Article February 17, 2014 Issue

The Velveteen Rabbit and a lesson in reality

Caroline Martin

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.