“… The more we hide our humanity beneath a spiritual or religious mask, the more we lose the integrity of our souls. In fact, ‘integrity’ simply means ‘wholeness’ (like how an integer is a whole number), meaning that suppressing or burying our humanity actually (and ironically) ends up splitting us in two, and we forget which one of us is real.

“Thus the greater the degree to which we avoid grappling with our own humanity, the more hopeless will become our thoughts, and the more frenetic will become our activity as we seek to distract ourselves from our own existential schizophrenia. ‘[Such a man] becomes his own slave driver,’ Merton says. ‘A shadow whipping a shadow to death.'”

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