We’ve been talking for weeks about spirituality and girls who want to become nuns. As has been pointed out in many articles, Rosalia did not make this mystical noise popular; it was heard for a long time even in literature, an area in which … It is difficult to overcome anything that smacks of transcendence, especially in countries where religion has been associated with unspiritual earthly power, and specifically with the hell of dictatorships.
This is the case of Spain, where the Church, and therefore our spiritual traditions (Christianity and Catholicism), have been confused with national Catholicism. The cultural world reacted with the same enthusiasm with which the national Catholic faith was imposed, and for decades viewed everything related to the sacred with suspicion.
This shift toward transcendence coincides with political inaction in a time of apocalypse. Ixa de la Cruz’s It All Begins with Blood has been cited as the most important book regarding this trend, but the mystic was already present in her previous novel, The Heiresses.
Anne Lecoux points out something shocking even for a Catholic: we must renounce the knowledge of good and evil
For me, there is a very revealing novel: “Ocaso y fascinación” by Eva Baltazar, where, in opposition to the approach of the typical social novel, it ends up embracing the spiritual. Even before Balthasar, the writer and priest Pablo Dors became a phenomenon with “The Biography of Silence,” a 2020 essay on meditation. Begonia Mendes, who is now publishing a small book on mystical writers (so called “mystics”), has explored the topic in “Science Fiction for the End of the Genre” in 2022.
I will recommend one of the most important books I have read recently about spirituality: “You Have Covered My Nakedness,” by Anne Lecoux, with a translation from the French by Charo Moreno and Neria Zola. Leko is a Dominican nun, writer, doctor and doctor of philosophy, who analyzes the meaning of the robes in the Bible to explain the Christian principle, to love your neighbor as yourself, which is a valid principle even if you are not a believer because it is also a moral principle.
The nun points out something shocking even to a Catholic: we must renounce the knowledge of good and evil. This is not a conceptual denial, but its deadly force: judgment and condemnation. The basis is theological: only God can condemn us, but he does not want to condemn us, but rather save us, because his essence is love. Can we take God out of the equation for this to be true from a secular perspective? I say yes, because the practical benefits would be obvious, but I leave the question here.