Spirituality Matters

“Authenticity is a person’s choice to be honest about whom he or she is.  When people practice authenticity , they stop trying to be what others want them to be and embrace who they are.  Authentic people allow themselves to be imperfect and vulnerable throughout both their  triumps and struggles” ….

‘The gift of imperfection ‘  Author Brene Brown

Photo by JDP Moments in Time

jill.smugmug.com

Easter Time

Easter is the time for holidays, festivals and a time for giving chocolate Easter eggs.

The first eggs given at Easter were birds eggs. These eggs were painted in bright colours to give them further meaning as a gift.

As chocolate became more wide spread in the 20th Century, a chocolate version of the traditional painted egg was developed. The size of the chocolate egg has grown over the years and is now more likely to be the size of an ostrich egg rather than a small birds egg.

But Easter means much more….

Easter is the oldest and the most important Christian Festival, the celebration of the death and coming to life again of Jesus Christ. For Christians, the dawn of Easter Sunday with its message of new life is the high point of the Christian year.

Quote:

“There is so much in the world for us all if we only have the eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it ourselves…Lucy Maud Montogomery” (1874-19-42)

I live in France.  I have lived here for about two years now.  It’s interesting from time to time to stumble on how ideas which are similar are expressed differently in French compared to English.  So they are similar but not the same.

Here is an example – in English, where we talk about “giving up our soul”, in French the equivalent translates as “giving back  our soul”.  What a difference.  In both, the idea that the soul has an existence beyond ours, but the French is much less individualistic.  Our soul is something which we have been lent and must return.  ‘Soul’ as a life-force in the physical body, as long as the physical body can endure.  And when it dies, the soul returns and becomes part again of the source.

I don’t believe in past lives.  But I do believe in a ‘soul thread’, a continuation of each one of us through our actions and our words, through our relationship with each person we have ever met, the means by which we have changed them and they us…   the way in which we have affected them, which will alter in some small way how they in turn affect others.  And so the soul thread is eternal, and perhaps what we give back is the means our bodies have on loan to keep spinning that thread by connecting with others.  It is temporary.  But when we stop spinning, our part of the soul thread is still there.  That is the soul’s eternity… and ours.