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market. I followed her as she preached in the
checkout lines and rubbed oil on the foreheads
of those willing to be anointed as they paid for
their week’s worth of groceries.
I wrote about a Muslim-American soldier who
heard Allah’s call for him to enlist in the U.S.
Army, only to question it amid death threats
from fellow soldiers during the War on Terror.
I wrote about a group of young men at a rural
seminary in Maryland who were on the cusp of
taking their final vows to enter the priesthood.
I asked them how it felt then, at a time when
the Catholic Church was in the throes of its sex
abuse scandal. They told me how it suddenly
seemed strange to tell someone you wanted
to become a priest, as if you were admitting
something was wrong with you. They spoke
of their own doubts and conflicting desires,
especially to marry and start a family.
For many of them, the choice boiled down to
a belief in their vocation.
We use the term nowadays as just another
word for occupation or career, but in early days,
vocation referred literally to a call from God. It
stems from the belief that God creates us with
unique traits and gifts so that we can be used for
a specific purpose. Finding your life’s vocation
meant you had heard the voice of God.
“You realize it isn’t about you,” one seminar-
ian told me during my visit. “It’s about what
God has intended.”
As a religion reporter, I believed I had discov-
ered my vocation.
But just months after my visit to the rural
seminary, I found myself on a plane to China—
dispatched by my newspaper to fill in for a
correspondent who had to leave the country
for a month. It made sense. I spoke Chinese and
had long been interested in China’s strange and
sometimes brutal system of governance.
The trip, however, changed me. I became
obsessed with the country, with the massive
change underway and the suffering often
inflicted by that change and China’s morally
fraught government.
My two months in China turned into five
years. And after it was over, I found myself
returning to the United States, no longer certain
of this notion of vocation—the idea of beingcalled to one thing as a way of finding meaning
and making a difference.
I was no longer a religion reporter—the
goal I thought my whole childhood had been
preparing me for. I was no longer a China
correspondent—the fever that had gripped me
and burned through all else in my life.
I spent two years after my return to the
United States wandering across the country,
parachuting from one disaster zone to another.
And then my editors asked me to consider a new
assignment: science.i ask jaime how he finally made the decision
to abandon his work in neuroscience.
He told me about a sermon he heard at Mass
during his last years doing post-doctoral research
at Yale. The sermon was about an encounter
Jesus has with a rich young man.
The man tells Jesus he has followed every
commandment to its fullest and asks what he still
must do to win eternal life. Jesus tells the man
there is just one thing missing, an empty hole in
the rich man’s life.
“Go, sell everything you have and give it to the
poor,” Jesus tells him. “Then come, follow me.”
At this, the story goes, the rich young man’s
face falls, and he leaves in sadness because he
knows he cannot bring himself to do it.
When Jaime heard this sermon at Yale, he said,
he started thinking to himself whether research
was truly how he was supposed to spend the rest
of his life. He thought about how he would feel
if he were to die in a matter of years, what his
biggest regret would be.
And he decided that even if he didn’t know
for sure whether that empty feeling inside was
God calling him, his biggest regret would be not
having tried to find out.
Some believe that science is the only way to
arrive at truth and certainty, he told me, but he
has never believed that to be the case. “Science
is how we observe and measure things in this
world, but there are things beyond this world,
beyond what we can observe. That is where
God exists.”
He tells me that even now—three years into his
training to become a priest—he still has doubts at
times and feels the nagging emptiness inside.MAN OF SCIENCE, MAN OF FAITH | WILLIAM WAN