After graduation, before the world starts moving on

There is a peculiar stillness that settles over campus in the second semester.

The energy of arrival has faded. Résumés are being finished. Graduate programs and job offers hover in inboxes. Conversations circle the same predictable questions: Where are you going? What’s next? When do you start? For many seniors, the future feels both thrilling and claustrophobic, full of motion, yet strangely rushed.

In that rush, we rarely pause to ask a more unsettling question: Who do I want to become before the world decides for me?

For more than twenty years, the Benedictine Volunteer Corps (BVC) has offered graduates of St. John’s a radically different answer to that question. Not a delay tactic. Not a résumé gap. But a year-long immersion into communities where life moves to an older rhythm, one shaped by prayer, work, hospitality and presence.

BVC volunteers live and serve in Benedictine monasteries across the world: teaching in classrooms, supporting clinics, mentoring youth, assisting retreat centers, maintaining libraries, kitchens and gardens. The work is rarely glamorous. Much of it looks ordinary; dishwashing, lesson planning, cleaning, showing up again tomorrow.

And yet, it is in this ordinariness that something extraordinary takes root.

One volunteer in Rome recently wrote home about a day that began like any other, morning prayer, library work, refectory cleaning, until it ended with an unexpected encounter with the Pope. The moment itself was remarkable, but the deeper realization came later: that even the unnoticed acts, the repetitive work, had quietly placed him in the path of grace. “I appreciated dishwashing as an act a bit more,” he reflected.

This is the hidden curriculum of the BVC.

In Guatemala, another volunteer arrived convinced he was unqualified to teach English. Standing in front of a room full of students, he felt the weight of inadequacy settle in quickly. Weeks later, he found himself eager to return to the classroom, surprised by how much the students had taught him, about patience, resilience and belonging. “I know that for these next several months,” he wrote, “I am called to be here.”

In Puerto Rico, a second-year volunteer described how hospitality reshaped his understanding of leadership. He learned from an elderly monk who spoke multiple languages and met each guest with patience and curiosity. The lesson was not efficiency but attentiveness, how presence itself can be an act of service.

In Montserrat, high above Barcelona, volunteers live among centuries of history and music. Their days are split between helping young choir boys navigate school life and finding quiet moments of reflection in the mountains. One volunteer wrote about discovering that even in a place shaped by tourism and tradition, the deepest gift was balance, between noise and silence, work and rest, ambition and humility.

And in Nairobi, volunteers working alongside young men in the Mathare neighborhood have witnessed something that no textbook could teach: initiative born not from abundance, but from scarcity. They have watched youth organize themselves, plant trees, clean their streets, hold meetings they call “Parliament” and build something lasting without waiting for permission or rescue.

These stories are not exceptions. They are the pattern.

The Benedictine Volunteer Corps does not promise clarity on day one. In fact, many volunteers write about early uncertainty, about feeling small, unseen and unsure if they are making a difference at all. But slowly, through repetition and relationship, something shifts. Volunteers begin to see that formation does not happen through acceleration, but through attention. In a moment when national volunteerism is declining, when burnout seems to arrive earlier and earlier, the BVC insists on something countercultural: that a year devoted to service is not time lost, but time reclaimed.

Importantly, the BVC is structured so that service is accessible. Volunteers receive housing, health insurance, a living stipend and travel support. This is not an experience reserved for those who can afford to pause their lives. It is an intentional investment in young adults from St. John’s who are willing to be shaped before they rush forward. BVC alumni go on to medical school, graduate programs, teaching, public service, nonprofit leadership and careers across countless fields. But nearly all say the same thing when asked about that year: it gave them a deeper sense of direction, not because it answered every question, but because it taught them how to listen. This semester, as graduation looms and decisions feel heavier by the day, I want to offer a gentle challenge to the campus community:

What if the most responsible thing you could do after graduation is slow down? What if service is not a detour, but a foundation? What if the year you give becomes the year that gives you back your clarity?

The Benedictine Volunteer Corps is not easy. It asks for humility, patience, sacrifice and a willingness to live without immediate validation. But for those who feel that quiet pull, the sense that there is more to become before settling into what’s next, it may be the most honest place to begin.

And sometimes, the year that changes everything starts with saying yes to service.

If you are interested in the Benedictine Volunteer Corps and discerning a different approach following graduation, send an email to bvc@csbsju.edu or llindvedt001@csbsju.edu and I would be happy to navigate the next steps with you. Join the 10 seniors who have said YES to serving.