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The Magic Rabbit |
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When I was growing up, I used to hike a lot in the West Texas desert -- on the sand, through mesquite, and around cactus. Occasionally I would see a coyote but, usually, besides birds, the only wild life I saw much of were snakes (lots of them) and rabbits (even more of them.) There wasn't much else there. Of the rabbits there were more cottontails than jackrabbits but there were plenty of both. It was a good thing that there were plenty of cottontails because my father was a worker on a wildcat drilling crew that, from time to time, had no drilling job. Sometimes he was out of work so long that he had to forage for food. There were many days, in fact, that the only meat we had on our table was rabbit. My dad was, after all, a pretty good shot with a .22 rifle. Not only did we somewhat survive on rabbit but I developed a deep affinity with them. I didn't understand them then and I don't understand them now; but, somehow, rabbits connected me to nature. As I grew older, they even became an analogy for what is both good and bad about human life. They were an incomplete analogy, but they helped me to understand how much a part of nature human beings are, also. In a somewhat quirky way, they helped me see more clearly the meaning and the point of being human. Consider the lowly rabbit. The rabbit is long-eared, short-tailed, with long hind-legs, gray or brown fur (usually). Perhaps, I felt close to them because much of that description sort of fit me as I grew into adolescence. The rabbit is gregarious. It lives a group life. It is a burrower, although cottontails usually build grass nests where I grew up. European rabbits, however, go at burrowing on a large scale and create warrens made up of many individual rabbit burrows. I need to exclude the jackrabbit from gregariousness. The jackrabbit lives a solitary life and seems to lean on no one else. Perhaps he follows the advice Polonius gave his son, Laertes, in Shakespeare's Hamlet: "Neither a burrower nor a leaner be." Actually, the jackrabbit is something of a cousin of what we, usually, think of as a rabbit. The Energizer Bunny is a rabbit. The jackrabbit is a hare. Bugs Bunny, in spite of his last name, is a hare. I've often wondered if the J.R. character in the TV series, Dallas, was actually named after the “J. R.” in Jack Rabbit. They both have the same initials. Or, if it was the “J. R.” in Junior as some form of acknowledgment of the male propensity for procreation -- but, I digress. A major difference between jackrabbits and other rabbits is that the regular rabbit is born with its eyes closed (they don't open until the 11th day). It is born naked with its ears closed (they don't open until the 12th day) and it is not self-supporting until after four weeks. The jackrabbit, on the other hand, is born with its eyes open, with a full coat of fur, and it is ready to hop. Perhaps, we should say that’s why people, who come to religion with their eyes open and a full complement of rationality and a readiness to hop out of the way of destructive dogma, should be called “hare-tics”. Where I grew up, the mispronunciation of words often seemed to have a hidden meaning. Rabbits (and hares, also, depending on how hungry you may be) are tasty dishes for humans and other predators. Also, they are good for our economy, providing a source both of felt and of a fur that approximates the fur of Angora goats and chinchilla. They provide meat for our tables, experimental animals for our laboratories, and make cuddly pets. To their evolutionary credit, rabbits are survivors. Herbivorous, they live everywhere. In fact they have well developed dispersal powers. Rabbits have a wide tolerance for environmental conditions. There are Arctic rabbits (i.e., snow bunnies, who love the snow, are the opposite of the snow birds who are getting ready to move south this month to get away from it), southern cottontails (i.e. Bre'r Rabbit), and in cities, at one time, there were numerous Bunny Clubs. Two other survival advantages they have are : 1) their great maneuverability. What they lack in speed they make up in the quickness with which they can change direction. Only a masochistic dog can catch a rabbit! And, 2) their enormous prolificity. They seem to proliferate almost as fast as they hop. The gestation period for a rabbit is one month. They can have a litter of 2 to 8 several times a year. The result is that rabbits, despite their size and lovability, can be devastators. They not only know their arithmetic, they have mastered their multiplication tables. They know these tables so well that the world depends on some other species (that knows how to subtract) to keep rabbits in check. The fewer the predators, the more the rabbits. The fewer the snakes, the more baby rabbits; the fewer the coyotes, the more mature rabbits. Over zealous farmers and ranchers can make serious rabbit problems for themselves by killing off too many coyotes and snakes. Such ill-advised human behavior can result in an unchecked rabbit population that can devastate crops. The Peter Rabbit and Farmer Brown story that many of us grew up with only sets out how much