Tommy Denton

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As the nest empties, one of a parent's consolations is nurturing memories of those awakening moments when a child's eyes opened in wonder.

On a sun-splashed grassy slope one springtime long ago, I shattered one of my firstborn's most cherished fantasies by informing him that the Easter Bunny was just make-believe.

Leaving no myth undisturbed, I also crushed the vision of Santa wiggling down the chimney with a sack full of goodies. Debunked, too, was the bow-legged figure of Joe Bob the tooth fairy, decked out in his tiny spurs and twirling the lasso that he used to drag the shiny quarter to the pillow and then to haul away the tooth.

I explained as delicately as I could the meaning of myths and symbolism and how grown-ups use them to help children understand complicated things.

In the minds of little boys and girls, the introduction to abstract values such as love and goodness requires the shape, color, texture and contour of characters like the Easter Bunny, Santa and Joe Bob.

One day, though, youngsters' blossoming logical faculties begin to overtake their sweetest fantasies, and parents face the bittersweet task of helping their children take their first tentative steps into reality. If parents don't, some callous smart aleck on the school ground will do it for them.

Still, myths and illusions die hard, sometimes not at all, and children are not alone in their reluctance to release them. Maybe that isn't all bad, depending on the myth. For every myth that sustains a self-centered, destructive arrogance or fosters a notion of racial or class superiority, another may nurture the hope, against all visible odds, that goodness, truth and beauty can indeed find a niche in an otherwise cruel and depersonalized world.

Like artistic beauty, many symbols find meaning in the eye of the beholder. A cross suspended from a golden chain embodies one meaning. A wooden cross burning on a lawn in the dark of night is quite another.

The swastika was emblazoned on many artifacts preserved from the Bronze Age and was a religious symbol for good luck or benediction in such disparate cultures as China, Japan, India, medieval Europe and tribes of American Indians. Its more recent association with Nazi atrocities and white supremacists projects quite another image.

Symbols and myths, properly used, can be the beacons at least to cast modest illumination that will allow exploration into the dark corridors of ignorance.

A child's mind responds marvelously to a fantasy world where the Easter Bunny hops through lollipop forests and meadows laced with cotton candy, gathering jelly beans, candy eggs and chocolate -- an abundance of good things to share with others for the sheer joy of making them happy.

But if that child sees the bunny as no more than a courier delivering goodies only to gratify her insatiable little tummy, the myth has failed. The bunny then becomes a symbol -- much too common in this culture of voracious appetites -- for hedonistic indulgence.

Easter, in its elemental grandeur, has nothing to do with bunnies, baskets or bonnets, of course. This most venerated of all Christendom's holy days celebrates the triumph of God's unfathomable and enduring love -- in spite of the vices and wickedness that this world arrays against it.

Struggles between good and evil manifest themselves in human struggles between pride and humility, greed and generosity, love and hate. For adults, those conflicts are personified in their everyday experiences. Children can grasp them only in the most superficial way.

Symbols -- the goodness of bunnies and elves, the evil of witches and trolls -- can help them to make these crucial moral distinctions in the simplicity of their fertile imaginations.

The task before those of us who like to believe that we have left the realm of fantasy is to usher the children into the awareness and belief that our symbols animate a spirit that arouses in them a sense of purpose and hope for their young lives.

If that task fails, they will grow to believe, as do so many of their cynical elders, that today is nothing more than the hollow extension of a pagan ritual to celebrate the rebirth of seasons.

Denton's column appears in the Sundays and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.