The Easter Bunny is Not Real, But Maybe Jesus Is

By Taina Lyons

I remember when I was maybe six or seven I asked my mom to please tell me the truth about the Easter bunny: Are they real or not? She paused—a long silence. My mother often pursed her lips together, small stress lines sketched downward from the corners of her mouth.  “N-n-no…” she said in her hesitant, heavily accented voice.  She told me the truth. I was grateful to her and devastated. It was a big loss.  

I imagine I feel the way my mother must have felt in that moment when I’m trying to reassure someone. I’m not particularly good at reassurance. I just know how bad it can be (just pay an iota of attention to what’s happening in the news) and I can feel pretty cynical. I sniff out delusional assurances like a dog sniffing for a half eaten sandwich in your purse. 

Yet I also experience what I know to be real Magic. Everyday miracles. It’s a hard thing for me to define, magic.  Perhaps it’s a technology and people who are skilled with it are masterfully sensitive, good listeners, and good at seeing what’s not visible. Their creative medium is threads of connection, or time, or energy.  Magic is what makes life for me, well, magical—meaningful and exciting.  It’s a connection with the unseen, what is felt, what moves the spirit, what connects me to the mystery beyond my perspective.  

Sometimes I feel that our collective context is all a skew. We want to reassurances that are not possible, but we rely on them to keep us from despair.   And many have lost their sense of magic, or had it historically forced out of them.

What if we start from the place of acknowledging how utterly terrifying this existence is, how eternal and mystifying. And from there, acknowledge how utterly magnificent it is, how magical. 

Stories as pathways to magic

Stories need to be held in a different way from our concrete, materialist worldviews.  Mythologies are alive and evolving. 

Mythologies and stories, such as the Easter bunny, allow us to play with the Imagination and understand some aspect of reality. They also open a portal to the unseen that is part of our spiritual ecology. The Easter bunny originates from Nature and Earth-based spiritual traditions rooted in cycles of the body, the seasons, the year, and the lifespan. The bunny represents fertility and Spring. This time of year for some is a celebration of the pagan goddess Oestre, (Easter’s namesake) a goddess of fertility, light and the dawn, and maybe a root of the word “East.”

Besides the Easter bunny, there’s the other big mythology of Easter time.  Jesus, that is, rising from the dead.  If it’s not a zombie story like some shitty HBO gore fest, what is it? What’s this story teaching us in this time?

Over dinner the other night, my kids and I were chatting about Easter.  I asked them if they know why Christians celebrate the holiday.  They know Easter as a time to hunt for eggs, do crafts, and celebrate Springtime (which can include snow patches as well as daffodils here in VT).  We talked about the story of Jesus, a central story for Christians, in which a Jewish prophet was murdered on a cross, and then rose from the dead.  We talked about people who are being oppressed, harmed, murdered, denied freedom today.  We talked about the possibility of miracles (Christians love a good miracle), and we talked about metaphors (seasonal rebirth of Spring and the self).

After dinner we drove to a community dance event my partner Moti runs.  There was a special musician playing that night, a woman who had lived and played music in Ethiopia.  (Have you heard some people posit that Jesus was from Ethiopia!?)  As we parked the car, the kids spotted a tree with spikes covering its trunk and branches at the edge of the unpaved lot—a Hawthorn tree. They rushed over, poking the thorns and shrieking in feigned injury.  On the way into the dance, which is held inside a large refurbished barn, the kids broke off a branch brought it inside.  “It looks like a crown,” my daughter said as she set it down by the window.    

After the dance, a man with large stone rings on his fingers and smile-crinkled eyes approached us. “Who brought that in?” he asked pointing at the branch.  “The moment I walked in I saw it and was reminded of Christ and felt Christ consciousness here.” 

Before you stop reading because things are getting too woo for you, consider that billions of people worldwide worship this dude, so he’s one of the ancestors most prayed to, evoked, and revered on the planet.  

So what the deal with Jesus and what is “Christ consciousness?” What is he saying to people today?

My personal understanding is that Christ consciousness is the awareness of a field of interconnection and oneness based in love.  

My interpretation is that:

Self is an ecology, a grouping of individuals

Each individual has its own perspective/consciousness

There are certain organizing principles, or “centers” - the sun for example

Too many people trying to be the center (ego driven), breaks the whole shape / choreography

Each part contributes to the whole 

The field or unity consciousness that can experience / touch all individuals & perspectives at the same time is what you might call God

Anyone can cultivate God consciousness by tuning to oneness 

Duality, or separateness - DIVERSITY - is also miraculous & divine and is the reality of this plane of existence

Living Christ Consciousness

Experiencing unity or oneness is usually a brief spiritual or ecstatic experience, but can serve us in a deep way to remember our interconnection and belonging to each other.  Being an individual with a unique soul is one of the gifts of being born into a body on this planet - and creates the rich diversity that is an integral part of the beauty of life on Earth.  Counterintuitively, remembering and knowing oneness, not conceptually but experientially, allows us to deepen into uniqueness.  It also creates a tether to the Soul of Life that gives us courage to dive into our journey with separateness.  

Right now, sacred diversity itself is being challenged and threatened on the planet.  From the destruction of ecosystems, to the ICE officers enforcing fascist rules that discriminate against brown immigrants, diversity is being challenged and threatened.

This Eastertime, may we remember that the old wise ones, as well as the stories, are still here, still in living relationship with us. We can seek specific support and guidance in this time of political unrest and environmental instability.  We can use the story of Jesus’s death as guidance to face fears of persecution in order to live according to our highest values and courage.  

And yes, the story of Jesus’s resurrection connects to themes of transformation and rebirth (whether of body/lifetime or ego) - which are important spiritual themes for us to connect with especially in this time of collective unrest and growth. But the message of this story for me in this moment was a reminder to not close down actual relationship with spirit, with ancestors, (or a plant, a pet, a beloved, with oneself) because we think we know what they’re about. We can live in a projection, or in connection. I feel the love Jesus taught invites us into a deeply enlivened, present, and real connection with life. From this place of presence, we can be creatively engaging with both Unity and our own unique soul.