"I'm not really religious; I'm more spiritual..."

What's the difference?

I'm reading John Senior who is quoting Thomas Carlyle:

One of the most powerful attractions in Oriental doctrines is something we
have as well at home [in the Christian West] but too quickly grow out of and
repress - the reality of spiritual presences. Carlyle described it
trenchantly:

To speak in the ancient dialect, we 'have forgotten God'; - in the most
modern dialect and very truth of the matter, we have taken up the Fact of this
Universe as it is not. We have quietly closed our eyes to the eternal substance
of things, and opened them only to the Shows and Shams of things. We quietly
believe this Universe to be intrinsically a great, unintelligble 'Perhaps.'

Contrasting this with real religion, he said:

Religion [to the monks of St. Edmundsbury] is not a diseased
self-introspectino, an agonising inquiry; their duties are clear to them, the
way of supreme good plain, indisputable, and they are traveling on it. Religion
lies over them like an all-embracing heavenly canopy, like an atmosphere and
life-element, which is not spoken of, which in all things is presupposed without
speech.

* ~ *
Among ordinary working Christians, the spiritual element is inconspicuous
by its presence. Nowadays we get self-consciously and deliberately "unreal"
every once in a while in the hope that thereby we become more "spiritual." We do
not see one and the same event as bathed in the natural and the supernatural
at once.

I noted that Dale was talking about the difference between "cradle" Catholics and converts. I wonder if this is not a false distinction. Perhaps we are all required to sink ourselves as deeply as we may into the mindset of the Faith, to have it imbue every aspect of our daily thoughts and actions. There should be no separation between the supernatural and the natural any more than there can be a separation between the Logos and the Man Christ.

Or as Reepicheep said, "Go further in and higher up."