Spiritualizing

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. The act of attributing spiritual significance to experiences or concepts occurs through the infusion of deeper meaning and understanding in various aspects of life
2. The process of interpreting events or ideas as connected to a spiritual realm or significance
3. Assigning a deeper, non-material importance to experiences by linking them to spirituality

Etymology: Spiritualizing is built from "spiritual" plus the verb-forming suffix "-ize", so the story lies mostly in the first part. "Spiritual" passed through Late Latin "spīrituālis", formed from "spīritus", a word meaning breath, which in Latin also came to mean soul, courage and spirit. The breath sense sits at the heart of the family: a spirit was originally what animated a living thing, the breath that kept it going. The suffix has its own journey. It descends from Ancient Greek "-izein", used to form verbs meaning to make or to behave in a certain way, and it reached English through Late Latin "-izāre" and Middle French "-iser". Attached to "spiritual", it produces a verb meaning to make something spiritual, or to give it a spiritual character or meaning. That is exactly the sense the word carries when someone is spiritualizing a text, a practice or a landscape: taking something concrete and reading a higher significance into it.

Synonyms: enlightening, uplifting, sacralizing, inspiring, refining

Antonyms: materializing, secularizing, dehumanizing, diminishing, dispiriting