What is Spirituality?

"Spirituality" is, decidedly, an unfortunate word. We have to say this at the start, so as to tackle the problem head on, because many people will find the first difficulty with this book in the title itself. For them, spirituality may mean something removed from real life, useless and perhaps even hateful.

These are people who, legitimately, shun old and new spiritualisms, unreal abstractions, and see no reason to waste their time.

The word "spirituality" derives from "spirit." And for most people, spirit is opposed to matter. "Spirits" are immaterial beings, without a body, very different from ourselves. In this sense, what is not material, what does not have a body, would be spiritual. And one would say that people are "spiritual" or" very spiritual" if they live without worrying much about material things, even about their own body, trying to live only off spiritual realites.

These concepts of spirit and spirituality as realities opposed to material and bodily reality come from Greek culture. From that, they moved to Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, even English and German So that whatever might be labelled "Western culture" is, in effect, as it were infected with this Greek concept of what is spiritual. The same is not true, for example, of the Quechua, Guaranf or Aymara languages.

Neither did the ancestral tongue of the Bible, the Hebrew language, the Semitic cultural world, understand "spiritual" in this way. For the Bible, spirit is not opposed to matter, or to body, but to evil (destruction); it is opposed to flesh, to death (the fragility of what is destined to die), and it is opposed to the law (imposition, fear, punishment). In this semantic context, spirit means life, building, power, action, freedom. The spirit is not something that is outside matter, outside the body and outside tangible reality, but something that is within, that inhabit smatter, the body, actuality, and gives them life, makes them be what they are; it fills them with power, moves them, impels them; it propels them into growth and creativity in an impulse of freedom.

In Hebrew, the word for spirit, ruah, means wind, breath, exhalation. The spirit is, like the wind, light, strong, flattening, unpredictable. It is, like breath, the bodily wind that makes us breathe and take in oxygen, lets us go on living. It is like the exhalation of our breathing: while we breathe, we live; if we don't breathe, we die.

The spirit is not another life but the best of life, what makes life be what it is, giving it love and strength, looking after it and moving it forward.

We can say that something is spiritual in that it has the presence of the spirit in it. So, from now on, we abandon the Greek sense of the word "spirit" and will take care to use it in its biblical, indigenous, African, not its split "Western," sense.

+Bp. Pedro Casaldaliga
Excerpt from The Spirituality of Liberation, Int. pp. 1