It is doubtful I have reread any book as much as Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton. It is far more moving to me than Augustine’s Confessions. The story of coming to faith, the journey, along with Merton’s prose, deeply move me.
From page 243 to 246 when he tells of his baptism, I am drawn in. I read slowly. I am lost in the power of Christ at baptism and communion. Coming to Christ is never “a moment.” It is a movement through time. When our conversion truly happens, it culminates in a deep awareness.
Merton writes:
For now I had entered into the everlasting movement of that gravitation which is the life and Spirit of God: God’s own gravitation toward the depths of his own infinite nature, his goodness without end. And God, that center who is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere, finding me, through incorporation with Christ, incorporated into this immense and tremendous gravitational moment which is love, which is the Holy Spirit, loved me.
And he called out to me from his own immense depths.
The immense love of God that calls to us! His raging love will not let us go!
Apprentice 2 Jesus 