The term mysticism immediately brings us back to the idea of a feeling of contemplation, veneration or adoration of the dimension of the sacred or of divinity. A transcendent feeling, deeply religious and that seems so far from our modernity, secular and secularized. And yet, as the philosopher María Zambrano wrote, “mysticism is a possibility of human nature,” a possibility that does not necessarily pertain to religious experience. It is no coincidence that an openly agnostic philosopher like Bertrand Russell is the author in 1918 of a work entitled, Mysticism and Logic, in which he asserts that “the greatest philosophers have felt the need for both science and mysticism. […] Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling regarding what one thinks about the universe.”

Mysticism, from this point of view, is a place of research, innovation, freedom. This is demonstrated by the stories of the eight lay mystics who are the protagonists of Lucetta Scaraffia's latest book, Dio non è così (Bompiani, 2025, Euro 18.00, pp. 192. Also Ebook). But who are these women, different from each other, but united by the desire to seek the divine outside the traditional religious framework? They are free and courageous women, who want to go beyond the idea of God that is proposed to them, they want to understand, they want to know him personally and they make this longing a path of emancipation inscribed in the great twentieth-century women's liberation movement. Being women, being in a certain sense always irregular, gives them all a breadth of vision that leads them to innovative choices. So innovative that they will prove prophetic and a source of emancipation.

“God is not like that, I am sure of it, and so I seek him on my own,” says Catherine Pozzi, and Adrienne von Speyr, Banine, Élisabeth Behr Sigel, Romana Guarnieri, up to Simone Weil and Chiara Lubich think the same. They are Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, they are women who live intensely, who love and who work, not attributable to the icon of the “madwoman of God”, a heroine of faith ready only for sacrifice and self-humiliation: women who, thanks to their spiritual openness, experiment with new relationships and new hierarchies, making them prophetic spheres, from which churches and society should draw inspiration for the future. In this search nourished by awareness, they found movements, work in factories, love without reserve, practice a profession. They seem to want to tell us that God is here and now, in the small and big things of life, in the work we do and in the relationships we cultivate with patience and dedication. Meeting him is not so difficult, you don’t need any religious trappings: you just need to draw on the richness of your inner life in search of a meaning to your existence. Also because, as the Jesuit Michel de Certau wrote: “Every human being is an unexpressed mystic”.

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