damage one individual rabbit -- and his brothers and sisters -- can do to a garden. I grew up thinking this was a story showing only the nuisance aspect of rabbits until I heard about what happened in Australia. There, rabbits took what has been called by one species dispersion specialist a "sweepstakes route" to adaptation. It took only 50 years for imported rabbits from a single farm to spread all over Australia! Since there were no natural predators, the Australian economy was threatened. The rabbits ate so much that in some places sheep and cattle had no food. They ate so much that some farmers could not raise crops. This went on until the 1950s when myxomatosis was intentionally introduced. Myxomatosis is a severe viral disease that afflicts rabbits and is used to remove them from plague areas. It’s as if one plague is used to remove another plague, a dynamic to which our overpopulating species should pay close attention. Nature, it seems, has its own methods in this regard, as HIV/AIDS and the Ebola virus – along with pestilence, drought, hurricanes, and earthquakes – amply demonstrate. Having said all this, let me say again: consider the lowly rabbit! I have always believed much can be learned from this soft, cuddly, rascally lettuce-muncher that can become a scourge. If we look closely, the lowly rabbit teaches much about nature, cunning, the burgeoning power of life, and about ourselves. I have come to believe that human beings are quite like rabbits in many ways. For starters, we are born naked, too. It takes us even longer to walk and fend for ourselves. In our group life we live in our own form of "warrens", although, here, we are like both rabbits and hares. Most of us need to be around lots of people; but, some of us are loners, haring along by ourselves. Human beings, also, are survivors. We are omnivorous, eating not only lettuce, but the lettuce eaters as well. We have even greater dispersal powers -- we have populated almost every corner of the earth. Our maneuverability, however, is mostly intellectual. We are physically slow; few of us can catch a rabbit without a trap -- although I almost did once. But, we can make the trap to catch the rabbit. It’s as if the rabbit in us has learned not just how to escape the fox and the hound but how to trap them instead. And even more to the point, we, too, are devastators. We let our multiplication tables have their way with us. We are destroying our resources through overpopulation. Aside from the more refractory aspects of the natural world and its unfriendly meteorological and geological behavior, we have no serious natural predators anymore! We have had to invent famine and war so that we can be our own predators. But then, rabbits are like us in this regard. In the Australian rabbit drives, where rabbits were herded into crowded compounds so they could be clubbed to death, many rabbits attacked other rabbits before they were clubbed. We may not realize it, but too close proximity seems to promote violence. We are like rabbits, also, in that we tend to live our lives on the same surface survival level as do they. We do our best to avoid the snakes and wolves of our own kind. We prefer to feed on the tastiest (not the healthiest) food we can find and will violate survival principles – and health principles – to get it! Too often we yield to sensuality without reference to consequences and produce our own kind in excess. During the last few hundred years, human beings, in effect, have been herding themselves into a shrinking compound and we have become so stressed that our drive for power and self preservation has made us increasingly destructive toward one another. The last 100 years have seen two major world wars and many regional wars in which the devastation of our species has not been inflicted by outside nonhuman forces but by people against people. We try to put a good face on such violent behavior by honoring the courageous and committed for standing up for what they believe are our collective principles. In many ways, it is good to honor such commitment. However, in such honoring, it is far too easy to have the illusion that we are honoring the highest in human life rather than reinforcing a gross distortion of what our collective principles actually are – or could be if we truly tried to understand them. If there were not more to human life than survival of treasured selfish life styles and protecting or expanding political jurisdictions, there would have been no reason for those prophets of love and compassion who have pointed to a deeper humanity than is evidenced by survival and patriotism. This level of existence ultimately is self destructive when it is all that is pursued. On this level of existence, we are most like the trapped rabbits of Australia. I have been talking about the dark dimensions of rabbit-ness and human-ness, but there is another praiseworthy level to both rabbits and humanity. This level is only hinted at in rabbits but it can come to full flower in people. For me, this level is represented by at least three rabbit symbols -- symbols that anthropomorphize rabbits, by the way. There, probably, are more than three examples, but three are enough for today. By the way, don’t let the cuteness of the