Easter in Spain

Easter is one of the most important traditions in many Spanish cities. It celebrates the death of Jesus Christ.

Summarizing the story, Jesus Christ was betrayed by Judas (this is the Spanish name, I'm not sure if it changes in English). After that, Romans judged Jesus and sentenced him to be crucified.

However, as if crucifixion wasn't enough, they mistreated Jesus in many savage ways.

Now more than 2000 years after that we celebrate it... Weird?

Well, we are not really celebrating the fact that some people decided to abuse the son of God. What we really celebrate is how he decided to allow them abuse him and died for all of us. Wasn't thereanother way to save humanity? The Bible has a very human point of violence and punishment...

So what do we do on Easter?

In Spanish we do processions, that are a kind of parade in which people take sculptures from the churches and walk with them around the city. The idea is to let people know what Jesus suffered during his punishment. So this sculptures shows Jesus' suffering. They move because Jesus had to take the cross in which he was going to be crucify from the city to the place were they were going to do it. So the procesiones symbolize that.

There are two ways to celebrate this:

Castilla mode: People are in silence and the event is very serious even frightening.

Andalucia mode: People are shouting, though the event is still full of respect.

I highly recommend to see a procesión in Castilla. The environment created is somehting very particular that you will hardly experience in other place. You don't need to do anything special, just see and be silent.

However, you have to be aware that you can see some people walking without shoes, to make their feet suffer as an offering to God. It is more unlikely that you can see someone punishing themselves somehow. But this behaviour is less common now, and chances are small. It is not something nice to see by the way.

Sometimes I think that this connection between God and suffering is very close to some Nietszche ideas, though he always claimed God was dead.

I don't think we need to harm ourselves in order to learn. Life brings its own problems for most of us. However I do like to think about Christian philosphy because it is very different to the capitalistic ideas and somehow, most of the countries have been able to mix them.