In the past 10 years, since my study of Thomas Merton with Sister Mary Luke Tobin, perhaps his closest confidante, one quotation more than any other, from my entire seminary experience, keeps coming to my consciousness and moves me in very deep ways.
"...In the deepest ground of our being we still hear the insistent voice which tells us: 'You must be born again.'
There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves."