The Use of Becoming Real

Our church is using Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie's book of devotions Good Enough in small groups, and today we talked about her devotion on the The Velveteen Rabbit, so I reread the children’s book by Margery Williams. The Skin Horse's monologue on becoming real that is cited in Good Enough is powerful, but as a multiple-time loss mom, I was fixated on a question about love and realness that comes later in the book, a question before the Velveteen Rabbit must be burned after the Boy gets Scarlet Fever: “Of what use was it to be loved and become Real if it all ended like this?”

Oof. But I’ve asked this same question, even when we scattered our daughter's ashes. You might have asked the same question yourself after a loss or divorce, while caring for a loved one after a stroke or through the illness of addiction. Here we went and got shabby and fell apart all do to the the power of love, and then it ended in difficulty or even literal ashes. Of what use is love at these kinds of horrible endings?

Margery Williams doesn’t give us the beautiful monologue of a Skin Horse to answer the Rabbit’s question. Instead a fairy comes and makes some magic. She makes the Rabbit real not just to the Boy who loved him into realness but to everyone. The Rabbit is happy, but the Rabbit and the Boy are no longer together and only glimpse one another in the wood on a sunny day. It isn’t a satisfying ending to me. If I am reading the Rabbit as my lost baby Autumn, then becoming really Real is about heaven. Which is beautiful, sure. But it doesn’t change the Rabbit’s question for me. Because I need my baby to be Real with me, still safe inside my womb until her due date in April; I don’t need her off in heaven being Real before I even got to know her. Of what use was her becoming Real otherwise?

I think I will be asking this question for a long time.

But I also think the answer is that as I loved Autumn into Realness, she was loving me too. And my spouse and living child and my family and friends and church- we were all loving each other as we loved Autumn into Realness and are still loving each other into Realness. Today, a friend asked me if I wanted to talk about Autumn, and so I did, and it felt like this great big pile of loving on each other and Autumn all at the same time. Love is the question, but it is also the answer it seems. And that might not always be satisfying, but it is Real.

Check out Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie’s book here: https://katebowler.com/good-enough/

Read The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams with illustrations by William Nicholson here: https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/williams/rabbit/rabbit.html