riven and re-pieced

I will never tire of conversion stories in all their many forms, and this from @mbattles is especially memorable:

You know how it’s been for me since last June, when I stumbled into a stretch of the Damascus Road that runs secret along the Victoria Line of the London Underground. I mean that shift of gravity that I can only call by the name “conversion.” You’ll remember me recounting how suddenly I was struck, amid the swaying and banter and laughter of a group of Italian schoolkids as they came tumbling aboard—struck by the shine of their souls big enough to fill the universe, by the radical precious value of creatureliness in each one, and by the unassailable force that holds these together, which can only be called love. I wanted you to understand that for me, who too often finds passing notions or appearances “quite striking,” this perception was not a matter of being struck by a thought, but of being intoxicated and reorganized in a flash, riven and re-pieced into a new way of seeing.