Finding Her Calling

ON OUR DRIVE back to New Jersey, I sat quietly in the front seat of the van. Six of my high school classmates sat in the back, chatting about the weekend and homework. The driver—my parish youth minister—gave me a side-eye. I could tell he was concerned with my silence.

This was in 2011, and we were returning from DC, where we’d attended the Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice, an annual social justice conference. My youth minister had given us the context for the conference: I knew that the peace and justice training was part of the legacy of the eight Salvadoran martyrs—six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter—who’d been murdered in 1989 by soldiers trained by the US military. I knew that we’d be examining the roots of certain injustices, all in preparation for a service trip we’d be taking later in the year.

But the conference also raised my awareness about a whole host of other global issues, from human trafficking to conditions in sweatshops to migration policy and the pursuit of peace in conflict zones.

My sixteen-year-old self was a little bit shook, overwhelmed by the sheer number of social injustices plaguing the world.

As we neared the Delaware Memorial Bridge, I broke my silence: “How am I supposed to just go back to school when the world is in such desperate need? Why do I need to take a chem test when people are starving and bombs are dropping and people’s basic human rights are being denied?”

My youth minister responded with kindness. I couldn’t have been the first high school student to react this way. And my brother later reminded me that continuing my education didn’t have to stand in opposition to my desire to work toward a just world in concrete ways—that my education could in fact fuel that desire. But at that moment, I didn’t know what to do with this new awareness or my lack of a clear response to it. Looking back, I think this may have been the moment when I first intuited my calling to become a teacher, though it would be many years before I’d be able to name it.

The path was not straight. Becoming an educator was not my first guess at a career. I thought I wanted to be an engineer. I dreamed of building systems that brought clean water to communities that needed it. A worthy goal, a worthy career. So when I started my undergraduate degree at Notre Dame, I declared an environmental engineering major. But my peace studies and humanities classes captured my curiosity in a way that chemistry and calculus did not. I began to contemplate changing my major. I kept asking myself the following questions: What are my gifts? What are the world’s needs? Where do those overlap? Later, during the summer before my junior year, I attended retreats to mentor high school students on faith and vocation—something I was clearly still wrestling with myself—and I discovered that I loved teaching.

University of Portland’s Pacific Alliance for Catholic Education (PACE) program showed me how to turn this new discovery into a career. After coursework on The Bluff, I was placed in a school in the Seattle area. I taught in a pre-K-8 dual-language immersion Catholic school where most of my students were first-generation Americans or immigrants from Mexico and other Central American countries. Issues I had learned about at the Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice and in college, like migration and income inequality in the US, were no longer articles to be read for class but realities my students and their families faced each day. The fulfillment I felt accompanying students on their journeys to understand the world and their place in it was the confirmation I needed that I was following my true call from God.

Fast forward to October 2024. I’d been working at Seattle Preparatory School for a month and had the opportunity to accompany 15 high school students to DC for the Teach-In. It felt great to see people I knew from the other times I’d participated over the years and to share this experience with my students. They attended a keynote speaker on immigration, workshops about the ongoing conflict between Gaza and Israel, and they prayed collectively with other young Catholics from across the country. The last keynote speaker was a nun who has spent 38 years living in El Salvador. She gave an impassioned plea to students to live out this year’s conference theme: “Steadfast Hope in Precarious Times.” It was one week before the presidential election, hurricanes had recently torn through the East Coast, there were concerns about hate speech and some high-stress feelings—plenty of precarity. But where to find the hope?

During the nun’s talk, I watched my students writing down quotes in their journals and laughing at the feisty sister’s jokes. I saw their eyes light up, despite being jetlagged and exhausted from days of touring around DC and hearing about heartbreaking topics.

We spent a day on Capitol Hill, meeting with staffers from the offices of Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Rep. Adam Smith, and Sen. Patty Murray. The students had prepared for weeks, researching bills proposed by the Teach-In team and crafting their own stories to drive home the importance of these issues. One student shared the story of his parents immigrating from Ethiopia to escape violence and persecution and argued that the asylum pathway they used must be extended to more people. Another student shared their concern about the deadly natural disasters occurring around the world and displacing many people, making them climate refugees.

A few days after our return, one of these students offered a morning prayer over our school’s PA system. She shared a message that stuck with her from the conference: “Let your heart be broken, and let that heartbreak fuel your love, fuel your action.” This student and others have shared their experience of the conference with their peers and have advocated for more just policies at the school, such as creating a support network for students in families with mixed-immigration status and working toward becoming a Green Ribbon school by following sustainability guidelines. They don’t shy away from sharing their stories, believing their experiences can transform hearts.

I can’t help but think of 16-year-old me, heartbroken and confused about the path forward. I continue to appreciate my youth minister, who prompted me to listen to the stirrings of the Holy Spirit in my emotions and experiences. It makes me grateful for the chance to be a companion to students now as they strive to make sense of the world and their place in it. We’re all still trying to answer these questions: What are our gifts? What are the world’s needs? And where do those answers overlap? I’m not sure where the path leads from here, but I trust there will be good surprises as long as I keep these questions central to my life and invite others to do the same. I also trust that my students will continue to embody hope, even during precarious times.