Earlier in the service Rev. Alison shared an excerpt from the Velveteen Rabbit, which was first published 100 years ago, way back in 1922. It is a story about a stuffed rabbit that doesn’t feel loved by the other toys in the nursery. Some of the more expensive toys quietly snub the rabbit. The mechanical toys feel very superior and look down upon everyone else. They are full of modern ideas and pretend they were real. It is only the old and wise skin horse that’s nice to the rabbit. The rabbit asks him what is real.
“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.
Eventually, the rabbit does become real because of the boy who plays with him and talks to him and sleeps with him every night. The boy loves him so hard all the rabbit’s whiskers get rubbed off. And with time he scarcely looks like a rabbit anymore except to the boy. To him, he was always beautiful, and that was all the little rabbit cared about. He didn’t mind how he looked to other people.
“The Velveteen Rabbit” was written by Margery Williams who was born in London in 1881. She was very close to her dad, a barrister and a classical scholar. She later wrote that he believed children should be taught to read early and then have no regular teaching until they were 10. Margery’s favorite book was a natural history book she found in his library. She wrote that she knew every reptile, bird and beast long before she knew her multiplication table. When she was 7 years old, her dad died suddenly.
Her grandson, in a recent interview, says she was very much in touch with what is real. His words, “She understood that all of these trappings of prestige and material possessions that we associate with being happy and will endear us to others really fall short because it’s only when we allow ourselves to both give and receive unconditional love that we really become truly contented.”[1]
I expect one of the reasons that story has lived on for so long is because of that simple yet profound message. That process of becoming real. That part about how some of our hair gets rubbed off and perhaps we feel a little shabby. But that deeper knowing too about how love, at its best, calls us to be more fully ourselves—our real selves—perhaps.
We get plenty of messages from the culture around us telling us to be something other than who we are. We should be richer, we should be smarter, we should be thinner, we should be prettier than we are. If we just had this or that thing life would be so much better. But truth is those messages all too often point in the opposite direction of being real.
Of course that becoming real part is most essentially something that is inner, that is within us. Something we come to know for ourselves. It comes out of the process of living. And it is something that others can help call out of us. Something others can help us find.
The writer Maya Angelou told the story of a lesson she had when she experienced a spiritual turning point. It was 1955 in a vocal class and her teacher was Frederick Wilkerson. He asked her to read aloud from H. Emile Cady’s book, “Lessons in Truth.”
In her words: “I was twenty-four, very erudite, very worldly. He asked that I read a section which ended with these words: “God loves me.” I read the piece and closed the book, and the teacher said, “Read it again.” Angelou said she felt foolish, being asked to read it again. As a young aspiring dancer in a room full of serious singers, she was already self-conscious. She pointedly opened the book and sarcastically read, “God loves me.” The teacher asks her to read it again. She continues, “After about the seventh repetition I began to sense that there might be truth in the statement, that there was a possibility that God really did love me. Me, Maya Angelou.”
She writes that in that instant, she had to leave the room as she came to know in that moment that she was a child of god. Once away from the others, she started weeping because of what she realized. “God moves me… this God who made the leaves, the stars and rivers, … and you, loves me, Maya Angelou.”
“That’s why I am who I am, because God loves me, and I’m amazed at it, I knew that if God loved me, then I could do wonderful things, I could try great things, learn anything, achieve anything. For what could stand against me with God, since one person, any person with God, constitutes the majority?”[2]
We are asked over and over again to take all the stuff of our lives and to make meaning from it. Life asks us to take all those learnings and setbacks that we experience day by day, lesson by lesson—sometime hard knock by hard knock—to figure out who we are, what’s important and where we are going.
Sometimes becoming real may come in the form of a revelation, in the form of a lesson from an important teacher. But mostly I think I’ve learned that the process of becoming real is something that’s life long, something we just need to keep working at.
This is how the writer Brene Brown says it:
“Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are. Choosing authenticity means cultivating the courage to be imperfect, to set boundaries, and to allow ourselves to be vulnerable; exercising the compassion that comes from knowing that we are all made of strength and struggle; and nurturing the connection and sense of belonging that can only happen when we believe that we are enough. Authenticity demands Wholehearted living and loving—even when it’s hard, even when we’re wrestling with the shame and fear of not being good enough, and especially when the joy is so intense that we’re afraid to let ourselves feel it. Mindfully practicing authenticity during our most soul-searching struggles is how we invite grace, joy, and gratitude into our lives.”[3]
Wholehearted living and loving. To mindfully practice authenticity.
