I just gotta be me: ok, so Mother Teresa you're not. But that still leaves plenty of room to lead a holy life.

The most important spiritual insight I've learned since becoming a Jesuit 15 years ago is this: God calls each of us to be who we are. As a result, holiness consists of nothing more than being the person who God created. In other words, being holy means being yourself.

While that may seem pretty obvious--or pretty simple--it's far more difficult to do than it sounds. There are at least two reasons for this. First, before most of us can accept this truth, we often find ourselves trying to be someone who we are not, based on another person's interpretation of holiness. And second, once we finally set aside the notion that we're supposed to be someone else, it's a long process discovering who we really are.

That's abstract, I know, so let's make it a little more concrete.

I would bet that most Christians--most Catholics--would say that true holiness is only for saints who are long dead, or, every once in a while, the professionally religious person such as a priest or sister or brother. And maybe, just maybe, it's for the extraordinary layperson, like the parent who dedicates his or her entire life to caring for a seriously ill child. But the idea of sanctity in everyday life still strikes many people as a bit strange.

So let's say you're a married woman with two children, ages 4 and 6. When the alarm dock jolts you awake in the early morning, you're still weary from the day before. As usual, your kids are already awake. One is crying her eyes out because she's had a bad dream. The other is already calling for a drink of water and for his favorite stuffed animal, which he tossed out of bed last night. Let's also say your husband is away on business and can't help you. While we're at it, let's say you have a job outside the home as well and have to make breakfast and get the kids ready for school before leaving for another hectic day at your office.

As you lie in bed for a few seconds, staring at the ceiling, you think about all the things you have to do for your family today, all the things you have to do at the office, and none of the things you can do for yourself. You wonder how you'll be able to accomplish even hall of it. Sometimes, during these early morning moments, you lament the fact that you don't have time for things like prayer or meditation. You wish you lived a holier life, a more religious life. Last summer you read a magazine article about your favorite contemporary saint, Mother Teresa.

And you say to yourself, "I'll never be like her."

Ah, but that's the problem. You're not meant to be Mother Teresa; you're meant to be yourself.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and author of the autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (Harcourt), liked to make the distinction between the "false self" and the "true self." Essentially, the false self is the person we try to present to the world, the one we think will be pleasing to others: attractive, confident, successful. The true self, on the other hand, is the person we are before God.

Sanctity consists in gradually finding out who that person is and striving to become that person. "For me to be a saint means for me to be myself," wrote Merton.

In other words, the working woman with two kids is not meant to be Mother Teresa: She is meant to be a woman who loves her children, loves her husband, loves her friends and coworkers, and finds meaning in her own world. She is meant to experience the presence of God in her life and in the lives of the people with whom she lives and works. Sometimes this means doing big things with love, like raising children. And sometimes it means doing smaller things with love: that's the famous "Little Way" that St. Therese of Lisieux wrote about. For our working mom, this could mean, as an example, keeping a lid on her temper (no matter how justified it may be). Part of this process means letting go of the desire to be someone else. Because, in reality, our working more might be lousy at the type of work Mother Teresa used to do. And Mother Teresa might have been lousy at the work that this young woman is doing.

To me, this makes sense. God has put all of us in different roles to do different things. It's part of what makes the world so marvelously rich. "How gloriously different are the saints!" wrote the English writer C. S. Lewis. The problem comes when we begin to believe we have to be someone else to be holy. In that way, we ignore our own personal call to sanctity. In fact, when admirers used to visit Calcutta to see Mother Teresa, she would tell many of them, "Find your own Calcutta." In uther words, bloom where you are planted. Discover sanctity in your own life.

This is not to say we are not called to emulate saints or holy persons or, more to the point, Jesus. Reading the gospels and the lives of the saints are wonderful ways to discover paths to holiness. After reading that magazine essay on Mother Teresa, for example, this young woman might decide to spend some time with the materially poor, in addition to her many other duties.

This is part of the discovery process that Merton speaks of. Through prayer and conversation and reading, she gradually finds herself, thanks to God's grace, growing closer to the person she is meant to be.

Blessed John XXIII highlights this in a lovely passage of his autobiographical Journal of a Soul (Image Books). We are, he wrote, not called to imitate saints in the details of their actions, but in the substance of their lives. "God desires us to follow the examples of the saints by absorbing the vital sap of their virtues and turning it into our own life blood, adapting it to our own individual capacities and particular circumstances. If Saint Aloysius had been as I am, he would have been holy in a different way."

This insight has been wonderfully liberating for me. For I know that while I'm always called to grow, God calls me to be myself, no matter what the situation. So when I'm listening to a friend or hearing someone's Confession or standing before a homeless man in the street, I don't have to say, "What would St. Augustine or St. Francis or St. Therese do?" Certainly they can be models of Christian action for me. But God has not placed them in this particular situation. God, in God's mysterious wisdom, has placed me there--with my talents and skills, as well my weaknesses and limitations. Therefore a better question is, "What should I do?"

An understanding of what the Second Vatican Council termed the "universal call to holiness" can imbue even the quietest and most unseen moments in one's life with a special grace.

A few years ago my father was dying of cancer, lying in his hospital bed punctured by needles and tethered to tubes. As his condition grew worse, there was little anyone in my family could do to lessen his pain or his worry. Still, my mother and sister and I spent as much time beside his bed as we could--as anyone would do with a family member or friend.

Gradually my father grew de pressed as, one by one, the things he most enjoyed doing--reading, talking, telling jokes, and watching television--became increasingly difficult.

One day, toward the end of his illness, my sister brought a laptop computer along with her to the hospital, and told my father that she had a surprise. She propped him up in bed, gently placed the computer on the rumpled sheets, and punched a button. Suddenly on the screen--her laptop included a DVD player--came the opening credits to my father's favorite movie, Young Frankenstein. My dad was delighted, and, with my sister sitting beside him, the two spent the afternoon together laughing and giggling over the movie, only a few days before his death.

Nothing about laptop computers, DVD players, or Young Frankenstein is included in the lives of saints (at least not yet). But in such simple, loving, and entirely everyday acts are paths to finding God in our own lives and helping others find God in theirs.

The call to holiness is an invitation to all of us to be ourselves and to remember the sacramentality of everyday life. It is a beautiful and simple way to encounter the living God, who wants nothing more than to encounter us as the persons we are and the saints we are meant to be.

FATHER JAMES MARTIN, S.J., associate editor of America. He is author of In Good Company (Rowrnan & Littlefield, 2000) and editor of Awake My Soul: Contemporary Catholics on Traditional Devotions (Loyola, 2004).