Our soul is irreplaceable, it can be exchanged for nothing in heaven or on earth, but until we have heard Christ speak, until we have received His call from the midst of the Christian assembly (every vocation to the faith comes at least implicitly through the Church) and until we have given to Him that secret and unique answer which no one can pronounce in our place, until we have thus found ourselves in Him, we cannot fully realize what it means to be a "person" in the deepest sense of the word ■ Thomas Merton, Seasons of Celebration, p. 24.