Hoppism

"We hop in the tradition of the blessed rabbits in the hope that someday we shall rise, as Christ has risen."

Hlogan's commission
Imagine being the first creature to see the resurrected Jesus.

Except Hlogan was a rabbit.

Lucky for him, Jesus still knew how to cast miracles, and he blessed Hlogan and his family with the gift of language. This came with two conditions: be fruitful and multiply, and that he and his descendants would tell everyone the good news of the kingdom to come. So Hlogan knew he had to find a way to bootstrap his ministry quickly, as the spiritual gifts of prophecy and ability to learn a language overnight were set to pass away. But he understood what the apostle Paul of Tarsus would later write to a budding congregation at Corinth, that even after short-term spiritual gifts needed to bootstrap early Christianity passed away, three gifts would remain with the congregation over the long term: "faith, hop, and love."

Hlogan realized that rabbitkind had the "hop" and "multiply" things down. So he sat and thought of ways to promote the gospel that humans around the world would understand. He ended up collecting hens' eggs as a symbol of the miraculous implantation of Jesus as a fertilized egg in the womb of the blessed virgin surrogate. To drive the point further, he decided to stain them red to represent two things: the virgin's missed period and an additional symbol of the blood shed during Jesus's execution, alongside the Eucharist cup.

Thus the tribe of Hlogan did God's work as the first Easter bunnies.

The Hoppists
Over many, many generations of rabbits, the secularization and commercialization of Easter caused the symbolism of red eggs to fade from humankind's memory. Some Easter bunnies backslid from the faith and came to see bringing eggs of many colors as its own thing.

Until the Hoppists came around.

In an early manuscript of the New Testament, an ancient copyist had "corrected" the enduring spiritual gifts to "faith, hope, and love." At the time, "hope" referred to confident expectation of God's providence, before it weakened centuries later to mean merely "wanting something to happen." One faithful Easter bunny who still remembered the association with virgin birth and ransom sacrifice decided to distract a printer into spelling "hope" as "hop". This "error" found its way into the Bibles shipped to a few congregations, usually going unnoticed until the sermon on the properties of Christian love.

A few pastors and elders happened up on this "hop" and tried to find other evidence in the Bible to explain why it was there. (It's a longstanding tradition of Bible study that "scripture interprets scripture," or that the meaning of a particular verse is the one that causes the Bible not to contradict itself.) After a search for other cases where Bible characters would jump or leap, one sect ended up distinguishing its worship by hopping on both feet on the way to and from meetings.

Some Easter bunnies watched Hoppist congregations grow and saw an opportunity to reinstate the true meaning of Easter as their patriarch had instituted it. They made up baskets of red hard-boiled eggs and met church leaders as they left meetings, though it took a few tries before many of them accepted the miracle of a talking rabbit.

Bolstered by this miracle, the Hoppists persisted even after the next shipment of Bibles returned to "hope", as the sect saw confidence in God as a consequence of faith, not a distinct gift.

Yogic flying
"Think happy thoughts, lift off, and miss the ground."

In parallel to all this was Yoga Sutras, a text compiled by Patanjali in India in roughly the fourth century CE describing "inhibition of the distractions of the mind". Its eight components were ethics, virtuous habits, posture, breath control, ignoring external senses, maintaining inward focus, deep reflective contemplation, and dissociation from self and loss.

The second half of the 20th century saw practices derived from yoga gain popularity in the west. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi founded Transcendental Meditation (TM), with practices derived from yoga's use of a mantra, while the posture and breath control were mixed with gymnastics to form a fitness program.

The advanced "TM-Sidhi" program practices "yogic flying," a method of locomotion involving hopping on one's behind and thighs in the lotus position. Mahesh believed that if several practitioners of TM-Sidhi "fly" in the same place, this creates a field reducing the propensity of people toward violence. To count how many people you need to "fly" at once to make a peace field have noticeable effect in a city, divide the population by 100 and then take the square root. For example, it takes 50 people hopping on a gym's padded floor to cover a city of 250,000 people.

The Easter bunnies have taken notice of yogic flying and seek to understand the connection between prayer and meditation, as it may help Hoppists replicate the peace field. Appropriating techniques of TM may prove useful to help spread Jesus's core commandment to "love one another."