Becoming Real

‘It’s elementary to the wise/For the fool in full disguise,

Beggars bow and poets kneel, and as for me, it’s finally real.’ 

                                                                                       ‘Daddy,’ Kendall Payne (2007)

You might have noticed that we live in an image-driven world. In fact we live in a world that applauds masks – the more perfect an image is, the more applause it receives. A number of my friends have become deeply dissatisfied with Facebook recently – I think this is because while there’s lots of good things about Facebook, Facebook is inescapably concerned with image-construction. Your “friends” don’t really get to know about your life – they get snapshots of your life, soundbites of your life. They get image. And image doesn't satisfy - no matter how impressive it is. Worse, image reduces us. It fools us into believing that our worth is no more than what people can see in any one moment in time. And image robs us. It robs us of the real.

“Real isn’t how you are made… real is 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, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt…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 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.”

                       The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Stuffed Toys Become Real, Margery Williams (1922)

I stumbled across this kiddy’s book again this summer – and it’s deep, people. We don’t end up ‘real’ – with the solid poise of anchored authenticity - by ourselves. I don’t think we’re born secure. We’re born searching, hungry to know who we are and where we fit into the world. Real is something you receive through being loved for a ‘long, long time’. That’s an amazing paradox of grace. God invites you to know his love through laying down your own selfish ambition, through taking up your cross, through decreasing as you allow him to increase – but that that does not mean you become less of a person, it doesn't mean you lose anything that even remotely counts. You become more. More substantial. More alive. Because you are becoming like your Saviour, who is, among many many other things, the most real person who has ever existed.

When I was little I had a teddy who my mum took away every Christmas to get a ‘new coat’ because he had been cuddled so much his fur had fallen off. This rather magical procedure in fact entailed the first ‘Baby Teddy’ being thrown away (Shh!) and replaced by different model. You could tell because Baby Teddy numbers 2,3,4,5, and 6 had completely different fur colours, body and face shapes than the original. I think the only time I started to smell a rat was when Baby Teddy went through the replacement machine outside of the Christmas season due to him having been left on a bus.

Baby Teddy kind of got destroyed by infantile Cat love. He ended up being pretty grubby and threadbare. How great is it that God’s everlasting love, with which he has loved us, doesn’t diminish us - but heals and renews us. And it does hurt to become real. God’s love hurts, because it demands that we wake up to the smallness and bankruptcy of our own hearts, and because sometimes it deliberately leads us into difficult times and dark places. But it’s in that journey that we get to see the beauty of the only love that can make us real and achieve the one thing that our world’s lovesick fixation with image never could – set us free.

“Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all." (2 Corinthians 4:16,17)

Once you spend a long time under the glory-weight of God's steadfast love, you cannot remain the same. You change. You become.

“And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” (2 Corinthians 3: 18) Wow.