Tag Archives: Paul Tillich

A Caveat About Judgmentalism

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The excerpt from Paul Tillich’s book, “On Boundaries” I shared recently is a prophetic word for us.  And in pointing out what “ails us” a prophet is “doom preaching” in some manner and one of my readers definitely took it that way.  I appreciate his “like” of the post and his “bothering” to share with me his take on the Tillich shared there, though I disagreed with its tenor.

Tillich lived and spoke with hope as did many Germans of his day, Dietrich Bonnhoeffer and Hannah Arendt for example. Tillich, Bonhoeffer, and Arendt were seers, prophets in a very real sense as they were keenly “aware of the present moment,” this “awareness” a gift to one with a prophetic voice.The gifted historian William Irwin Thompson noted that a prophet, “is not so much having the ability to foretell the future but the ability to be aware of the implications of the present.”  We have them in our world today in the art and literary fields as well as with spiritually astute individuals like Richard Rohr, Marriane Williamson, and the Reverend William Barber, to name but a few.

But the reader’s response made me aware of the “tenor” of what I think, say, do, and “write” in this venue.  Even the very profound excerpt from the Tillich book, “Boundaries” makes a statement about the one who was writing and is sharing.  Someone once said, “Give a kid a hammer and everything is a nail.” Yes, the post of yesterday is another example of a “kid with a hammer” in a very real sense.  Yes, “in a sense,”  I am a very judgemental person and occasionally realize that in the formative years of my life, I would even say early moments, I “felt” judged and thus became a “judge” in a sense.  But mercifully I see this on occasion and “tone it down” a bit, look around for a moment and see the beauty of the world that surrounds me.  

For example, let me share with you a visit from Beauty which I was blessed with on Sunday morning last.  Shortly after awakening, I walked into the living room and noticed the bird-storm outside my windows, the flurry of birds delighting in the feeders I have out to win their favor.  This alone always quietens the din of heavy-handed, ponderous, pontificating that is always so ready to lure me from the Grace of simply “being here.”  There was a warm fire crackling in the wood stove to my left, a cup of hot coffee before me, and my beautiful little dachshund, Petey, curled up beside me.  Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” was playing on the Dish-satellite music channel. In a few moments my lovely wife began to rehearse on her Grand Piano for the music program at a nearby little Methodist church a bit later, via Zoom.  The old hymns from my youth stirred my soul as she played them and sang along, Petey joined occasionally when he deemed the key in tune with his musically sensitive ears.  (Admittedly, Petey’s “singing” would be dismissed by less refined listeners as a lot of barking and whining!)  In an hour or so, Petey and l shifted venues in our house to the sunroom as my wife joined her church service.  Petey and I call the lovely sunroom on this occasion, “the penalty box” as it keeps his highly-skilled and sophisticated voice from interfering with the church service. There Petey and I are delighted with the view of a sun-filled desert behind our house, the back-splash of which is the stunning Taos Mountain Range, snow-covered from recent snow-fall.  According to local lore, these mountains are sacred and their “call” leads some people to move here and take root which we did seven years ago.  We are honored because these mountains did not “kick us out” as, per local lore, will happen to some who move here but who don’t last long.  We passed the ancient test of these mountains and are honored.

Whatever out thoughts, whatever their tenor, they will pass.  As someone said, “We are not our thoughts. are the ones having them.”  Therefore, “Don’t believe everything you think!!!”

Stunning and Profound Wisdom on Boundaries From Paul Tillich

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Paul Tillich is one of the great “finds” of mine in the 20th century, shaping the course of my life henceforth.  I think he is the most important theologian I’ve ever come across and one of the most important thinkers. Being raised in Nazi Germany, he could not help but have learned a lot about boundaries and the easier path for him would have been to succumb to the inertia of his culture and become a Nazi; absolutism and certainty always solves the “messiness” of what could eventually become a mature faith!  But somewhere along the course of his young life, he found a “contrary” vein of thought in his heart which led him to follow the path of a German contemporary of his, Hannah Arendt and employ Shakespeare’s “pauser reason.” He found that boundaries had value but only if one could find the equally valuable respect for the “no boundary” dimension of life. This wisdom allowed him to write among many other things, “The Courage to Be” which is such a powerful book on the importance of “be-ing” a human and not simply become flotsam-and-jetsom in the current of contemporary thought. Here is an excerpt….

The American book, “On the Boundary” tells about several boundaries that are common to all and at the same time to my own personal destiny: about the boundaries between country and city, between feudalism and civil service, between bourgeoisie and bohemian, between church and society, between religion and culture, theology and philosophy — and lastly, quite personally, between two continents. (He had moved to the United States to escape the Nazis.)

