I LOVE BEING A JESUIT. ONE OF THE greatest joys of Jesuit life is that in joining the project of my life to the project of the Society of Jesus and its mission in service of the Church and the world, I have lived and worked with some truly remarkable men.

This weekend I found myself reflecting on my experiences and why I love being a Jesuit. The answer is complicated, but it comes down to passion, especially the sort of passion that manifests itself in a bred-in-the-bone love of teaching.

All Jesuits, in one way or another, are teachers. Teaching is a natural “vocation within a vocation” for us because of the experience of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola that undergirds everything we do and informs the imagination out of which we do it. In the Exercises, Ignatius provides a framework that enables us to discover that the spirit of God is active and laboring in every human life, whether people realize it or not. The Church asks Jesuits to help people realize exactly that and, further, the Church asks Jesuits to find ever more effective ways of inviting people, especially young people, to cooperate more fully in the grace-fueled project of their own lives.

That Ignatian two-step – helping people recognize reality with a capital “R” and inviting them to choose to cooperate with it – is what Jesuits do. That’s why our guts call us to go where people are asking tough, smart questions about themselves, God, the world and what really matters. That’s why the order gravitated so early and so easily to work among young people in schools. We came to that challenge with a particular way of proceeding, one born of great confidence in the power of the Spirit and steely-eyed trust in the ability of an honestly searching human heart and intellect to grow in understanding and trust to the point of being ready and willing to be grasped by God.

That’s why we’ve always been more concerned with coaxing people to ask the right questions than with trying to force them to memorize the right answers. We know that real learning takes time, sometimes a very long time. We understand our work in education in a strategic and optimistic way because we know that life is messy but good, that truth is elusive but knowable, that people learn by trial and error, and that God is very patient.

What happens in our classrooms will bear fruit (or not) decades and decades from now in the lives our students will choose to live. Ultimately, our success will be assessed not by some metric that can be displayed on a spreadsheet, but in the content and quality of the conversations that will take place between our alumni and their Creator before the judgment seat of God at the end of history. We believe that what we do at Georgetown can influence and inform those conversations. So Jesuits teach. So Jesuits love teaching.

I have been reminded of that mission and that love several times over the course of the past month or so by some conversations I have had with various Jesuits I have bumped into at the coffee urn or in their rooms or at the dinner table. For some reason, in each of these conversations the topic of teaching came up. Not some abstract theory of teaching, but the actual human undertaking of a professor standing up in front of a group of intelligent young people and asking, “OK, so what do you think of this?” and then engaging wholeheartedly in whatever happens next.

I wish I could describe for you the energy that rises, the glint that comes to the eyes of men like Rick Curry, David Collins, Ron Murphy, Matt Carnes, Mark Henninger and Jim Schall when you ask them, as I have, about their teaching, about their interaction with students in the classroom, about their vocation as teachers. It’s the stuff of Jesuit legend, and even after all these years in Jesuit schools, it still quickens my pulse and stirs in me a love of my Jesuit vocation.

We Jesuits are teachers, and we have been blessed with the stunning invitation to help young people wrestle with the most important subject matter there is, whatever our particular discipline. We’re teachers of Humanity 101, and there just isn’t any better or more important job than that on the planet. At least that’s how this Jesuit sees it.

Fr. Ryan Maher, S.J. is an associate dean and director of Catholic Studies in the College. He can be reached at rjm27georgetown.edu. AS THIS JESUIT SEES IT . . . appears every other Tuesday with Fr. Schall, Fr. Maher and Fr. O’Brien alternating as writers.