Routine-Ritual Souls

The transition we have just described, the discovery of God as present to the inmost depths of our being, is in reality the shift from an exterior to an interior life in the strict sense of the word.

- Thomas Merton

It is not that the exterior life is what is outside of us and the interior life is what is inside of us. The interior life is not the isolation of the soul. It is not as if the exterior life is aligned with being in extrovert and the interior life is taken up with the affairs of an introvert. It more has to do with the awakening of a critical consciousness which has become aware of the manner in which one has been enculturated to think and believe and behave. The external life is more of that by which people treat life automatically, without consciously realizing how one's thoughts and actions are dictated, and of how we are prejudiced to conform to certain cultural and social standards that are set around us. Beware though, because mere rebellion against these patterns does not by any means mean that a critical interior consciousness has been awakened and that an internal shift has begun. Rebellion is most often simply another form of social compulsion...a negative conformity. The experience of God draws us directly away from this mechanical complicity where people remain dead interiorly to an awakening of a spiritual consciousness that is sane and spontaneous, responsive to the movement of God both in the world and in one's awakened, and one's now emptying of routine-ritual, soul.