To be completely honest, I've never been able to figure out what "spiritual" actually means. Every use of it in the wild appears to be directly reducible to som

To be completely honest, I've never been able to figure out what "spiritual" actually means. Every use of it in the wild appears to be directly reducible to some other mundane meaning minus the rituals, which always led me to believe that rituals were the purpose. My father was a well-educated preacher and he could not explain it either when I was growing up, saying it existed mostly as a suitcase word that had no distinct constructive meaning, while also asserting it was nonetheless important to the nature of religion. He acknowledged this was an objectively poor answer that raised questions about why anyone should care but couldn't offer anything better. Yet there is this weird expectation that everyone should be "spiritual" in some way, and this expectation can be perfectly satisfied via trivial performance in practice. So when people ask me if I am spiritual in some way, my response is always "I have no idea". When they try to explain it, it always ends up being equivalent to the reductionist meanings I've inferred by default. (Human languages have many suitcase words, many without any connection to religion, that encapsulate incoherent concept spaces. The idea of spirituality appears to be just one of many.)