Becoming Who You Are: Owning up: To recollect, to regret, to be responsible, ultimately to forgive and love. Chance and choice converge to make us who we are, and although we may mistake chance for choice, our choices are the cobblestones, hard and uneven, that pave our destiny. They are ultimately all we can answer for and point to in the architecture of our character. Friedrich Nietzche saw the process of becoming oneself as governed by the willingness to own one’s choices and their consequences — a difficult willingness, yet one that promises the antidote to existential hopelessness, complacency, and anguish. The legacy of that deceptively simple yet profound proposition is what philosopher John J. Kaag explores in Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) — part masterwork of poetic scholarship, part contemplative memoir concerned with the most fundamental question of human life: What gives our existence meaning? The answer, Kaag suggest...
("I am a Christian woman, and what I do know about Christianity is that we bear no prejudice, and everybody is welcome." — Lady Gaga)* JESUS: The Spirit of the Lord Is Upon Me Inside the synagogue, Mary inches her way to the front. She has heard from a passerby that her son is back from his travels and is now in the synagogue to preach from the scripture, as wont his usual way. And sure enough, Jesus is reading from the book of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, he has consecrated me to bring good news to poor people, to set the oppressed at liberty, to proclaim a year of favor from the Lord.” He speaks with authority, the words coming out of his conviction, not like the scribes who ordinarily read the scripture on the sabbath. Jesus compares himself to Elisha the prophet, and to Elijah before him, and how the Lord will judge even the Jews. (There were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed but only Naaman the Sy...