Hope for us works in progress

I especially enjoyed this reflection at this point in Lent. Here's an excerpt (courtesy of the National Catholic Register's commentary section):

God is an artist who has given his works the tremendous gift of being able to participate in their own creation. In his Letter to Artists, John Paul II tells us, “All men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: In a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.”
But becoming a masterpiece is not easy. It requires courage. The man who gambles his entire life for pennies will never win big. Or, as Kierkegaard puts it, “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”
Imagine if St. Joan of Arc had decided that it would be better to just stay in Rouen and be a nice, pious, good little girl? Or if St. Peter had decided that it was irresponsible to leave his fishing nets untended? If St. John the Baptist had tried to find a way of calling Herod to repentance without offending anyone? If St. George had been too modern and sensible to believe in dragons?
The courage required to become ourselves is, more often than not, the courage to be taken for a fool. “We are fools for Christ’s sake” (1 Corinthians 4:10). The respectable Christianity that is so often mocked and abused by atheist writers deserves every ounce of venom that it receives; Christ never called anyone to be respectable.
Why? Because heroes are never respectable.
They are very often respected (though generally not until after they have completed their quests), but, nonetheless, they are always a little odd. There is a kind of glamour that hangs around a Bilbo Baggins after he returns from the Misty Mountains, but the upright, ordinary folk will continue to warn their children that people who go in search of treasure are liable to become a dragon’s dinner.
Now, not everyone is called to be a public hero.
. . . . .
The soul that risks little cannot accomplish its own being. ...

Yet, it is frightening, because we do not know what we are called to become. Our identity is a mystery, hidden in the mind of God. It cannot be penetrated by our attempts at knowledge, “for no science can say who man is, where he comes from or where he is going” (to quote Benedict XVI’s address to a conference on “The Changing Human Identity”).
It cannot be discovered through navel-gazing and self-realization workshops. It can only be discovered in the process of living. ...

Read the whole thing here.