symbols fool you. There is the Easter Bunny; there is the Velveteen Rabbit of a few years back; there is the rabbit-in-a-hat. When you look at these three symbols closely you can see that they point to that which may be the highest of our human essence! The Easter Bunny, for instance. Teutonic legend has it that once a bird was wasting away because it wanted to live closer to the earth. Eastre, a Teutonic goddess, took pity on the bird and changed it into the rabbit. Thenceforth, every spring that "bird-become-rabbit" (Brabbit? Br'er Rabbit?) laid gaily colored eggs and gave them to humans as symbolic gifts -- symbols of life's constant renewal and rebirth. This is symbolic reminder that there is a higher consciousness or spirit within each of us that shall hatch out if we will let it -- a consciousness that enables us to live both close to the earth and to fly free through the upper reaches of imagination and perception. Human beings, who believe in life, believe this, or something like this. This symbolism has somewhat degenerated in our time, of course. If given a choice, many people, nowadays, would reject the renewal of the Easter Bunny in favor of a supposed tangible immortality represented by the Energizer Bunny -- you know, the Energizer Bunny that seemed omnipresent on TV some time back. He still pops up from time to time beating his drum and marching along to the superficial cadence of contrived immortality. Then there is the Velveteen Rabbit. This is the story of a little boy who so much loved a toy rabbit that the toy rabbit became a real rabbit. It is a beautiful children's story by Margery Williams that was popular during the 1970s and still enjoys some currency. It inspired hundreds of UU sermons because we, human beings, devoutly wish that whatever we truly love become real. Ideas, God, interconnectedness, our image of one another: we tend to believe that, if we believe in these and in like things hard enough and sincerely enough, they will become real. Of course, the same belief process applies to things that upset us and that we would rid ourselves of. But the rabbit is too soft a symbol to represent hate -- unless you know about the attack rabbit in the Monty Python movie about the Holy Grail. But the Velveteen Rabbit, in its deepest sense, speaks to our human desire that love and hope be the realities of our lives. Finally, there is the rabbit-in-a-hat -- the magician's trick. The top hat is empty; a magic incantation is said; and, Voila! a rabbit is drawn forth. This is, of course, a sleight-of-hand trick, an illusion -- not magic. But, we usually get it backwards. The illusion is not the rabbit coming out of the hat; the illusion is that the rabbit was not there in the first place! The illusion is not created when the rabbit appears; the illusion is broken when the rabbit appears -- for, then, we see what is really the case. It was there all the time! Deep down we know that it is the apparent lack of meaning in life -- the apparent lack of love -- that is the illusion. We know that a fuller reality appears when meaning and love appear! The illusion is that these were not there. The reality is that they were there and hidden all along, waiting for us to see clearly enough to recognize them. The rabbit is a symbol of human reality that speaks to us in unexpected ways. What we know of the rabbit is that it is a cute, profitable, potentially destructive creature. What we fantasize about the rabbit speaks subtly to our deepest image of ourselves. The rabbit suggests that there is magic within us. When we tell our children rabbit stories, we point to mystery. We suggest that we, human beings, like rabbits, are of the world we see but that we are, also, more than the world we see. We suggest that our most persistent illusion about life is that what we see is all there is. But, we try to get beyond this illusion; we try to get beyond rabbitness into humanness. We know our worldliness -- our secularity, materiality, rationality, and cunning -- is, somehow, overarched by the mystery of the human spirit. We know that life comes with singing and laughter, with tears and confiding to those who love life. We know that, somehow, love does make life real! This can be as surprising and seem as magical as the rabbit-in-a-hat trick. And, deep down we really know that magic and the supernatural have little to do with it. What matters is that we get beyond illusion to the human reality that is there. Unexpectedly, the rabbit is a symbol of our own spiritual reality. A burrowing animal, the rabbit remembers what flying free was like. A "bird-become-rabbit" that lays the eggs of renewal to hatch out new life, it dispels the illusion that death and meaninglessness are the ultimate end of existence. The true magic of the rabbit is so to confront us with our fearfulness, sensuality, and materiality that we realize it when we are being more rabbit than human. With this realization, the illusion of our own pointlessness drops away to reveal a being we never imagined: a real human being, strong, radiant, beautiful, and wise. Somehow, if we will let it, the rabbit reminds us that we are real human beings rooted in the earth who yet, when awakened beyond our illusions, can make real our aspirations. |