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The Velveteen Rabbit and a lesson in reality
While leafing through the much-loved children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit, I came across part of the story where the main character, a stuffed rabbit, asks another nursery toy, the Skin Horse, about being real. The horse tells the rabbit that becoming real is something that happens to you after a child loves you for a long, long time.
Standing in the bookstore, I smiled. While becoming “real” is a very tender element in this story, I started thinking about true spiritual reality, and how we can discover it. I then remembered a distinct turning point in my understanding of reality that took place some years ago after a particularly poignant healing.
At that time I was studying American Sign Language (ASL). I had just enrolled in a total immersion program which involved a week of day-long classes and workshops in ASL. The class was located in another state, and I had to leave at dawn to allow enough driving time to get there for registration. But the evening before, as I made my preparations to leave, I began to feel very ill. I was so distressed at my symptoms, and frightened. This was a condition I’d had off and on since I was a child, and, in the past, I had sometimes resorted to antibiotics to find relief. At other times I had found relief through prayer. This time I wanted to address the situation prayerfully, so I prayed the best I could to know I was the child of divine Love, God. To me that meant I was exempt from anything that God didn’t create—that as His perfect daughter, I could not be touched by an inharmonious condition. My whole being was filled with the yearning to know this truth, to know it as well as I know my name.
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About the author
Caroline Martin lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
February 17, 2014 issue
View Issue-
Letters
Joan Greig, Lori Doutrich
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Redemption and freedom from the past
Kate Ness
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An answer to all our needs: within our reach!
Masisa Tadio Nazert
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Prayer and the yearning to be authentic
Melanie Wahlberg
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Invest in what's important
Myriam Betouche
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The Velveteen Rabbit and a lesson in reality
Caroline Martin
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"In returning and rest shall ye be saved..."
Photograph by Don Seymour
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No steering off course
Christa Kreutz
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A clear, loving message
Irene Miller
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Not sick anymore!
Hannah
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Digestion back to normal
David Fowler
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‘I stood up without pain’
Juliet Blake
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Alarming symptoms vanish
Sofía Rodríguez de Cestti
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Protected during, and after, a car crash
Thomas Liston
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Choose God
The Editors