Ecological spirituality:
By Tomás Núñez, ThD
Ethical-social challenges of ecology. When we talk about spirituality we think of an all-encompassing experience, with which the totality of things is captured, exactly as an organic totality loaded with meaning and value.
Originally, spirit, from which the word spirituality comes, is the quality of every being that breathes. Therefore, it is every being alive, such as human beings, animals and plants, but not only that, the entire earth and the entire universe are experienced as carriers of spirit, because life comes from them, they provide all the elements for life and maintain the creative and organizing element.
Spirituality is the attitude that puts life at the center, that defends and promotes life against all mechanisms of diminution, stagnation and death. In this sense, the opposite of life is not body but death. Taken in its broad sense of biological, social and existential death (failure, humiliation, oppression.)
To nourish spirituality means to be open to everything that is a bearer of life, to cultivate the space of inner experience from which all things are linked and re-linked, to overcome stagnant behaviors, to grasp the totality and to experience realities beyond their opaque and often brutal feasibility, as evocative values and symbols of a deeper dimension.
The spiritual man/woman is the one who perceives the other side of reality, capable of grasping the depth that is revealed and hidden in all things and who manages to see the relationship of everything with the ultimate reality.
Spirituality does not come from power, accumulation or interest, but from emotional, sacramental, symbolic reason born from the gratuitousness of the world, from the inclusive relationship of profound emotion, from the movement of communion that all things maintain among themselves, from the perception of the great cosmic organism soaked in traces and signs, of a higher and more ultimate reality.
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