Laura Bosio seems to have had time at her disposal, a room of her own and a canvas to weave. The threads we could say that they were all the souls of women animated by rare souls, and excuse the repetition of words but in "Of love and reason. Women and spirituality" of animus there is a lot, along with a certain authenticity and stylistic ability to explain and bind.
It would have been easier to write a linear booklet; any author would have been able to cast a fleet of figures of more or less mystical women. The Bosio instead made them talk, one by one, as if to give them new and fresh voice. Almost by necessity, in this loss of meaning that some circumscribe within the limits of the word "crisis".
We decided to carry out this interview because perhaps, if we go with the hearing of the heart, the sensitivity of the reader who makes the emptiness inside to welcome, if we turn to women who were conveyed by profound spirituality, one with visions and actions ... here, perhaps, we say perhaps, we will understand how to take it, take it back or know it again, this gift that unites everything, this tension of the soul .
Spirituality, he explains, transcends terms we use with a certain ease: affection, sympathy. Does it incorporate them and surpass them? In other words, who lives spirituality daily has already experienced and experienced these other forms of feeling?
Yes, I believe so. Spirituality, and in particular in the mystics and mystics of every religion, is not sentimentalism: psychology and morality dissolve, to make a void and enjoy fullness. An impossible fullness. I would say that the term shared by the women who speak in this book is love, in all the aspects that represent it: affection, sympathy, but also devotion, charity, eros. By bringing together the most diverse texts, I was struck by the convergence of loving feeling : the encounter between the ecstatic experience of earthly love and the physical experience of supernatural love.
When they talk about love, two distant women like Maria Maddalena de 'Pazzi, the visionary nun of the sixteenth century, and Sibilla Aleramo, the feminist writer of the early twentieth century, use almost the same words. I have drawn a presentiment of it, of which contemporary culture tries to find itself right, and that is the unique, dark and impenetrable matrix of our existential perception.
Spirituality is also annihilating pride, that gaddiano filthy first-person singular pronoun. But now everything is around the self, I would say paraphrasing an advertising slogan: personalized message boards, online photo albums, customized rates, intimate virtual messages. Do you not think that one of the causes of our distance from the spiritual dimension lies in this?
Spirituality is a very broad term. Here it is understood as space, inner breath, which are the necessary conditions for the relationship with oneself and with others. In this space the ego opens up, the walls where it is entrenched and swells collapse . And finally the words spoken, the words exchanged, acquire a clearer sound: they remain, reverberate, and the relapses are not only personal, but social and political, not at all intimate.
Self-educate yourself to the inner feeling. Getting closer to living with that "firm heart" which for Maria Zambrano is a condition to feel the inner movement, despite the temporary disorientations, the external influences. What would you suggest to young women who would like to listen?
Yes, the importance of self-education ...
Difficult to answer, but I borrow words from Rābi'a, who lived in Iraq in the eighth century in total poverty, dispenser of wisdom to the greats of his time, considered "the mother of Sufism", the most enlightened mystical line of Islam . "Make your heart alert" reads the Sayings. "If he is alert, you will see the path with the eyes of the heart, and it will be easy for you to reach the dwelling."
I add two verses by Else Lasker-Schüler, Berlin, Jewish, who died in Jerusalem in 1945, author of works burned by the Nazis: "We want to reconcile the night / if we hug each other we don't die".
The titles he gave to his chapters are beautiful ( Metaphors of the heart and of the castle, The temple without walls, etc. ) and lead the reader into words, leaving a vortex of the unspoken that wants to explore. Could we go back to the spiritual quest by going through an area of unsaid, unrevealed, unmanifested at all costs?
I think so. The unsaid resounds in the space we were talking about before: the one where it is possible to come together and where words are found together.
Three female characters who would define spirituality as close to the present day.
The three women who were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 come to mind: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian, imprisoned and then forced into exile by her country, was the first democratically elected African woman president.
Leymah Gbowee sought to overcome ethnic and religious dividing lines to end the war in Liberia and ensure women's participation in the elections.
In the most difficult circumstances, both before and during the Arab Spring, Tawakkul Karman played a leading role in the struggle for women's rights and democracy and peace in Yemen. Great spiritual strength is needed for battles like these.
The spiritual goes hand in hand with the ironic, as he explains in humor and humility. If humor characterizes every authentic spiritual quest, who takes themselves too seriously remains at a basic, material level, close to the fear that immobilizes intentions and away from our inner temple that has no boundaries?
It is disorienting to know that Kafka laughed at his characters with friends : a sadism that reveals, more than many pages, his intimate solidarity with their misfortunes. Chekhov was also surprised that the audience was crying in front of the resignation of its protagonists: "Why are they crying?" He said annoyed. "Here there is laughter".
The comic, the humor, more than the irony, are bewilderment, disarray, reversal of clichés and acquired habits, break of the order . For many, spirituality and humor do not go together, but it seems to me that the opposite is true. Humor and humility, towards which spiritual beings tend, have a curious closeness, not only of writing and sound . Both words refer to a watery and fertile element, humor to humor, humidity, and humility to humus, the earth.
It almost seems that humor is the lay name of humility. Their effect is the same: reversing the perspective, both of them prevent one from taking oneself too seriously.
They say that behind every great man there is a great woman. In your research did you happen to run into spiritual women with great men for silent support?
Of course yes. For example, Edith Stein, a Carmelite philosopher and nun killed in the camps as a Jew, was a student of Edmund Husserl . Christina Rossetti was a poet like her painter brother Dante Gabriel and daughter of an adventurous and open Italian, far from the Victorian hypocrisies. Nelly Sachs, awarded in 1966 with the Nobel Prize for literature, was a friend of the great poet Paul Celan, with whom he had an epistolary correspondence lasting sixteen years. Chiara of Assisi shared the road with Francis . And the examples would still be many.
Tell us a curiosity: among the women you present, is there one that secretly feels closer or that gets stronger inside?
There is Emily Dickinson, with these verses of hers that have a sweet and slightly impertinent laughter: "May the tree / whose apple, battered for the winter, / be lured to breakfast yesterday morning / two Gabriels from heaven be praised . / In the book of nature they signed / 'Pettirosso Padre and Figlio' / but the angels have this modest way / to avoid notoriety ".
