Many of the problems and sufferings of the spiritual life today are either fictitious or they should not have to be put up with. But because of our mentality we block the “total response” that is needed for a fully healthy and fruitful spirituality. In fact the very idea of “spirituality” tends to be unhealthy in so far as it is divisive and itself makes total response impossible. The “spiritual” life thus becomes something to be lived “interiorly” and in “the spirit” (or worse still in the “mind” — indeed in the “imagination”). The body is left out of it, because the body is “bad” or at best “unspiritual.”. . .
So we create problems that should never arise, simply because we “believe” with our mind, but heart and body do not follow. Or else the heart and the emotions drive on in some direction of their own, with the mind in total confusion. The damnable abstractness of the “spiritual life” in this sense is ruining people…. All is reduced to “intentions” and “interior acts,” and one is instructed to “purify one’s intention” and bear the Cross mentally, while physically and psychologically one is more and more deeply involved in an over-worked, unbalanced, irrational, even inhuman existence.
Thomas Merton
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, pp. 253-54)
