OF RABBITS AND RESURRECTION
By Gregory Talipson
a.k.a. Snark
Humorist Alexandra Petri's column in the
March 30, 2013 Washington Post,
quotes Stan in "South Park": "Look, I'm
just saying that somewhere between
Jesus dying on the cross and a giant
bunny hiding eggs there seems to be a
. . . a gap of information." She writes
as one who understands the importance
of Easter and who is appalled by our
culture's way of observing it. She
concludes her perceptive column with
these words: "Maybe it's time we just
admitted it's the Baffling Secular Rabbit
of Spring and stopped trying to link (it with Easter). Shun the Peeps. Shun the chocolate. Take Easter out of the Easter Bunny. It couldn't make it any worse. Maybe the only thing sillier than removing it is having it there in the first place."
With all due respect to Alexandra, the only thing sillier than the Easter Bunny is
Easter itself.
Wait! Don't throw those raw Easter eggs at me just yet! Read on.
In 1968, Harper & Row published a book written by the poet Joseph Pintauro and illustrated by Sister Mary Corita (Kent). It was titled To Believe In God. One of the entries goes like this:
To believe in God
is to know purple jelly beans
could hatch to yellow ostriches
and tulip bulbs break into
blooms big as moons,
or even rabbits
could produce humans out of hats
and
it would be all the same . . .
Easter.
Surely, that's a through-the-looking-glass, down-a-rabbit-hole view of Easter!
More familiarly . . .
Easter is all about the Resurrection. What could be more absurd . . . more unexpected . . . more unlikely . . . more nonsensical than that the rag-tag bunch who followed a Jewish Mystic/Reformer/Prophet/Pain-in-the-Imperial-Ass fellow named Jesus should have a series of experiences with him after he was thoroughly dead? Whatever their nature, these experiences radically changed them, leading them to boldly proclaim the absurd, unexpected, unlikely, nonsensical good news that he who had died was alive! How can that be? That's preposterous . . . down the deepest of rabbit holes.
Indeed.
Yet something happened. Something turned those frightened and disillusioned followers who had fled for their safety into fearless bearers of revolutionary news. Their Easter proclamation was "He has risen!" And we've been trying to understand what that meant for a couple of millennia.
No, I'm not going to tell you what really happened . . . how could I possibly? Like I know and could do that? How can anybody do that . . . for we are dealing here with Mystery. Mystery with a capital "M" doesn't grow smaller the more we know about it: it grows larger! Like the Big Bang, Dark Energy, Quantum Physics, an infant's first smile of recognition, evil . . . love. All are such Mysteries. The more you focus on them, the more awestruck you become . . . the bigger grow the goosebumps . . . the more numerous your questions.
So it makes a certain sense to me that we have the Easter Bunny hiding eggs. What could be more absurd, unexpected, unlikely, nonsensical than that . . . than him showing up at a time when we are celebrating the resurrection of Jesus? After all . . . once you stop trying to imagine corpses levitating into the sky . . . which is never what Easter has been about . . . and once you start contemplating it with an eye for metaphor and spiritual meaning, Easter becomes the most real and certain of events . . . in our own experience!
For one meaning of Easter is that the way of life that Jesus preached and lived triumphs over all the hedonistic, cynical, consumerist, power-grabbing, greed-is-good, Ayn Randian, nihilistic alternatives. Looked at one way, Easter proclaims that new life is possible here and now . . . on this side of death. Easter is the absurd, unexpected, unlikely nonsensical reality that . . . in spite of how futile and dead-ended our lives, our politics, our jobs, our economy, our efforts to preserve the planet may seem . . . in spite of all that, the utterly new, the lively unexpected, the graciously (and therefore absurdly) nonsensical emergence of new life has the last word.
In my pastoral counseling office, I have the stone pictured at the top of this page. A client gave it to me many years ago. It was, at first, expressive of her hopeful yearning . . . and later an experienced reality . . . that she could be different than she had been . . . that new life for her would be possible. The deck of childhood cards was very much stacked against her. She had a long, hard struggle toward the promise of Easter. Eventually, the stone that had sealed her tomb rolled away and she blossomed. Neither of us saw it coming. Neither of us could have predicted it. When it finally happened, we were both surprised . . . and both had silly grins on our faces. When I ran into her ten years later, her new life was visable and I almost didn't recognize her.
The stone she gave me proclaims the promise of Easter. It shouts the good news. "Nothing is etched in stone!" New Life is possible! Depression, anxiety, obsessions, PTSD, loss, grief, and all the rest do not define us. They alone are not who we are, nor descriptive of who we shall become . . . here and hereafter.
"Nothing is etched in stone." In a Zen sort of way . . . if you get outside the box a bit and reflect on that . . . it means that is what is written on each and every stone you will ever see! Every one of those stones has nothing etched on it!
How silly is that! Absurd, unexpected, unlikely, nonsensical, and yes . . . silly! Just like the Resurrection. Just like Easter! Just like the Easter Bunny showing up hiding eggs. What could be a happier collision of metaphors?
The Resurrection! The Easter Bunny! Bring 'em on!
