"Professionals." Or "profession" or "professions." I don't know which answer I got from the managing editor. As I scooped up the manuscripts to reread them and prepare this last-page editorial, I asked her to put into one word what the issue is about. I know that she did not answer "professionalism." Emphatically. Attach an "ism" to "professional," and it changes the concept considerably.

Robert J. Baum eloquently sets the theme with an essay pondering how altruism is supposed to connect with being a professional. The other contributors write variations on that theme, sometimes applying it to particular professional situations. Together they give readers a reason to rethink the meaning of professions in this time of testing.

A profession, wrote Louis Brandeis, is "an occupation for which the necessary preliminary training is intellectual in character, involving knowledge and to some extent learning, as distinguished from mere skill; which is pursued largely for others, and not merely for one's own self; and in which the financial return is not the accepted measure of success."

In a commencement address some years ago, I quoted José Ortega y Gasset: "Strictly, a person's vocation must be his vocation for a perfectly concrete, individual, and integral life, not for the social schema of a career."

With that contrast between vocation and career in mind, I proposed a hierarchy for graduates, or for anyone else. From top to bottom: vocation-profession-career-job-work. You go to work because you have a job that is part of a career informed by a profession. But you can lose jobs and thus lose work. Contingencies may lead you to have to change careers or even change professions. But if there is no sense of vocation, of calling, of response—to God? to human need? to humans who inculcate responsibility?—the rest will not hold together.

Many graduates who head off to professional schools, of law or medicine or ministry, no doubt connect "profession" and "career" more than they connect "vocation" and "profession"—to their and society's detriment. When they do, and when they isolate "profession," or forget that it is pursued largely for others, professionalism results. Then we are not likely to find altruism, heroism, exemplarity, or the kind of human, humane, and humanizing service that Baum found among so many after the World Trade Center devastation.

The one element in Ortega's summary that I would be sure to color is the notion that a vocation is for not only an "integral" life, but for an "individual" one as well. Of course, vocations are individual and personal. They are part of our story, our identifiers, and both remind and assure us that each of us is irreplaceable.

"Individual" in our culture, however, can be isolated and misread to imply individualism. Many of those graduates have been schooled to think of their profession as an over-against situation. Competition, being Number One, smashing others in a zero-sum game to get to the top of a profession: these are often elements of ethos surrounding professions.

Instead, a profession at its best implies collegiality, community, company, comradeship, and other small-"c" concepts that nurture our vocation and character. Novelist Stendhal contended that you can acquire anything in solitude except character. That is hyperbolic, of course, but not entirely off the mark.

Those firefighters, police, medics, and chaplains who were ready to lose their lives for others and often did were professionals not given to professionalism. They and their companies had anticipated crises that could lead to their deaths. Whether their altruism was grounded in what reductionist sociobiologists would say is "nothing but" their working out of the selfish gene, or was inspired by profound religious and philosophical impulses, it was reinforced by the company they kept.

Scraping together elements that might help a society find meaning amid the effects of the terror, those who reflect on the way professionals in New York on and after September 11 greeted the new day, the new epoch of which we are now all a part, may well find something that undergirds and transcends profession and gives it life: their calling, their vocation.