The existence on the boundary, the boundary situation, is full of tension and movement. It is in reality not a stance, but a crossing and returning, a re-returning and a re-recrossing, a to-and-fro, the goal of which is to create a third area beyond the bordered ones, something on which one can stand for a time without being enclosed in a fixed border. The situation of the boundary is not yet what one could call peace; and yet it is the passage that each individual must and that peoples must go through to arrive at peace.  For peace means standing in the overarching thing that is being sought in the crossing and the crossing back over the boundary. Only someone who has a share in both sides of a boundary line can serve what overarches it and thus serve peace, not someone who feels secure in the momentary quiet of a fixed border.  Peace appears where in personal and political life an old boundary has lost its importance and with that its power to foment strife, even if it continues in place as the boundary for some partition.  Peace is not a tensionless juxtaposition; it is unity in something more comprehensive, in which the opposition of living powers and the conflicts between old and new are not lacking,  but in which they do not break out destructively, but rather are constrained in the peace of what overarches them.

If the crossing and crossing back over the boundary is the way to peace, then the fear of what lies on the other side, and the wish that is born from that to be rid of it, is the root of discord and war.

When fate has taken one to the boundary of one’s being and has made one aware of oneself, one is faced with the decision of falling back on what one is or of crossing beyond oneself.  All persons are led to the boundary of their being now and then.  They see the other beyond themselves, which appears as a possibility for themselves, and awakens in them the fear of the possible.  They see their own boundedness in the mirror of the other, and are frightened. (W. H. Auden, “And Truth met him, and held out her hand; but he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”)

Tillich’s explanation of the subtlety of boundaries reveals how conflict arises among human beings, and technically the whole of creation. He is very astute, and very “Rumi” to recognize the value of an “overarching framework” as being the solution to what can otherwise be an interminal and even lethal conflict. Rumi, a 13th century Persian told us, “Beyond the notion of right doing and the wrong doing there is a field; I will meet you there.”  The “field” is the “overarching” Presence that Tillich had in mind.

Sparrows, Wendell Berry, Stanley Kunitz, and Paul Tillich

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I often perseverate. Just a few days ago I was perusing my library and pulled out two copies of the work of poet/essayist Wendell Berry and shared a couple of thoughts here. But this casual, even random perusal of my books has done what literature should do, it has stimulated me along a certain vein of thought. Thus my current “perseveration” which will lead me soon to even an heavy-duty German/American theologian of the 20th century, Paul Tillich. But first, from yesterday the notion of a sparrow being but “organized energy” has really grabbed me, as I realized that some similar “organized energy” grabbed me at birth…and even before…and is still here today. This is some vestige of primordial will operating through me which has led me to this phase of my life in which I bring emphasis to the metaphorical dimension of life. And there is no escape from this central entelechy in one’s body and soul, only modification so that we might more or less fit in which the entelechy that is guiding our species. Let me illustrated with the wisdom of poet Stanley Kunitz who once said in a poem entitled, “Layers” that, “I have walked through many lives, some of them my own. I am not the one I was though some remnant of being remains from which I struggle not to stray.” That “remnant of being” is a way of describing the very core of our soul, a primal energy that has been “harnessed” as is with the sparrow so to bring us to this moment in our life. The same could be said of our species.

This indomitable, irrepressible will, in my daily “perseveration’ in life, has brought me this morning to the aforementioned kindred spirit of mine, Paul Tillich. My next post, if this current flow of “perseveration” continues with me, will be his observation about human will and the complexities of “harnessing” it.

Specious Reality Gets a “Reality Check” Here and There

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My focus here recently has been reality, as in “reality.”  My emphasis is the vulnerability that “reality” faces, as it is something other than the basic assumptions that we take for granted.  Here, I am putting on the table something that cannot actually be put “on the table.”  For “reality” is subtle to the point that we can never fully grasp it with our feeble, pea-sized brain but only with a discerning heart that can understand these subtleties, or at least understand that they can only be inferred.  In this effort I make it very complicated…because it is complicated, infinitely so…but it can be simply presented by borrowing from the Apostle Paul, “We see through a glass darkly.”

It is this “darkliness” that is imperiled with the term I employed days ago, “the judgement of God.”  Psychologist Carl Jung used the word “einfall” to describe this irruption into our consciousness, an intrusion which often rattles our cage beyond our comfort zone.  Another term I’d like to introduce here is the “black swan” popularized several years ago by Nassim Nicholas Tasseb with his book, “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.”  Tasseb uses the aberration of a swan being black rather than white to introduce the shock of cognitive dissonance, the “catastrophe” of realizing that things are not as we see them.  According to Wikipedia, Tasseb’s metaphor “lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought.  A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved.”

