What Is the Point of Spirituality?

The word spirituality has a capacity to divide people like few others. For some, it’s an innately beautiful touchstone, the designator of a special kind of experience that is so valuable, it is best left reverentially unexplored and pure, lest one disturb its ethereal mysteries with the cold hand of reason. For others, it’s nonsensical bunkum of appeal only to adolescent dreamers, the underemployed and the weak minded. But precisely because ‘spiritual experiences’ are so often either worshiped or derided, it pays to try to submit them to dispassionate and sober examination, not in order a priori to crush them or honour them, but so as to make them more intelligible, to friend and foe alike. Whatever our suspicions, spiritual moments are capable of being pinned down, split into their constituent elements and assessed with due regard. One should – and can – get respectfully rational about spirituality.