TAKE CARE OF THE SPIRITUAL BODY

Tattooed, named, made up, trained, trained, cured and kuratiert, artfully chiseled and medicated to the bitter end, the body is the great protagonist of the singularist turning point: the phenomenon appears evident if we connect it to another important turning point of our times, that secularist. We have one body, we only have one body, the life of our body is the only life we ​​have and that life is our only individual possibility. We can certainly transmit the life of the species by reproducing, following the biological drive, the collective life, the life of the species. We can even prove ourselves so open and unselfish that we are committed today not only to the life of our direct descendants or our compatriots but also to that of people far away in space, and even that of people distant in time, future generations. We could imagine leaving them a healthy, fair and clean world, following the intuition that belonged to Hans Jonas and which has recently been taken up and elaborated by some currents of ecological thought, sustainability and the ethics of care. All this sounds very beautiful and selfless, but in the end this body of ours is the only one we have, hic et nunc, and every man is unique. The fact is that the process of secularization has also led those who believe in religions that promise eternal life in the hereafter, to cling to the fleeting life afterwards. Secularism, in the brilliant reconstruction of Charles Taylor, a believing Catholic philosopher, means the exit of religion from the public sphere as well as the distancing of people from God and the Church and the decline of religious practices. It is a phenomenon that historically began in the Western world around the sixteenth century and developed in some countries more than in others, and by virtue of which faith in God, from an axiom that was within a context in which not believing was virtually impossible. , has become an alternative, a human possibility among many. Modern society has become secular just as it has become democratic and mediatized and singularized, and this is a simple fact, and the majority of its members are in fact secular (whether they are faithful to a religion, skeptics, agnostics, doubters, atheists convinced). The eternal life of the soul in eternal bliss has become a smoky and unconvincing expectation, just as few devote themselves to caring for the soul to guarantee its immortality. The contemporary commitment, even of many believers, more than aiming at the immortality of the soul, focuses on caring for the body, to be kept alive and protected from aging and disease through technical interventions of various kinds and of different scope. We are faced with a ghost of immortality that is not based on the predominance of religions but on the myth of man perfected by science and technology. The care of the soul, managed by the churches and their systems and trained by spiritual exercises, has given way to the care of the body and brain trained by physical and mental exercises.

NATIVITY

The nativity scene in my family was a ritual. My grandparents had handmade wax figurines, which are nowhere to be found. They were very ancient, delicate, fragile. It was beautiful to make the crib. My father went around looking for real moss and brought it home still damp. Then everything else, stones, branches, leaves, everything was gathered around in the countryside. There was a different magic when my father was alive. He took care of the lights, he had a lot of patience to illuminate the right spots. Now, on the other hand, everything is done quickly, in a hurry, with tiredness and stress. The best time of Christmas for me was when I was a child and my grandparents were all alive. Now I don't feel that magic anymore and I would love to feel it but I know it's impossible.

Etymologically, the word itself means "manger" which is actually the place where the baby Jesus is placed at his birth, with Joseph and Mary who look after him with the help of the ox's breath and the donkey that allowed him to give some warmth in the cold cave they were in.
And this is precisely what the nativity scene that many of us have at home at Christmas depicts: the reproduction of the sacred grotto with the baby Jesus and his family.

There are few and confused elements that foreshadow a precise origin and before 1200 it was depicted by unknown artists (The Virgin with Jesus at the Catacombs of Priscilla in Rome) or even by Giotto.

The first real exhibition of a nativity scene in Italy is obtained in 1220 in Greccio, thanks to Saint Francis of Assisi who, on a trip to Bethlehem, where he saw the nativity scene recalled, wanted to reproduce it in Italy.

So he celebrated a mass in a wood, in the presence of an ox and a donkey and the saint sang some verses of the Gospel over the manger.

Thus there was the first representation of a living nativity scene in Italy. From here on, the crib had a slow and inexorable diffusion and from a purely artistic element, it began to be popular.

From the fifteenth century it spread to central Italy, arrived in the Kingdom of Naples, began to spread in homes and be part of the popular sentiment.

In Naples, in the houses of the nobles, they even began to make sumptuous, large, refined versions, with precious materials and each house pursued its own spectacular version of it, as in a competition.

The Neapolitan nativity scene is still a great classic today, one of its characteristics is that of uniting the cave of Jesus with various other shepherds, intent on their daily life, each in its own occupation.

Via San Gregorio Armeno is very famous, where even today master craftsmen compose cribs, build shepherds also depicting current figures that can be politicians, cinema characters and various others.

An art that every year, during the Christmas holidays, attracts many people to visit and attend the birth of the shepherds in the Neapolitan city.

Obviously there are also other types of cribs in other areas of Italy, among these we remember the Genoese, the Bolognese (among the oldest), the Sicilian and others, each with its own differences in materials used, characters, among the many.

A type of craftsmanship that besides our country has also conquered other nations in Europe and in the world where everyone creates a version with their own characteristics.