Calling this Friday good

At school we should have been on Retreat for these days of Holy Week, a time to read 'spiritual books' and to listen to sermons and meditations provided by visiting priests, all culminating in the glory of the Easter Vigil, starting with the Chapel in darkness and the celebrant singing out Lumen Christi as the Pascal Candle is lit and the flame passed on from candle to candle. But Christ before Pilate is what always stays in my mind. It is the confrontation between the spiritual and the temporal, and its tension depends upon our knowing that the spiritual will be eclipsed by the temporal, which cannot countenance it, or, rather, does not register it, does not comprehend it because it is not part of its world, it cannot be heard, and its fundamental questions (jesting Pilate) are dismissed with confidence and authority. And there they are, exposed and not exposed in that very confidence and authority. The one is defined in opposition to the other, the spiritual in opposition to the temporal, an opposition and also and therefore a possibility, but only a bare possibility of the heart. What we call the temporal cannot be redeemed by the spiritual but can only be transformed into it.

Well, something can be registered, and then dismissed, but there is also the moment between the one and the other, of recognition, of uneasiness, a faintest echo, something recalled, and this is a kind of spoor for the tracker to follow, a footprint in the mud.

If this is the phenomenology then this is also the epistemological imperative for any philosopher who wants to start talking about 'spirituality' ...