Conflicts and difficulties

Most of our conflicts and difficulties come from trying to
deal with the spiritual and practical aspects of our life
separately instead of realizing them as parts of one whole. If
our practical life is centered on our own interests, cluttered
up by possessions, distracted by ambitions, passions, wants and
worries, beset by a sense of our own rights and importance, or
anxieties for our own future, or longings for our own success,
we need not expect that our spiritual life will be a contrast
to all this. The soul's house is not built on such a
convenient plan; there are few soundproof partitions in it.
Only when the conviction -- not merely the idea -- that the
demand of the Spirit, however inconvenient, rules the whole of
it, will those objectionable noises die down which have a way
of penetrating into the nicely furnished little oratory and
drowning all the quieter voices by their din.
... Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), The Spiritual Life [1937]