“Become who you are!” Those words spoken to me years ago, when I took vows and became a Jesuit, still ring in my ears. Over the years, I’ve had to grow into, fill out, really experience, what I said I was back then. So for all us as Christians: we haven’t yet fully grasped the call that we received at baptism; we haven’t become who we are. Are you “living in a manner worthy of the call you have received”?
Jesus shows us the way. He is the Son of the Father and, during his earthly life, he too had to “become what he is,” living out in his concrete life over time what it meant to be the Son, a loving child of the Father, which we become at baptism. He showed us the way by living “in all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love.”
—Fr.Mark Henninger, S.J., a philosophy professor by trade, now serves as a pastoral care chaplain at Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, IL.