Easter rabbits

By Colin Gibson in All Sorts

... and Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit

I am ready for Easter. Yes, even though Lent has just started and the Easter weekend is a few weeks away, I'm all set. I've got an Easter Bunny, so this time I won't have to buy one at an exorbitant price at the Warehouse or Pak'nsave or the New World, or wherever else cunning merchants are scheming to relieve me of my money.

My Bunny is rather cute. He consists of a large, white rabbit (well, really a hare) head with a pink nose and two purple-lined ears, set on a spring-loaded pop-up handgrip. When you press his button, he leaps into the air (resurrection style) with a resounding 'Boing! Boing! Boing!' Then he subsides until you press his button again. I've thought of bringing him to church on Easter Day, but somehow 'Boing! Boing!' isn't quite the sound I want to make, nor is it-I suspect-a sound others might wish to hear.

Now why rabbits and Easter? I really don't know, but they do remind me of Beatrix Potter, author of perhaps the most famous rabbit story ever told, The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

Beatrix was born into a wealthy London family, but grew up a lonely child supervised by nurses and educated by governesses. The atmosphere in her home was oppressively quiet, and she developed a yearning for the dream world of the countryside. She taught herself to draw and paint, and began sketching her own pet animals, dressing them in clothes to make them amusing. Eventually her dream world generated a number of stories, illustrated with her own pen and watercolour drawings. In 1893 she sent one to Noel Moore, the five-year-old son of her former governess, Annie Moore. Little Noel was recovering from a bout of scarlet fever, so Beatrix amused him with a story based on her own pet rabbit, Peter Piper: 'I don't know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits, whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter'.

Later, after successive publishers had turned down her manuscripts, she privately printed The Tale of Peter Rabbit herself. Her own copy of this edition contains the following inscription, recording the death of Peter Piper. 'In affectionate memory of Peter Piper, who died on the 26th of January 1901 at the end of his 9th year. Whatever the limitations of his intellect or the outward shortcomings of his fur and his ears and toes, his disposition was uniformly amiable and his temper unfailingly sweet. An affectionate companion and a quiet friend.'

I have always loved those little Beatrix Potter books, and especially the tale of that naughty rabbit. But as an adult I have gone on to read many other books with different visions of the world-Watership Down among them, in which rabbits fight ferociously with each other, become refugees and have to combat a terrible plague. New Zealanders who have to deal with plague numbers of rabbits on our farmlands might also have a different vision of those cuddly pets; one more in keeping with Mr McGregor's fury at finding them thieving in his vegetable garden.

Now I reckon that far too many Christians are content with their Sunday School versions of Jesus...you know, the one just like Peter Piper, whose 'disposition was uniformly amiable and his temper unfailingly sweet. An affectionate companion and a quiet friend.'

I understand their deep and abiding affection for a Jesus of this kind, but I hope they will grow to realize that there is more to be said and learned about one who gathered small children to himself, but also faced up to the big bad cruelly real world, and changed it forever. Is your Easter Jesus going to be a cuddly pet, another Peter Piper, or an exploding-out-of-the-grave Son of God?

--Colin Gibson

First printed as a Connections article in the Weekly Parish Bulletin, March 20, 2011.