‘I forget what we were arguing about, but in the end Lax suddenly turned around and asked me the question: “What do you want to be anyway?”
I could not say, “I want to be Thomas Merton the well-known writer of all those book reviews in the back pages of the Times Book Review,” or “Thomas Merton the assistant instructor of Freshman English at the New Life Social Institute for Progress and Culture,” so I put the thing on the spiritual plane, where I knew it belonged and said:
“I don’t know; I guess what I want is to be a good Catholic.”
“What do you mean, you want to be a good Catholic?”
The explanation I gave was lame enough, and expressed my confusion, and betrayed how little I had really thought about it at all.
Lax did not accept it.
“What you should say”–he told me–“what you should say is that you want to be a saint.”
A saint! The thought struck me as a little weird. I said:
“How do you expect me to become a saint?”
“By wanting to,” said Lax, simply.
“I can’t be a saint,” I said, “I can’t be a saint.” And my mind darkened with a confusion of realities and unrealities: the knowledge of my own sins, and the false humility which makes men say that they cannot do the things that they must do, cannot reach the level that they must reach: the cowardice that says “I am satisfied to save my soul, to keep out of mortal sin,” but which means by those words: “I do not want to give up my sins and my attachments.”
But Lax said: “No. All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent to let Him do it? All you have to do is desire it.”‘
–from The Seven Storey Mountain
The Orthosphere 
The Siamese electrical installation code (or lack thereof) desired it.
When someone spends his entire adult life staring at his navel and drifting from one religious retreat to another, he isn’t going to learn a heck of a lot about electricity or other such mundane matters.
I guess I’m more of a Neo-Pelagian. I think you have to do more than simply desire it. You have to work at it. You can’t expect God to do all the heavy lifting. Sainthood is freely offered, but it isn’t free in the sense of “at no cost to yourself”. It costs us plenty.
I do find it remarkable thinking that if I sincerely ask God to give me grace to repent and to believe and to love Him and to accept suffering that I can be sure that He will not deny me, even though it might now feel like I’m becoming more faithful, hopeful, or loving, and my will might not feel stronger. No matter how degraded I am, I can at least ask God to make me want to repent (and that my asking indicates that even now He hasn’t wholly abandoned me to my own wretchedness), and I can be sure that He will do it.
Lax was correct insofar as he identifies the will as the core of a man’s being. This is an essential difference between Christianity and Greek Philosophy. What you want is what you are. Lax is incorrect insofar as he suggest that a man can choose what he wants, because, on Christianity, the will in man is dominant. So a man cannot want to be a saint if he does not want to be a saint, because he has in himself no power to redirect his will. It requires an external power to redirect a man’s will, most often, I believe, a supernatural power. So Merton’s answer to Lax should have been:
“You are right, all that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one, but I cannot possibly get to there from where I am now.”
I think your formulation is more precisely right, JMSmith. On the other hand, there are some spiritual truths which it seems one can only express adequately, so that their full force hits you, if expressed inexactly, so I still thought it was worth sharing. There’s probably an application here to Jesus’ often shocking way of speaking.