Spiritual Life is a Journey

"Denigrating the 'before' is common in the spiritual life.  After a conversion experience, one is tempted to set aside, downplay, or reject one's past.  In Thomas Merton's biography The Seven Storey Mountain, the former dissolute student turned Trappist monk largely characterizes his former life as bad, and his life in the monastery as good.  Of the 'old' Thomas Merton, he said ruefully, 'I can't get rid of him.'

"In time, Merton would realize how misguided a quest that is: there is no post-conversion person and pre-conversion person.  There is one person in a variety of times, the past informing and forming the present.  God is at work at all times."

(Jesus: A Pilgrimage, by James Martin, S.J.)