As the school year was coming to a close, and I began noticing that more and more of my fifth-grade students were not completing their homework, I found myself having to tell them: “Don’t be mediocre; don’t just slide by until you make it to summer.”

One of them asked, “Why do you always talk about that? That word, mediocre?” I replied, “Because you have so much potential but do not always live up to it.”

How easy it can be for all of us to give in to the temptation to do “just enough.” After all, we might think, as long as I’m a good person, that’s all that really matters. But God does not intend us to be merely “good people;” He made us to be saints, to live holiness in a radical way, witnessing to His presence in our lives.

St. Catherine of Siena, a great Dominican saint and Doctor of the Church, is known to have said, “If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world on fire.” It can be easy to think of this in a more abstract, or even more sentimental, way than the radical Catherine would have meant it. Imagine, for a moment, the entire world set on fire. What does fire do? It not only provides heat and light, but is also powerfully destructive. And it transforms that which it burns into something entirely different — wood when burnt by fire is chemically no longer wood, but ash.

Fire is often a symbol of the Holy Spirit. This, too, is no sentimental imagery. If we really allow Him to be active in our lives, the Holy Spirit will transform us into something completely different — into the image of Christ Himself to the world! But to do this, He must be destructive as well. Christ told the Apostles at the Last Supper that the Holy Spirit would “convict the world in regard to sin and righteousness and condemnation” (John 16:8). He comes to convict us of our sin and to destroy it in us.

It is only once we allow the Holy Spirit to consume us with the fire of His love, which overcomes and transforms our personal sin, that we become, in St. Catherine’s words, “what you should be.” Only through our own conversion from mediocrity are we able to spread the warmth and light of the fire of God’s love and “set the whole world on fire.”

Sr. Mary Martha Becnel is a member of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, based in Ann Arbor