I was writing this for someone else, but thought some people might be interested… some background on how I became a churchgoer:

About a year ago, I had an experience which is incredibly hard to describe, but I basically came out of it knowing that my entire way of viewing the world, experiencing reality, thinking, interacting, everything, had drastically changed. Almost overnight, it seemed, I had become happier than I had ever been before, and felt this amazing sense of being constantly connected to something much more vast than I could ever conceive of. It was indescribably wonderful, better than anything I had ever imagined in many years of reading about spirituality, practicing yoga, etc, and yet at the same time it seemed totally ordinary and obvious that things had always been this way.

Coincidentally, I just happened to be assigned to read St. Augustine’s Confessions for a western civ. class shortly after this strange thing happened to me, and was struck by how much his conversion resonated with me. I went to my professor, telling him how much I had enjoyed the Confessions and asking if he could recommend anything else in a similar vein (though I was careful to point out that I did not view my “waking up” experience in any particular religious context), and my professor (now a friend), who just happened to be a Catholic convert, gave me a long list of authors, including a fellow named Thomas Merton, whom I had never heard of at the time. I read The Inner Experience first, and several other of Merton’s works, all of which I’ve loved, though I think The Inner Experience remains my favorite. By this time I had begun going to churches downtown (I live in the west village), but eventually Merton lead me uptown to Corpus Christi, the church where he was baptized when he was my age and a grad student at Columbia.

I fell in love with the place immediately. I could go on and on about how special Corpus Christi is and how important it’s become to my life in the last nine months. I really felt at home from the very first time I went, which is rather surprising considering I very rarely went to any church at all as a child, there are no Catholics in my family, I had no exposure to the Mass, etc. Plus I was just about as biased against the Catholic Church as it is possible to be, though I can, in retrospect, site numerous examples of my being rather fascinated by Catholicism, nuns, rosaries, etc, as a kid.