Our vocation as Christians is to follow Jesus on his downward path and to become witnesses to God’s compassion in the concrete situation of our time and place. Our temptation is to let needs for success, visibility, and influence dominate our thoughts, words, and actions to such an extent that we are gripped in the destructive spiral of upward mobility and thus lose our vocation. It is this lifelong tension between vocation and temptation that presents us with the necessity of spiritual formation. Precisely because the downward mobility of the way of the cross cannot rely on our spontaneous responses, we are faced with the question, “How do we conform our minds and hearts to the mind and heart of the self-emptying Christ?”
To follow Christ requires the willingness and determination to let God’s Spirit pervade all the corners of our minds and hearts and there make us into other Christs. Formation is transformation, and transformation means a growing conformity to the mind of Christ, who did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself.
Thus discipleship cannot be realized without discipline. Discipline in the spiritual life, however, has nothing to do
with the discipline of athletics, academic study, or job training, in which physical fitness is achieved, new knowledge is acquired, or a new skill is mastered. The discipline of the Christian disciple is not to master anything, but rather to be mastered by the Spirit. True Christian discipline is the human effort to create the space in which the Spirit of Christ can transform us into his lineage.

Fr. Henri Nouwen, The Selfless Way of Christ

Henri J. M. Nouwen (1932–1996) was an internationally known priest and is among the great spiritual writers of modern times.