By Tom Padula
Our Pasqua/Easter is approaching, so it is only right to focus on this very important public holiday period—and the traditional Christian season beginning with Ash Wednesday, the day after our Carnevale period. The year, in general, is filled with feast days, commemorations, and celebrations. Roman rulers believed that people need both work and play in their lives—“bread and circuses” (panem et circenses), a phrase coined by the poet Juvenal circa 100 A.D. This was a palliative offer to appease our baser desires still true today. In our Christian traditions, the Easter period is totally dedicated to the life and death of the Son of God, Jesus Christ.
He claimed to have a kingdom not of this world. Christians believe that his dead body disappeared from a borrowed tomb in Jerusalem.
This tomb had been blocked by a huge, Easter/Pasqua is truly a time for deep reflection on what it means to be divine on Earth.
