Pandemic Parables: The Bunny
Saturday June 20th 2020

I felt such a surge of elation on Friday a few minutes after noon when passing the gift shop in the hospital where I am working as a Resident Chaplain until the end of August.

It was open!

I charged in.

We’ve missed you! We’ve really missed you!” I exclaimed, my hands clutched to my chest in excited glee.

“What a wonderful surprise! It is so good to have you back!”

The gift shop closed a couple of weeks before Resurrection Sunday.

I have written before of the frozen Easter display including the grey fuzzy bunny who slumped further and further towards the bright orange carrot in his paws as the reality of the Coronavirus bore down upon the hospital.

One dreadful day I realized the bunny had disappeared from the window. At the same moment I spied stealthy bunny napping shadows moving in the back of the shop.

The wonderful volunteers from the Hospital Auxiliary who run the place had not been allowed in for months. At the time I presumed a couple had been granted a few hours access, perhaps to dust.

That was several weeks ago.

I’d never had any intention of buying the bunny. It was fairly expensive. On the whole I’m sensible. I didn’t need a stuffed rabbit.

But I kept staring at him every time I passed by.

A Facebook friend was incredibly kind. She read my post about the missing bunny and sent me one, a carbon copy of the bunny that had brought her comfort during a recent trauma added to the ongoing stress of the virus. He was soft, pink and squishy, with very long ears that were perfect for wiping away tears. I was very grateful. This was an act of generosity and love.

But, although I felt a tad guilty because of my new stuffed friend, I kept on thinking about the gray fuzzy bunny.

After Easter I’d had a brief conversation with two female staff members who were walking together.  I had never met them before.

We were passing the shop in different directions.

“Don’t you think that bunny looks like all of us who are left in the hospital, slumping further and further down because of the tension and stress that’s swirling in here,” I said.

They both laughed. Then one of the women pointed to the other.

“She really wants to buy that bunny. She really, really likes that bunny.”

“I do,” said the other, and she pressed her face against the window like a child in an old-fashioned sweet shop.

“But it’s closed so I can’t.”

We passed on and I didn’t think any more about the conversation.

Weeks elapsed. Then the bunny disappeared leaving a cavernous space on the shelf where his furry posterior had perched. It wasn’t part of a purging of Easter decorations. Other china and chocolate bunnies were still sadly standing sentinel. But the grey, carrot-clutching bunny was definitely AWOL, even though the shop was closed.

I pass that shop at least six times a day. I missed that bunny more and more every time I peered in the darkened window. I realized I really, really liked that bunny. I mourned his absence. I wanted that bunny.

I would go without to get that bunny.

I had to have that furry bunny!

One day I suddenly spotted that all the other stuffed animals were also missing. A whole three tiered carousel of them was empty.

Why hadn’t I noticed this before?

“I bet when those volunteers were in they took all the stuffed toys into the back so they wouldn’t become dust traps,” said a Facebook friend who’d read my post.

“The bunny could well be in with the others in the storage area.”

Like the Emily Dickinson poem, hope like a feathered thing started to flutter in my soul.

“Perhaps the bunny hasn’t really gone,” I thought.

“Perhaps he is wrapped up snuggly in the back room waiting to emerge before Easter next year.”

I wrote a note to the volunteers, although I hadn’t seen any in the shop since the bunny heist.

It started: “To the wonderful volunteers who man the gift shop”

I explained what had happened regarding the bunny, and then went on to say:

“If by chance he is still available, I would really like to buy him. Really, really like to buy him. I realize that I miss him! I have watched him constantly throughout the pandemic as I went off to do rounds and now I would love to adopt him and take him home.

“I am crossing all my fingers and toes, and sending up a couple of prayers that the bunny is safe and in your back room. Do let me know.

“My money is jangling in my pocket. Well really on my credit card. I am so hoping he is still for sale...

Thank you!”

Praying that whoever opened it would have a sense of humor, I signed it:

“A bunny love-sick chaplain.” 

After adding my name and contact details I put the missive in a white envelope and shoved it under the gift shop’s glass doors.

