandwiches to be delivered to unhoused neighbors near campus. Regardless of engagement, how do students, staff, and faculty integrate vocational discernment and consideration for the common good into curricular and co-curricular offerings? Photo courtesy of Loyola Marymount University.
Alex Budzynski’s involvement in our office began with his serving as a musician and lector at Mass. But over time, his vocation on our campus expanded and was deeply lived out by being a fellow in “It’s on X,” our campus movement against sexual and power-based violence. He has been a unique leader who challenges our professional staff to consider trauma and injustice in our ministry and community, while leading his peers towards a campus culture marked by healthy relationships. His story demonstrates that no single experience moved him toward the vocation to which God called him. It was many experiences in our Catholic communities on campus, in the classroom, with his friends — many experiences that added up to this unique vocation that is bringing ever more justice to our life on campus.
He describes a junior-year retreat as being a place where he was able to claim and grow his individual faith and rekindle his relationship with God. But as I read his essays that engage spirituality, justice, pluralism and intentional community, I hear a thread of vocational discernment through it all, and I can see the ways that God calls Alex to change the world. Indeed, with God’s help, Alex already has brought change.
Those mountaintop, silence-in-a-cave, whispering-in-the-wind kinds of experiences do matter and do make a huge difference. But as I reflect on Alex’s experience and on my own vocation of forming people for and with others, I know it is a much longer journey than any one of those experiences alone.
As a minister who accompanies students as their vocations unfold, I am reminded that it is a long road, and that we all need companions along the way.
Rev. Abby King-Kaiser is director of the Dorothy Day Center for Faith and Justice at Xavier University.
The featured cover photo (above) is courtesy of Xavier University.