Virtue, Vocation & the Examined Life

On Thursday 24 September 2026, a full room of young adults gathered at St Bede's College for an evening on knowing yourself, discovering your calling, and building a life of virtue.

Ali Ghaffari opened with a night over the Persian Gulf. A young Navy pilot, nearly out of fuel, lost his tanker in a bank of cloud and became so disoriented that his body told him one thing and his instruments another. Pilots call it the leans. What brought him home was the voice of his old instructor: trust your instruments.

From there he told the longer story. A hard childhood in Vermont. A path to medical school traded for fighter jets. And a neighbour, Paul, a man with little formal schooling who had spent two years quietly reading Aristotle and Aquinas, and who exposed with a few simple questions how shallow Ali's education had been. Years later Paul put to him the question that changed everything: does the truth conform itself to us, or should we conform ourselves to the truth? Months of argument followed, then Plato, then the Church. In 2019 Ali founded Divine Mercy Academy, a classical Catholic school in Maryland.

He closed where he began. The landing instrument in the cockpit is shaped like a cross. Keep the needles centred through Mass, confession, prayer and good company, and they will bring you home through any weather.

Dr Lehman then drew the threads together. Socrates, he noted, speaks more precisely of the unexamining life. Examination has no finish line this side of death. The liberal arts are the arts that make us free, forming the habits of mind on which the virtues rest. He pointed to two men who lived that education to the end: Boethius, who wrote the Consolation of Philosophy while awaiting execution, and our own patron, St Thomas More, whose family portrait included the Consolation among the books that shaped him, and who wrote some of his finest work in the Tower.

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