In today’s Gospel verse, Jesus identifies us as his disciples. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that when we look at church life today, especially as we see it lived out concretely within parishes, it is evident that it is made up of much more than only the core, committed congregation, namely, those who regularly participate in church life and accept the dogmatic and moral teachings their churches. The church also contains a wide variety of the less-engaged: people who practice occasionally, people who accept some of its teachings, guests who visit our churches, people who don’t explicitly commit but are sympathetic to the church and offer it various kinds of support, and, not least, people who link themselves to God in more-privatized ways, those who are spiritual but not religious. But we must be careful in how we understand this. This does not mean there are tiers within discipleship, where some are called to a higher holiness and others to a lower one, as if the full gospel applies only to some. There were centuries in church history where Christian spirituality suffered from this misunderstanding, where it was common to think that monks, nuns, contemplatives, priests, and other such people were called to live the full gospel. In contrast, others were exempt from the more demanding of Jesus’ invitations—no such exemptions. The church may never be divided into the perfect and less perfect, the better and the half-baked, full-participation and partial-participation. The full gospel applies to everyone, as does Jesus’ invitation to intimacy with him. Jesus doesn’t call people according to more or less. Christian discipleship doesn’t ideally admit there are levels, notches, layers, and different tiers of participation. Still, something akin to this forever happens, analogous to what occurs in a love relationship. Each individual chooses how deep they will go, and some go deeper than others, though ideally, everyone is meant to go its full depth. And, given human history and human freedom, this is not surprising. There will always be a significant variation in both depth and participation. Each of us has our own history of being graced and wounded, formed and deformed. So, we all come to adulthood with very different capacities to see, understand, love, accept love, and give ourselves over to someone or something beyond us. None of us is whole, and none of us is fully mature. All of us are limited in what we can do. Hence, religiously, nobody can be expected to respond to something entirely outside their sphere of possibility, so we will inevitably gather around Jesus in very different ways, depending upon our capacity to see and give ourselves over. Jesus, it seemed, was okay with that. In his view, there was no such category as a cafeteria disciple or a disciple light. In our understanding, there shouldn’t be such categories either.