The children’s team at our church has just spent the week leading up to the Easter holidays offering an Easter storytelling experience to primary-aged children from local schools. Talking it through afterwards, we reflected on how much more challenging - and yet somehow more rewarding - it was than the similar Christmas experience we offered just a few months ago. Christmas is an easy story to tell to children - all fluffy sheep and chubby angels - but it’s trickier to explain the meaning behind it all. Easter, on the other hand, is a difficult story to tackle, but one that is at the heart of understanding the Christian faith.
The problem is that to tell the Easter story, we have to talk about death, and that’s a subject we tend to avoid with children until it’s absolutely necessary - often when they first experience the death of a beloved pet or a family member. And at that point, we fumble; it so often takes us by surprise.
That’s why Eleanor Watkins’ beautiful novel Moon Song for 9-14 year olds is, to my mind, an Easter book, even though it doesn’t mention Easter at all (in fact, quite a lot of it is set at Christmas). The woodland creatures at the centre of the story have a clear belief system, which they gradually reveal and explain to Chas, the abandoned puppy who is trying to live wild alongside them. There is a Maker, a Master - not like human masters, but a good and kind one - who will one day renew his creation and make everything perfect. Until then, the death that is an inevitable part of woodland experience - the harsh winters, the cruelty of humans, the fact that some animals have to kill and eat to survive - is just painful evidence that the day has not yet come.
That may seem bleak, but the hope in the book is glorious. In one memorable scene, the animals gather around the grave of one of their own and they sing:
Go to thy maker, thou child of the woodland…
…Rest quietly. Wait.
As we all wait
For the coming of our Master.
For in him, and him alone, will all be made well.
Chas points his snout to the moon and attempts to join in with a miserable howl, expressing the unfairness of it all in a perfect representation of a child’s emotion.
Eleanor Watkins’ picture of all creation waiting for the return of a master echoes the words of Paul in Romans 8, where he writes that ‘all creation waits in eager expectation… in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.’ Eleanor’s own love for nature, and her passion about damaging human influences on the environment, shine through the story and unite us, as readers, with the longing and hope of the animals for a different, renewed world.
We can’t tell the Easter story without having some understanding of death, because it’s only once we feel ourselves rebelling against death that the resurrection of Jesus matters at all. The renewed creation that Easter day promises is the Christian message, the Christian hope. Moon Song is the perfect way for older children to begin to discover it.
Written by Amy Scott Robinson