The Unseen Here and
Now . . .
Stuart
Revercomb
Stuart
Revercomb is a marketing consultant and joyously married father of four
children. He seems to remember someone once telling him he ought to be
a writer. "The Unseen Here and Now" -- Thursdays.
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"Thursday's Fare"
March 28, 2002
Bashing The Bunny
I’m not sure when it started, but at some point along the way I began to really dislike the Easter Bunny. In fact, I’m not certain I ever cared for him at all.
Maybe it was the lack of real animation or character in some “store bunny” that I witnessed as a child. In lieu of the humanity of Santa, (a relatively real person with a face that could speak when he chose to), the Easter Bunny had a big white styrene head with unmoving mouth and eyes and plastic ears that looked more like a donkeys than an actual rabbit. There was something maniacal in that face - like a bad clown, that had an almost supernatural ability to scare you beyond the frightening stuff of the everyday. It was clear even to a toddler. The Easter Bunny wasn’t quite right.
But taking the short view, which small children tend to do, one could get comfortable with the fact that the big rabbit - deranged or not - would usually leave candy upon one’s doorstep. And while not the stuff of Halloween, (which he seemed to have some odd connection with), it was candy nevertheless, and therefore was bribe enough to warrant some measure of forgiveness for whatever it was he was guilty of. Call it cheap forgiveness if you must, but at age 6, I probably would have traded my sister for a Nestles Crunch bar.
Does all of that make sense? If not, I apologize. Keep loving your bunny.
There is also something about “church formality” at Easter that has always bothered me as well. For those of you that attend more contemporary churches or no church at all, you’ll have a hard time connecting here, since you are rarely required to go to all the fuss of putting on your “Sunday Best.” But for those that do, perhaps you feel the same as well.
As a child I NEVER liked the idea of putting on “nice clothes.” Such clothes were stiff and confining and didn’t lend themselves to the natural activities of children. My knee-slides went twice as far on the long waxed floors in blue jeans, and one never felt properly equipped exploring the dark rooms and crawl spaces beneath the sanctuary with a tie and loafers on. But eventually such attire became part of the ritual that is my preparation for worship, and now I sometimes feel less than fully “prepared” whenever my schedule keeps me from a coat and tie at a mid-week service.
But there is something about Easter that doesn’t go with any sort of formality. Maybe its because as a Christian it is “the thing” - the moment where all other moments are given their life. Less the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the claims of any Christian are just so many more good stories with some nice moral lessons attached. Aesop’s Fables do the job nearly as well, and are perhaps a whole lot more memorable. As a moralist the Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi and any number of Shao-Lin Monks might be said to be the equal of Christ.
No, as a Christian, Easter is it. And there is something about it that doesn’t leave room for any sort of formality - something about the pain and suffering of God himself in Jesus Christ stretched out upon the cross for the very worst of humanity that says, “leave everything else at the door - come naked before me, let nothing distract you - for in the gift of my love in Christ crucified I have given you all that I am.... I love you beyond your ability to fathom.”
One’s best clothes may help prepare some of us for worship on any given Sunday, but nothing can prepare you for the reality of that truth. A truth that finds its greatest expression at Easter.
Which is, perhaps, exactly what is so bothersome about that bunny. He’s a distraction in the midst of “all the news that is news” - the greatest and only moment in creation worth remembering and celebrating, and to have that thing hopping around on the sidelines of it all seems nothing less than macabre comedy.
There. I said it. The Easter Bunny needs to hop his way into history. The sooner, the better.
But he won’t. Just like millions of other believing Americans, I’ll accept the distraction as something we can live with, and my wife and I will carefully lay out 4 little baskets with pink and green grass as fake and plastic as the Bunny himself. We’ll fill them with little chocolate eggs and jelly beans and those horrible little yellow marshmallow chicks that have a shelf life of 200 years. And we’ll smile together as our children scramble down the steps Easter morning to find just where the Bunny has hidden their baskets this year.
Eventually, they too will wind up measuring the value of such a tale as they wait for their own children to begin to breathe in and breathe out the ultimate truth and mystery of Easter. And like me they’ll probably wonder why they continue to perpetrate the whole silly bunny thing themselves - and why at Easter when we celebrate the universal moment of God’s gift of himself that we are the slightest bit concerned about what outfit we might be wearing.
But ultimately it won’t much matter.
Because in the end the great Apostle was right, “nothing can set us apart from the Love of God in Christ Jesus.”
Not even the Easter Bunny.