Spring is a time of birth and rebirth, of Nature earth nurturing its creatures. In the old pagan traditions, Easter was a time of birth, too – it was the celebration of spring and of life renewing itself. It’s enough to go in Nature during this period to see and hear grass growing tall, trees being full of leaves and flowers, birds singing, animals and bugs of all kinds being incredibly active and full of life: working, nesting and having offspring, after the slow down of the winter months.
While in Christian tradition Jesus gets reborn, too, I always found that the Catholic church – and also the protestant ones – place too much emphasis on to the passion and suffering of Jesus Christ while he was killed; they seem to have an obsessive and morbid attachment to the carrying of the cross, to the act of suffering in itself, more than on the meaning of the resurrection, of raising up again after having beaten up. Rising up and shining our light again is the message, while being beaten up (killed on the cross) is just a symbol for a bad situation from which we can rise again!
I believe suffering and death are too emphasized with those religions and with the western thinking in general. After all, Jews were slaughtering sacrificial lambs, too; the ancient Greeks and Romans were also sacrificing tons of animals to please their gods – gods that were embodying too many of the human faults and negative emotions, such as anger; gods that you needed to keep quiet and that people had to be scared of.
Today, with Easter approaching, we’d like to focus on a Jesus that is taken care and fed by his mother, rather than on the dying one. Hence we chose to share this image of a breast-feeding Mary (an image we spotted at a corner of a road in the old village of Calcata) because we think it represents the true meaning of life much better: life is about giving but not necessarily about suffering. Life is about loving and nurturing.
Sure, we all do suffer sometimes. Sometimes we even suffer a lot – it’s part of the human condition – but the learning and the message of Jesus was to not focus on the suffering itself, to not have fear, to forgive those who make us suffer, and to keep shining our light, no matter what. Suffering is not the end, suffering is just a temporary condition to go through to learn that we are much more than our bodies in this lifetime, and to keep focusing on the good. The world can be scary but our mission here is to learn to rise above fear and suffering. While suffering is the means through which some lessons are imparted, the lessons are always teaching and reminding us that only Love is what counts, that only Love is real and that we should be focusing on Love, Life and Joy, not on negativity, fear and death.
PS – As a side note, breast milk is very important for boosting the immune system of a baby.
