The essence of spirituality

When we move and proceed in the dimension, the style, everything, of our spiritual paths, we can feel deeply, covertly, intimately, delicately, an experience that is not exactly the kind of love or personal presence we can experience with humans, but has a resemblance and is related to it. It is spirituality that is delicately, secretly, in the darkness of the secret of the hidden and vulnerable feeling, even an experience in our heart, although in the midst of all its admitted limits and its exposition to criticism. We should not forget that the essence of the intimate spiritual experience lies behind the coarseness of materiality. Our temptation to concentrate on the search for specific resources, activities, sources, nourishments, rituals, is counterproductive: we can search for them, but what matters most is the internal organization of the spiritual experience, of the word-search game, that lies behind materialities.
“You shall not make for yourself an image” not so much because God is invisible, but because the experience to which we should cling to is the innner one.
In this context no totem, no heirloom, necklace, medal, pendant, will ever be able to give us the presence of spirituality. Material things can be used, but only to refer, to continuously point towards interiority.
Our cultivation of attention to this inner experience, that is permanently at risk of being reduced to invisibility in our consciousness, can counterbalance our experiences of oppression that the world imposes on us and can orient our daily life.
The value of our walking and growing, as well as the vattimian stepping back, lies in the direction towards our inner experience.

If we consider the definition of spirituality, given in the article What is spirituality?, as “inner life”, we can deepen our research by asking what inner life is made of. Exploring this question with a metaphysical mentality would be the worst method. I have described along the course the fundamental problems that metaphysics has. This means that the most appropriate way to dive into the question is the opposite: the core of spirituality is subjectivity, which, expressed in a clearer way, is the feeling “I” that everybody is able to experience in their here and now, in the personal present perceived by those who are reading these words. In this central core we can include what we perceive, experience, from the inside of our subjectivity, as metaphysics that is able to impose itself on us; this includes other people as well. As a synthesis, we can say that spirituality is our path in this world, in our dialectic relationship, dialogue, between us as a central “I” and peripheral metaphysics, which is the rest of the world. This synthesis constitutes a frame that continuously embraces and shapes whatever we do and experience.

This existential dimension can be considered a liturgy, which is a cultivation of memory and consciousness, an intentional or passive celebration that happens day by day, moment by moment, in the development of our life in this world. This happens in the monastery of the intimacy of our heart, where we continuously elaborate our living and our always indirect relationships.