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.

As the night wore on, however, I felt worse. I began to cry as the pain increased, and then, although it was quite late, I called my Christian Science teacher for Christian Science treatment. I had taken Christian Science class instruction from him the year before to really ground myself in the teachings of Christian Science. It had been the holiest time of my life as the class delved into the practice of this loving, healing Science.

This night I poured out to him my worries about the chronic condition and my fear about being so far away from home while dealing with this issue. At that point I seriously doubted my ability to make the journey and complete the sign language course.

There was a pause on the other end of the phone. Then the teacher calmly said, “Caroline, you can never be separated from God.”

I felt the reality of that truth. I was healed before I hung up the phone.

That was it. That was all he said. And at that moment I understood. I felt the reality of that truth. All my prayers over the years regarding this situation were answered in one sentence. It was as if I’d been climbing stairs, each one leading a bit higher, and this was the top step! I had gone over and over spiritual facts, but wiping away any thought of separation from God was what finally brought freedom. With it came the deep conviction that I am, right now, the perfect child of God.

I was healed before I hung up the phone. I felt the condition vanish, right there and then—and it never returned. I silently reached out to God in gratitude.

I spent the remainder of the night prayerfully acknowledging my inseparability from God. I had witnessed in a moment that healing, as practiced in Christian Science, is the outcome of glimpsing reality, wherein we feel and know that we are the cherished spiritual children of a perfect Father-Mother. The outward result is harmony and peace.

In The Velveteen Rabbit, the title character had to become real. Spiritually speaking, it’s a different story: Each of us has always been spiritually perfect. And when we hear God’s voice more strongly than anything else, that opens the door for Love’s messages to come rushing into our thought, and the result is healing. Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “If divine Love is becoming nearer, dearer, and more real to us, matter is then submitting to Spirit” (p. 239 ). Elsewhere, she states, “In divine Science, God and the real man are inseparable as divine Principle and idea” (Science and Health, p. 476 ). That night, I recognized that both of these ideas were facts, not just familiar statements. Full of childlike wonder and gratitude beyond what words can express, I went forward with my plans and had an amazing sign language immersion week.

In the Bible we read of a woman who had been troubled with an “issue of blood” for 12 years. When she sought out Jesus in a crowd, she had faith that by touching just the hem of his garment she could regain her health. Imagine her joy, her gratitude, when she touched the garment’s hem and then felt in her body that “she was made whole from that hour” (see Matthew 9:20–22 ). I understood that joy, and the immediacy of wholeness right where pain and fear seemed so real.

While not all healing takes place instantaneously, the result is the same: we grow closer to God, clearer in our understanding of the reality of spiritual being. We feel completely loved. The Velveteen Rabbit reminded me, in such a sweet way, that we don’t have to “become real”—we already are the very real, spiritual child of of our dear Father-Mother. Opening our hearts to that truth heals, and turns us Godward in speechless gratitude and love.