Ponderings

Trying to find an Easter story for the children is as complicated for me as trying to choose a cross necklace for Winnie (long story, March sermon stuff). Suffice it to say, it’s one of those simple projects that I invariably manage to transform into a mountain.

As a holiday central to our Christian experience, I want to tell the story. But I don’t know how to get around the gruesome death, which is not an appropriate story for young children. I have a collection of children’s books for Christmas, the story of the baby is easy! Yet I have almost no Easter books on my shelf.

Once again this year I decided to search and once again came away frustrated. Picture books abound but almost all end with the final page declaring that the good news of Easter is that Jesus died for our sins and now he has risen. A recent reprint of an old classic by Aileen Fisher is the one exception and, to be candid, it’s rather dry. Believing Jesus about God, believing the death to be tragic, believing Easter to be God’s “no” to the world’s hate, this should be an exciting story of liberation not unlike the Passover story. I want an Easter story that conveys not sacrificial atonement but rather the prayer of Desmond Tutu that “goodness
is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate”.

Faced with boredom or atonement, I turned to the holiday fluff section with bunnies and eggs. Skipping over the Easter-around-the-World books (worthy) and the counting bunny books (always fun), I landed on parables. Some of the parables still convey themes of sacrificial atonement (particularly the ones published by Zondervan and Nelson), but others were more promising. I finally landed two gems; “The Bunny Who Found Easter” by Charlotte Zotolow (the discovery that Easter is not a place but an experience of renewal and community) and “The Golden Egg” by Margaret Wise Brown (celebrating the promise of the emptying tomb/egg). Ironically both of these worthy stories were written years ago and are reissued with new illustrations.

So why is no one writing (or is no one publishing) children’s books for Easter that convey a progressive Christian perspective? Many incredible artists have offered renderings of the story, but we need to recruit new writers. Maybe we could persuade Sarah Thomson, one of our former ‘kids’ who now lives in Portland, Maine to write a story for the rest of us.(We’ve been reading her latest book, The Secret of the Rose, as a family -it’s exceptional!)

In the meantime, it’s Good Friday and I’m grateful for reissued classics.