Weekly Reflection for March 8, 2010
Spiritual life is not mental life. It is not thought alone. Nor is it, of course, a life of sensation, a life of feeling - "feeling" and experiencing the things of the spirit, and the things of God.
Nor does the spiritual life exclude thought and feeling. It needs both. It is not just life concentrated at the "high point" of the soul, a life from which the mind and the imagination and the body are excluded. If it were so, few people could lead it. And again, if that were the spiritual life, it would not be a life at all.
Thomas Merton. Thoughts in Solitude. (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1956). p. 15