"Here, then are our principles: We are baptized into the whole Christ. Baptism implies a responsibility to develop one’s supernatural life, to nourish it by love of God, to reproduce and spread it by love for other men. All this is ordered to the final perfection of a plan that extends far beyond our own individual salvation: a plan for God’s glory which lies at the very heart of the universe. This mystery we must believe and seek to understand if we would make anything of conversion and vocation.

“I might add that every baptism implies a distinct individual vocation, a peculiar function in the building up of the Mystical Body.”

Merton, Thomas. “The White Pebble.” (1950) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013, p. 7.