Becoming Real

The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

"What is REAL?" asked the [Velveteen] Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

--From The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams


We had some mixed emotions on the Thread today--new babies, dead uncles, published articles and whatnot. It seemed like life was hitting full-force--like we were experiencing becoming a bit more real, more fulfilled, more whole.

Truth to me seems to be the things that aren't always easy but the things that make me feel like I am being fulfilled, being turned more and more into the divine creature that my nature was formed from--of God or one with God. I've got a long way to go for sure.

As George MacDonald says, "We are not and cannot become true sons without our will willing his will, our doing following His making. It was the will of Jesus to be the thing God willed and meant him, that made him the true son of God. He was not the son of God because he could not help it, but because he willed to be in himself the son that he was in the divine idea. . .And we can be sons and daughters, saved into the original necessity and bliss of our being, only by choosing God for the father he is, and doing his will--yielding ourselves true sons to the absolute Father. Therein lies human bliss--only and essential. The working out of our salvation must be pain, and the handing of it down to them that are below must be in pain; but the eternal form of the will of God in and for us, is intensity of bliss. [From Creation in Christ]

It seems odd to me that so many Evangelical Christians want this Earth to pass away and to flee in the fourth quarter--as if that is how God works during Armageddons. It appears that during the great floods and fire-from-heaven episodes of the Bible, the righteous are left behind--Noah, Lot, Rahab, etc. . . I'm becoming a fan of NT Wright's work, particularly his affinity for nature and the way that God reveals himself to us in the great work he created around us and Christ is recreating for Him. As my friend Shani wrote in her FullFill article this month (http://www.fulfill.org) quoting NT: "You are not planting roses in a garden that's about to be dug up for a building site. You are--strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself--accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God's new world."

Sheldon Vanauken paraphrased CS Lewis in A Severe Mercy: "Both Heaven and Hell are retroactive, all of one's life will eventually be known to have been one or the other."

CS Lewis said it even better (in my humble opinion): ". . .every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either in a Heaven creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is Heaven: that is, it is joy, and peace, and knowledge, and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other." [From Mere Christianity.]













becoming more real
pain of regeneration
dios mio, man