Sunday, Day 29: Easter Bunny

When I was a kid, my uncle Elias raised bunnies in the backyard. They were so adorable—poofy cotton-puff tails, long hair, black button eyes. The cages smelled terrible, but we loved to press the bodies of those bunnies against our necks. They were pretty calm animals, always willing to be cuddled. Once in awhile one of them would “escape,” and we wouldn’t be able to find it. “Fluffy’s gone,” we’d say. We’d search the yard halfheartedly and take comfort in the fact that Fluffy had probably found some other bunny friends in the neighborhood.

The same night, coincidentally, we always had “chicken” for supper. Apparently all the other cousins figured out what was going on long before I did—which is to say that it wasn’t until my uncle’s funeral when I was in my late 20s that the truth became clear.

“How in the world did you not know?” my cousin Joanne said, laughing hysterically. We were in her backyard, drinking beer after the funeral, and it felt good to be home—I was in my last year in Phoenix and ready to leave, and missing everyone terribly.

Years later, in Ikaria, my daughter and I were visiting my Theo Foti. He walked us around his yard, proudly showing off his goats, chickens, and bunnies.  My daughter wanted to pet one of the bunnies, so he reached in and grabbed the fattest bunny I’d ever seen by its ears, then handed it to her. She cuddled it against her neck.

Full circle.

“Little does she know that bunny is tomorrow’s supper,” Theo Foti said to me in Greek, winking at me.

My family has long lived off the land in Ikaria, raising just enough to eat, catching just enough fish and making just enough wine to sell to pay for additional expenses. Even the two brothers--my father and Theo Elias--who decided to come to the U.S. to find a better life--ended up trying to create a small piece of home. Even though they were working in restaurants or factories or painting houses, they also had large gardens and occasionally raised animals and butchered them for food. 

The cousins my age and younger have mostly left that lifestyle, moving to Athens or Pyreas to raise their families. This summer will visit my Theo Foti’s home, but he won’t be there. My Theo Aleko, the only one of my father’s brothers who is still alive, lives on the original family property—but he and his wife, too, are growing old, and someday these properties will  be cared for from afar, used as vacation homes only. 

The Easter bunny—the human-sized version in shopping malls—always struck me as pretty creepy. Even as a kid, I preferred the smelly bunnies our uncles raised to that fake bunny sitting on a bench in front of a giant, shiny Easter basket.

In the same way, I’d much prefer a faith and a life that is real—which is to say, messy-- to one dressed up to make it palatable. Nowadays, if you’re going to give me rabbit to eat, just say so—don’t pretend it’s chicken. 

As much as I don’t totally buy the idea of a Jesus offered up as a living sacrifice for our sins, I’m also offended by the image of Jesus as a God-Person who is always strong and in control. It matters that he felt grief, suffered, got angry, felt compassion. It matters that, when he died, some people were relieved, and others so grief-stricken they couldn’t figure out what to do besides try to anoint his body with perfume after he died. 

Jesus lived among people, real people, in a world that was rapidly changing, one that has continued to change rapidly since his death and Resurrection. That’s the messy world we live in. That’s the messy story we believe, and try to make sense of, every day. It's a story that looks a lot more like a skinned rabbit than a human wearing a fuzzy costume in a shopping mall.