The Courage to Be a Rabbit

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Story passage:

“Just as the little girl lost hope for the duckling and the tears began to pour down her face, an idea glimmered in Ostara’s eyes. She placed her hands gently over the little girl’s own, covering the body of the duckling. The girl felt a sudden warm breeze blow across the field and heard a chorus of sparrows begin to sing in the trees above. Something in her hands was stirring and wiggling with a surprising vigor. 

The goddess of spring withdrew her hands and there, where the duckling had been, was a small, fluffy, twitchy-nosed, bright-eyed bunny rabbit!

As the girl froze in shock, the bunny hopped from her hands to the ground and away into the maze of forest floor.”

Full Transcript, April 17, 2022

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I don’t know about you all, but this week I’ve been feeling something different in the air. From the many moments I’ve felt compelled to stop and marvel at the spring flowers outside, to the sacred grief held in our Tuesday night Vespers service, to the multitude of spiritual and theological deep-dives I’ve seen shared by friends online… amid it all, I’ve been feeling like I’ve been on a Holy Week journey the likes of which I haven’t felt since I was a young kid.

And I imagine that we are likely finding ourselves in such a place, collectively, by the very virtue of the heavy ordeals we have found ourselves living through lately. The spring flowers are meeting an extra hunger for beauty, after the isolation of pandemic winter, the long experience of missing each other as we struggle to balance the risks and rewards of gathering when the weather will not permit us outdoors. For many of us, we are beginning to feel a kind of hope that the world will indeed go on. But, as we have had to grow to accept, it will never return to the way it was before.

We will never again hold the hands of those whose lives have been claimed by COVID. Some of us with special health concerns might never gather unmasked. We may find ourselves with a small hesitance before hugging or shaking hands for years, or perhaps the rest of our lives. The “back to normal” we were looking forward to way back in 2020 has faded into a dream. Reality still isn’t happening the way we have hoped for.

Jesus’ followers were planning to continue learning from him for decades longer than they did. Those who called him Messiah were expecting that by the end of his life, he would have saved the world from all ills. His beloved friends, were looking forward to many a future evening spent sharing a meal in his company, nourishing their hearts together. 

After Jesus’ death, his disciples and friends were lost, in a state of shock. And not just for the three days until his resurrection - in fact, for the years following his crucifixion, the followers of Jesus lived in a state of fear and chaos, trying to put the pieces back together. Some of them went on down the path that led to the apostle Paul, the early church, and eventually what we know as Christianity today. Others grieved, believed, learned, moved on, or simply lived their lives in the best way they knew how. They were all in some degree of danger by their association with Jesus, and for many the center of their social and spiritual community had dissolved. For all, their lives had changed, and would never again be how they were before they met Jesus, son of Mary.

I want you to think, now, about a crossroads. A time when your life changed, and would never be the same again. Do you ever think about what your life would have been like if this change had never happened?

When our lives change, we ourselves change on a deep level. The person we are can be so shaped by these moments. We don’t have a choice about whether changes like this happen, or when, or how. We are a duckling one day, a rabbit the next. But the question we have to ask ourselves is, do I have the courage to live as a rabbit, when I expected to be a duckling? 

We can look back with nostalgia on the time we had feathers, but if we spend our bunny lives trying desperately to swim and fly, we are going to find ourselves frustrated and flummoxed a lot. We can remember flying, and still hop. In fact, I’ll even dare to suggest that if we can own our own journeys, we could hop even higher because of what we learned back when we flew.

Can you find the courage to live as a rabbit when you expected to be a duck? Can you open yourself to the wisdom, not to reject your duckling history, but to embrace it alongside your bunny nature? 

My blessing for each of us today is that we might draw strength from who we used to be, as we continue to discover who we are becoming. Let us have the resilience to accept the unexpected parts of the journey, and the patience to observe without knowing as the next steps unfold ahead. Let us have compassion for ourselves and each other as we go out into the bright morning of spring, carrying all the pains and challenges of recent times, yet open to the joy close at hand.

Happy Easter, beloveds.

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[Copyright 2022 Miranda (Bran) Lennox]