We can’t know what any given day will bring. We cannot know what turns our lives will take. Just when we might think we know how it will be we find out that we don’t know much of anything.
What I have learned is that with time, life reveals itself. With time we come to understand the old wounds and how deep those wounds go. We come to understand the hurts we have done to others. We come to appreciate the gifts we have been given. We come to see how what was once a hurt has brought us to a place that we would not have gotten to without that hurt. We come to see just how multi layered and mysterious life can be.
The process of becoming real is the process of sorting all of that out. It is the process of loving others and letting others love us. It may be the process of losing others and not knowing how we’ll find our way. It is mysterious and wild and wonderful. It is the process of a lifetime.
Words of Sean Parker Dennison:
I will love you by being brave.
I will walk directly into the eye of every storm;
Push back against the wind
That tries to stop my forward motion;
And bare the bruises from hailstones
That mark my skin.
I will love you by being strong.
I will lift the weight of a thousand broken hearts;
Pull the whole world
Behind me on a single chain;
And break my own shell to grow,
tender and new.
I will love you by being wise.
I will close my mouth, open my eyes, my ears, my heart;
Push aside the obvious, the easy,
The darling and the dead;
And begin again and again to know
And not know everything of love.
I will love you by being weak.
I will reveal the tender and the vulnerable,
Hold myself open;
Pull off the armor, the exoskeleton, layer by layer;
And build nothing in its place.
I will love you into being.
I will breathe in and out
And cherish the beating of my own heart;
Push back against anything
That would suffocate my flame
Burn away despair; leave room for more love.
I will love you be being weak
I will love you by being wise
I will love you by being strong
I will love you by being brave
I will love you by being.[4]
We are in the season of gratitude, the time of year when we are most of all asked to give thanks for the bounty of our lives. Now that often can be about the things we have, the bounty we have around us. And that is important to do. To give thanks. And perhaps we can also offer a prayer for those who call us into a fuller sense of who we are. Who call us into our own place of wholeness. Those who help love us into being.
It has been said that the most essential prayer is a prayer of gratitude. That when we don’t know what else to do we might start there. That in the midst of all of life’s complexity we might simply be in the present moment and ask what it is we have to be thankful for in this moment.
Perhaps gratitude is the recognition of how it is our lives depend on others and how other’s lives depend on us. It asks us to take nothing for granted but to live in the awareness that each new day is a gift we have received. It asks us to strip away all the stuff that really isn’t so important and to be first of all aware of all that is in front of us. Perhaps that is some of what helps us find our way to real.
As we bear witness to life—our own and the life of the world around us—we come to see how our lives are through and through connected with the whole of life. And as we can do that we can better see our own lives in the context of that whole.
It is perhaps human to take for granted what we have in our lives. I expect nobody here has what they call a perfect life. In fact I know enough of our stories to know that is far from the case. And I also know this, that there is something that calls us to carry on. There is something that keeps calling us back into life.
Our task over and over again is to recognize our interdependence, to recognize how we are connected. To recognize the love we have known and the love we bring.
Again from the Velveteen Rabbit, “It doesn’t happen all at once, 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.”
In our living may we find our way to becoming more and more real. And in that becoming may we also come into our own capacity to love and to be loved. And in our loving may we make love a little more real in the world. Day by day. Moment by moment. Whisker by whisker. Amen.
Prayer
Great spirit, help us to always begin with gratitude. For our lives. For the lives of those around us. For this creation of which we are a part. And help us to be ever aware, ever grateful for the love that sustains us, that calls us, that allows us to more fully know our own wholeness. Through all of the wonders and tragedies of life, hold us. Help us—each of us and all of us—to know ourselves to be precious in your sight. Amen.
Benediction
Remember, good people, that losing some of your buttons and having some of your fur rubbed off is some of what makes you real. In your life, in all your days, may you know love and may you bring love into the world.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/04/23/1094470418/velveteen-rabbit-centennial
[2] Read a few versions of this story including from https://www.unity.org/article/maya-angelou-and-unity
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1056769-authenticity-is-the-daily-practice-of-letting-go-of-who
[4] “I Will Love You By Being,” by Sean Parker Dennison, from “Braking and Blessing: Meditations,” Skinner House Books 2020.
Topics: Neighbor