Religious experience is the principle and strength of the relationship.

Professor's intervention Giuseppina De Simone during the conference at the Pontifical Faculty of Theology of Southern Italy in Naples, on October 13th, in the presence of the young people of the 8th session who, passing through Ostia, the port near Rome, will reach Marseille on October 25th.

Religious experience as a space for building peace

If, at the end of this morning, we ask ourselves once again why religions can contribute to the building of peace, we must answer that this is possible from the experience from which they proceed and which nourishes them: religious experience as an experience of God. When lived authentically and understood deeply, this experience becomes a space of encounter, a place of relationship par excellence. Religious experience is what unites us, not what divides us: it is the principle and the strength of the relationship.

We are speaking here of religious experience as an experience of God. It is this experience that lies at the heart of religions, but also at the very depths of human beings—of every human being who seeks the meaning of life, who waits and hopes for its fulfillment.

To speak of religious experience is to speak of the deepest intimacy of every human being.
"The innermost source of my existence," as defined by Friedrich Schleiermacher, a German philosopher who lived between the late 1700s and the first half of the 1800s.

This is true not only for believers, whatever their faith, but for all human beings, including those who declare themselves atheists or indifferent.

Deep within our being, there is a relationship that is given to us and that runs through us entirely. A relationship in which we move and for which we exist, since we are not the origin of ourselves. We are children of the infinite. This is why we are constantly seeking to transcend ourselves, searching for something greater, for an absolute worth living for: we are "gestures of transcendence."

To discover that we are inhabited by a relationship that precedes us, that constitutes us, and that makes us free—not slaves—is to be freed from the illusion that we can be sufficient unto ourselves, from the illusion that pushes us to place ourselves at the center of everything, to construct the world around us, around our group, to the point of locking ourselves into an absolute.

We are relationship, and what is most proper to ourselves, most intimate in us, is precisely what we cannot reduce to ourselves, over which we have no power.

And yet, history continues to bear witness to attempts to appropriate God, to this desire to make God no longer the beginning of the encounter and of the relationship with the other, but on the contrary the reason for opposition, rupture, negation of all relationship.
The relationship that constitutes us is what identifies us in our humanity, but too often, we make it the origin of closed identities, hard as stone, impervious to the presence of the other, to their hopes, their suffering, their cry.

Violence committed in the name of God is the most inhuman and devastating form of violence, because it reaches the deepest roots of life and completely distorts them: it preserves the strength of commitment, but diverts it towards that which destroys the very possibility of relationship and the meaning of humanity.

This is where the political use of religions and their instrumentalization in the service of power come from.

We must be aware of this.
Exercising critical vigilance is absolutely necessary in these times of hammered propaganda, where great confusion reigns.

But religions must also be aware of this.

It is possible to resist this manipulation if dialogue and open confrontation between religions develop. But even more so, it is essential that they do not lose living contact with the experience from which they emerge: an experience greater and broader than the religions themselves.
Religious experience is a heritage of humanity. It is a precious and fragile gift that must be protected and cared for.

In the name of religions, of the experience of God and of faith in Him, borders have been drawn—to divide, separate, oppose: the faithful and the infidels, us and the others… But these borders have also been violated, the freedom of the other denied, their right to exist trampled upon.

In reality, there is a link between religious experience and the notion of borders, but of a completely different order.
The boundary that is given in religious experience is that of an identity in relation. The boundary between man and God, the finite and the infinite, time and eternity, becomes a space of encounter: a place of relationship without confusion, an exchange that does not deny differences, but reveals them, gives them a face and a name.

If human beings are not made to be confined within overly rigid boundaries, if these boundaries become walls or barbed wire that stifle our humanity to the point of disfiguring it, it is because we are made for relationships.
In this relationship which is the "depth of the soul", of our soul - and which infinitely surpasses us - difference and borders are not abolished, but welcomed.
It passes through us in an incessant movement of “overcoming”, which is our own life.

The experience of God is an experience of transcendence, which makes us fully human.
It is greater than any single religion. It cannot be contained within a single religion, much less within a single culture. And yet, within these cultures, it can spring forth like a living spring, never exhausting its richness.

It is the experience of relationship that flows from the origin from which we come and towards which we move.
The relationship that brings us into the world and makes us exist.
We are relationship through and through, because we are immersed in that relationship.
It is this which makes us beings made for relationships, and which directs us towards relationships as the fulfillment of our humanity.
Recognizing oneself as a relationship is the very principle of humanization.
To deny this relationship, to break the tenuous thread that unites us to others, to the point of no longer feeling the pain of the other, is an extreme form of dehumanization.

Religions can promote a culture of encounter, be the protagonists of stories of dialogue and peace, and contribute to making the borders between peoples and cultures permeable.
They can do so from the experience of God who nourishes them: the experience of the first and most profound “surpassing” that is given to the human being to live.
A “passage” that gives form, not by dissolving identities, but by drawing them from their most intimate source; a universality that opens in the deepest dimensions of the singular and the unique, to the point of becoming one with it, like its very breath.

The Mediterranean, which the young people of Bel Espoir are crossing, helps us understand that borders are made to be crossed, in order to unite what is diverse.
Naples, a Mediterranean city par excellence, has much to teach us on this subject.

In a 1924 text, another German author, Walter Benjamin, defined Naples as a "porous" city, not only because of the rock on which it is largely built, but above all because of the way of life reflected in its architecture.
There is no clear separation between sacred places and everyday life, between homes and the street, between times of celebration and ordinary routines, but a flow, a "transcendence," one might say, which opens a space of light, of unexpected and surprising relationships, a space of welcome and invitation.

Naples has always been a city of hospitality, where one can experience the strength of relationships, thanks also to a faith that has become, over time, a popular faith, rooted in everyday life.

Rediscovering the strength of relationships, starting from the relationship that constitutes us, is the transcendence that we must always be capable of experiencing - a transcendence necessary for the growth of peace, here, in the Mediterranean, as throughout the world.