What Do I Want to Be?

“What do you want to want to be, anyway?"
"I don't know; I guess what I want to be is a good Catholic."
 "What you should say"--he told me--"what you should say is that you want to be a saint.”
 ― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

What do I want to be?  

Hmmm.  There are a lot of things I'd like to be.  And if I were to list all of them, the list would probably take up a couple pages. And in those pages of  numbered lines, I'm not sure where "to be a Saint" would end up.  Number 123?  249?  Honestly, I'm not even sure it would place at all.  

Oh, not because I don't want to be a Saint.  Of course, I do.  I want to be a Saint because God has called me to be one.  It's life's most worthwhile goal.  It's why we were created.  

So, of course I want to be a Saint.  I just don't believe it would place on my list because I don't think I would think about it.  It simply wouldn't come to my mind as quickly as "to be a good father," or "to be a good husband."  

And that brings me to another question--the biggest question.  If it wouldn't naturally and easily come to my mind--if being a Saint doesn't top (or even place) on my list of "what I want to be"--am I all that safe in assuming I'll become one? 

How many baseball players end up playing in the majors without putting that dream on their list?  How many doctors become doctors without placing that career on their list?  How many teachers become teachers, pastors become pastors without first setting their sites on that achievement, that goal, that path?   I would wager the numbers are pretty low.

Now, if every single career or goal in life is attained only with work, vision, sacrifice and drive, why do I find it so easy to assume I'm going to slip backwards into Sainthood while able to keep my eyes focused elsewhere?  Is Sainthood easier to achieve than a degree in medicine?  Am I presuming God will let me slide by because I'm a good guy?  Or am I simply lazy?  Spiritually lazy and lacking in ambition and energy and drive?  

I don't know the answers (for I assume it's not just one of those things, but rather a combination) to that question.  All I know is that when I look at my list of "what I want to be", being a Saint isn't there.  Not right now.  Not if I'm honest.  And that's frightening.  It's time to rewrite the list.  And, more important, it's time to start living accordingly.

We Are Catholic--Great Video

An Excerpt from Thomas Howard's "The Night is Far Spent"

The following essay was originally a lecture given at Gordon College by Thomas Howard on June 1995. Howard, according to his biography, was raised in a prominent Evangelical home (his sister is well-known author and former missionary Elisabeth Elliot), became Episcopalian in his mid-twenties, then entered the Catholic Church in 1985, at the age of fifty. Howard is a highly acclaimed writer and scholar, noted for his studies of Inklings C.S. Lewis.

My guess is that a great clutter of bric-a-brac swims into your imagination when you hear of Catholic spirituality: rosaries, holy water stoups, crucifixes, little plastic Saint Christophers for your dashboard, and laminated holy cards depicting pastel-tinted saints with their eyes cast soulfully up into the ozone, not to mention all the polychrome statues and banks of candles flickering in little red glass cups (there are even electric candles that have a bogus flicker).

My guess is also that I am addressing at least three groups of people all stirred in together here in this assembly. The biggest group of you would locate yourselves in that wing of Protestantism known as Evangelicalism and will have been brought up in Evangelical households. A second group will tell us, "I was a Catholic until I was fifteen, then I met Jesus", or "I was Catholic until I was seventeen, then I, became a Christian." A third group of you are Roman Catholic even as we speak and may possibly have discovered that some of your colleagues here are very far from satisfied that your Catholicism qualifies you as a Christian. There may also be a fourth group, namely, those of you who are trying to shuck off whatever remnants of the Christian religion are still clinging to you so that you can get on with your own agenda.

Let me see if I can throw any light on this topic of Catholic spirituality so that the whole array of us may grasp things in a fairly clear light.

Click here to read the rest of the essay (it's worth it!)