This year, 2020, has been full of the unexpected. Covid-19 has turned the usual rhythm of our life together upside down. We have seen how this event has affected the usual gestures of our companionship over the last few months. And it is not over. Now, though we have come out of lockdown, the reopening is still preventing us from participating in our familiar gestures of summer (community vacations, the Meeting, etc). Further, in respecting the health-related guidelines in place, we cannot organize the pilgrimage to Czestochowa, that gesture so dear to high school and college graduates, as we can see by the desire to participate that has not weakened over time.

Life, however, does not stand still. In fact, it is more pressing than ever! The fact we cannot make the pilgrimage to Czestochowa has not erased the irreducible need that inspires it: to give thanks for the experience one has had and to look at the question of one’s life during such an important rite of passage as finishing high school or college. Paradoxically, the pandemic made the need not to turn away from that question emerge with even greater
urgency in many of us.

The decisions we need to make, in fact, will not wait. From choosing what to study and which university is the best fit, for the high school graduates–including the decision of whether to move into student apartments or not–to the job search for college graduates, with all the sense of uncertainty the economic consequences of the lockdown have generated in each of our lives.

All these decisions are tied to the need for a personal work to clarify one’s vocation: what am I here to do in the world? How can I be useful?

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