There it stayed.

For an eternity I saw that blob of white on the floor untouched. Day in and day out, it remained exactly where it was.

Then I saw some things had been shifted around in the gift shop.  Volunteers must have been in and left.

But the letter was unmoved.

Finally, eons later, the letter was gone. But no one was in the store. Later in the afternoon though, I saw the manager - the loveliest of women - behind the windows of the still closed shop.

I pressed my face to the locked glass door.

The manager shook her head. Weeks before she had told me she would find out what had happened to the bunny.

“It’s gone.” She said. “Sold.”

I thanked her then walked away sadly. Drooping.

Some things are not meant to be.

That was about three weeks ago.

Oh fickle chaplain that I am, I realized in the intervening time that I really could live without the bunny. But still, I hoped it had gone to a good home.

I watched as the shop windows were slowly and beautifully transformed from Easter to summer. Decorative buckets with recipes for crab boils on them, and July 4th regalia, replaced bonnets and rabbits.

Then, all of a sudden, this past Friday, the shop was open.

I discovered that they are letting that wonderful volunteer shop manager come in, and she will be helped by a staff member, the director of volunteers - an equally marvelous woman.

Six people will be allowed in at a time, and the store will be open from twelve noon until four pm Monday through Friday. Hallelluia!

It was a thrill to see those doors open!

It was such a sign that things are on their way back to normal.

(Although we still have a way to go. On Friday we had ten Covid-19 patients in the hospital and two in isolation, a slight uptick from earlier in the week. However one hundred and eighty one virus patients have been released.)

I went in exclaiming my delight that they were finally open.

“We’ve missed you” I said. We’ve really, really missed you!”

The manager smiled at me and her kind eyes crinkled.

“I’m sorry about the bunny,” she said.

“There was a meeting with one of the hospital’s compliance officers when I wasn’t here. They were discussing how best to open the store. Apparently the CO had a real thing for that bunny. She had even posted pictures of it on Facebook saying she wanted it. So an executive decision was made, and they sold her the bunny before the store was officially opened.

I suddenly realized I had seen the compliance officer.  It had to have been one of the two women that I’d met by chance months before when passing the store. The one who had pressed her face against the glass.

There was no question, the right woman got that bunny.

I felt relief.

He couldn’t be more loved or in a better home.

Clearly that grey carrot clutching rabbit was never meant to be mine.

That was confirmed when I went into the finally open gift store on Friday. There, on the shelf where the bunny had been sitting, was a placard. I started to laugh. It was a scripture from John 8:35:

“So if the Son sets you free you are free indeed.”

What a perfect end to the saga.

The bunny had been liberated.

And so had I!

I thought about the times that I knew in my heart that a person, a thing, a direction wasn’t for me, wasn’t my best option. Only to later convince myself that it was.

And I am very persuasive.

In this Coronavirus time of constant change it is easy to want the uncertainties to end, for the ever shifting ground to stop moving beneath our feet. How easy it would be to go in the wrong direction, to settle for a less than ideal solution, to make the wrong choice because of a craving for stability.

Like a mollusk searching for a rock.

Then settling for a pebble.

May we, during this oddest and most difficult of seasons, take time to go deep within ourselves and rediscover again who we are.

Why we are here.

And may we pursue that, and only that.

May we have the courage to shed all else.

May we take to heart once again the promise in the Good Book, where it says in Jeremiah that the Lord has promised to prosper us, and not to harm us, to give us a hope and a future.

 May we trust that the Lord will make a way where there seems to be no way.

May we let go of things we think we want, so that they can go to where they are meant to be.

Indeed, may all the bunnies in our lives end up in their right homes, no matter how we might try to manipulate a different outcome.

May we trust the small voice within us that guides us with truth and love, and not talk ourselves into some other version of what we tell ourselves is truth.

And may we trust at a deep level that we will have everything we need to make it through this season and the next.

Because the Lord is on our side. His promises are yes and amen. There is no shadow of turning in him.

 And that means our futures will be good.

Amen.