Become who you say you are....

We are called.

Called to examine who we are, what we say, what we do, where we are going, and even the secret desires and dreams we carry within us. We are invited to hold all of these alongside God's call and to ask ourselves a profoundly important question: Are we following the Way?

Both the journey and the destination matter. We cannot profess to follow Christ while living as though his teachings have little bearing on our daily lives. The Way is not simply a destination toward which we travel. It is also the manner in which we must make the journey.

We must LIVE the Way.

Sister Joan challenges me when she criticizes prayer that becomes little more than mechanical repetition. Yet I wonder whether repetition itself is not one of Benedict's greatest gifts to us. The psalms return us, again and again, to truths we so easily forget. Their words become familiar, their messages become part of our consciousness, and slowly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, they shape the way we live.

But Sister Joan's warning is important. We must never confuse the recitation of prayer with the living of prayer. We can repeat the words of the psalms without allowing their wisdom to challenge our attitudes, our decisions, and our treatment of others.

Prayer must reach beyond the moment of prayer. What we profess before God must find expression in the ordinary circumstances of our lives.

We will not always succeed. Benedict understands that. His Rule is not a demand for perfection but an invitation to lifelong conversion, to beginning again, to becoming more fully the people God calls us to be.

Ultimately, our calling is both simple and extraordinarily demanding:

We are called to BECOME who we say we ARE.