Easter is approaching. The supermarket shelves are a triumph of chocolate eggs of all sizes, doves, with all possible variants - with raisins, without raisins covered in chocolate with eggnog - to satisfy the most extravagant tastes.
few years later, to the more traditional doves, have been joined by cakes in the shape of bells and lambs, these in various versions. For those who live in the country, and has the look used to observe what happens in the surrounding reality, Easter is that moment when the buds begin to swell on the branches and peach and apricot trees, often recklessly, unfolds its flowers. The first wake up lizards and their noise is heard in the vicinity of the walls while the eggs of the toads, wrapped in their thousands from a long series of gelatin, swaying between the soles of the lakes. In the undergrowth sprouting primroses, violets, the Crusaders, the periwinkles and the melancholy chirp of birds winter in the great symphony becomes a prelude to courtship. The period
before Easter is the time when life moves again to its fullness, and with this strength today is so little understood, also urges us to renew ourselves, to embrace a new vision for the flow of life uncertain. Although many animals are involved in this renewal. Most of the kids and lambs are born with the full moon in February and, after the first day of shyness spent trotting behind the comforting shadow of the mother, they initiate ran wild with peers of the flock. Who has not seen the little lambs play, will never have a clear picture of the joy that can permeate your life. Chase in groups, steering, changing direction, jumping on their front legs and back, if there is a higher point in the pasture, a rock, a tree felled, a fountain, are vying to jump on and this is the most fun for them, and then again resume their chase, occasionally face and load tested to simulate the adult. Then the mothers call them, and then it's all a run, with an uncanny ability to reach the crowd of the flock, his mother, a push head, tails vibrate met. Descends on the pasture then the silence of wheat feeding. But then one day, just before Easter, while the lambs sponge inviting smile on the shelves of supermarkets in the countryside arrive and load vans and small sheep goats. The joy goes away from the pasture and take over the bleating of mothers agonizing for three days running from side to side incredulous calling out their creatures with breasts swollen with milk. Then, after much turmoil, the silence descends on the countryside and pastures of return to be barren expanse where the ravens trotting between mothers emptied from the pain. Meanwhile, the lambs, wrapped in cellophane, arrived in the counters of the supermarkets: Whole, broken, or just the head, apparently a delicacy. I can not but wince when I see it, crushed by the film, opaque eyes and those teeth that have already pulled out the first grass.
The other day I called a friend who works near the slaughterhouse. "I put the caps, but no use. Are downloaded every day, hundreds, and with voices of children screaming, desperate, hoarse, in terror, but, apart from me, nobody seems to notice. At the bottom of every year it is. That's life, is the tradition, it is Easter and this is the sound of Easter. " Yeah, because Easter is primarily a traditional lunch, a meal of those who seldom, with the triumphant lamb in the middle of the table, a culinary delicacy in reduced lamb, a sign of a food culture never betrayed, stripped of every value that exceeds the gastrointestinal tract. But in those bleating in the yelling in the life that is pure innocence, is not hidden The deeper question about the meaning of existence? Because death and devastating storms, with no regard for anyone. In our society, so sterile and so imbued with omnipotence, we forget a little 'too often, but forget the bulky presence of death means to abdicate from the beginning, the meaning of life. When death comes upon one of my pets, others make the long trips, do not approach the body, not to look at and for a few days, their behavior changes, it becomes strangely absent, as if something inside them, all ' Suddenly he began to vibrate in a different way. The contemplation of death can only provoke a deep sense of fear, fear that eye bright suddenly becomes opaque, live for that warmth turns cold rigidity. It is for this reason that all human cultures have developed rituals of slaughtering to make this transition less frightening for the animal, but especially frightening for us, terrible for the evocative power contained in the blood flowing.
But in a society like ours, totally secular, in which nothing is more sacred and the only concerns are linked to the given subject, the chain of death at the slaughterhouse is not a reality, among others. The screaming of the lambs are a background noise of a thousand sounds that stunned the present day. And perhaps not know hear this complaint is not knowing how to listen all the complaints - the cries of the victims of war, the sick, children tortured, murdered, tortured people, abandoned, the persecuted, of all those voices that cry out to heaven in vain. It is also not being able to hear our cry, people satiated, bored, resentful, unable to see another horizon beyond that of our tiny ego, unable to question, to address the big questions and to accept the fear that they will inevitably drift. Lie down on the sofa of theodicy, continue to say that God can not exist because it allows evil and the innocent assumption that there calms down, we still, puts us in the right, protecting nights of insomnia excruciating pain and anguish of the world. How many horrors - and how many errors - resulting from this image of Almighty God, by this idea of \u200b\u200ba God with a beard, sitting on a cloud, a close relative of Zeus with lightning in his hand, ready to hurl upon the wicked of the earth . The omnipotence of this hyper-technological society, it may come from this? God is not omnipotent, as he had promised, and is thus our task to take on omnipotence, straighten the crooked things straight into things, to create heaven on earth, a paradise where justice eventually triumphs, thanks to our laws. Heaven on earth, however, as they showed plenty of the tragedies of the twentieth century, soon is transformed into its opposite, because when the man believed to act solely according to the absolute principles of reason, is already rolling out a grid and prepare powerful neon lights to illuminate every corner of the prison.
Perhaps the tears of thousands of lambs for routine consumer these days is not that the cry of all the millions of innocent lives every day in different ways, from time immemorial, are crushed by evil. And those tears that rises to the sky and received no answer, suggests perhaps that the move, true liberation - the true Easter - this is it. Knowing that God is not omnipotent, but, as the Lamb, we share the same desperate fragility. And only on this idea - the idea that we share the fragility that your tears are my own and Sue are our - can you imagine a world that no longer creak under the delusion of omnipotence but will move in the construction of a true humanity.
Susanna Tamaro - March 28, 2010
Source: The Courier