Our world is now being shaken to the core, with many “fundamental postulates” jeopardized.  Any country worth its salt will have leaders who will avoid blaming anyone, will focus on the problem as it applies to its own people, and offer a well thought out strategy for this perilous moment in history.  The image of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, confined to a wheelchair, calmly guiding us through the Great Depression and into the 2nd World War came to my mind.  What courage, fortitude, and faith.  He knew it was not all about him.

Addictive Thinking and Our Political/Spiritual Morass

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The abysmal morass that is gripping my country today is just a matter of “thinking.”  I sometimes tease my friends on this subject with, “Hey, why don’t God just stop us from thinking.  All the problems would then go away.”  But, of course, the problem is actually deeper than our thinking as our thinking flows from our heart and as Woody Allen once noted, justifying his marriage to his step-daughter, “The heart wants what it wants.”  We think what fits our heart’s intents and it is easier to just go with where our thinking takes us than dare to look into these intents.  Looking into these intents is to risk opening Pandora’s box and our identity in a sense is predicated on not venturing there.  But not “venturing there” leaves us with an impoverished identity, a rigid ego structure that can make us very successful, even give us a very “good” life, but one that is missing the riches that could be had by that “venture.”  The poet Ranier Rilke noted, “The heart has its beastly little treasures.”

William Butler Yeats, the famous Irish poet, addressed this mind-body disconnect with the powerful prayer, “Oh God, guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone.  They who sing a lasting song must think in the marrow bone.”  Thinking is intrinsically a dissociative developmental accomplishment but in maturity…if things go right…we can acquire the ability to let our thinking be influenced by our emotions, i.e. “our body.”  We will then be able to ‘feel” and “think” together, no longer being captive to our preconceptions and premises, described by W. H. Auden as the thinking of “a logical lunatic.”

The issue here is “the heart.”  My heart is still tainted by my literal-thinking past in which I somehow imagined it existing in my depths in some concrete form.  This concretism allowed me to think that I “knew” my heart, that I could grasp with my intellect its machinations, as well as treasures.  My culture taught me that this was possible.  For decades I’ve been learning that the heart is a mysterious dimension of my experience that cannot ever be fathomed by “thinking.”  But here, I am tackling “with words” to put into words a dimension of human experience that cannot be put into words.  That dimension is the “Divine Spark” which is the Ineffable and therefore a mystery, known only by “that still small voice” in the depths of our hearts which is “heard” only in silence.  There are parts of me to which this makes “no sense” at all for those “parts” are the hyper-rationality that I escaped into in my youth with the nudging of my culture.  Well, “nudging” is putting it mildly.  Cultural dictates are overwhelming to a child which is why they are so difficult to become aware of at any age.  They are intrinsically subtle and the egoic mind is not designed for subtlety.

We are now witnessing in my country what can happen when reason is in subjection to unacknowledged depths of the soul.  The acknowledgement of these depths evokes the feeling of being out of control, an illusory sense of control which reason has given us.  The religious dimension of this catastrophe was prophesied by Paul Tillich in the mid-20th century when he wrote, “A religion within the bounds of religion is a mutilated religion.”  Tillich knew that the resulting faithlessness of religion would facilitate the spiritual darkness in which we are now living; for, religion locked in the “logical lunacy” of reason does not require any faith though it does facilitate the seduction of certainty.

Tony Kusher, “Change Is Difficult”

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How do people change?  Well, most of us don’t; we start out lives in a rut, learn to cling to that rut, find others in a similar rut, take comfort there and try not to deviate.  To deviate is scary.  There is comfort in sameness.  When “deviance” presents itself…and any “difference” often evokes the fear of “deviance”… we are prone to put up the sign of the cross and run away.

But change is part of life.  Life is fluid; and its flow takes us different directions at times and if we resist that flow we will find ourselves in a static dimension of life.  Technically, that is “death.” However, if we are firmly ensconced in “stati-ticity” we will never make this discovery as it would be troubling to the safety we have found there.  There is comfort in living in the bubble.

Playwright Tony Kushner, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his play, “Angels in America.”  In this powerful play there is a scene which the internal tension of change is vividly put into words; here it is presented as  gut-wrenching, which at times it can be.  Fortunately, most of the time it is merely discomforting or stressful as people like myself do not have the brilliant, sensitive, artistic temperament of people like Kushner.  Here is a quotation from one memorable scene:

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice.

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching. 

Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

Harper: That’s how people change. 

Change is so painful as it often requires questioning the premises by which we have lived our life.  And “God” is involved often as the change involves premises that lie in the inner most part of our being, basic assumptions that we take for granted and would prefer continuing to do so.  This can be unnerving.  Theologian Paul Tillich understood this when he wrote a book entitled, “The Shaking of the Foundations” based on one of his sermons in which he presented the teachings of Jesus as intended for such a “rattling of our collective cage.”

The culture of my country is in turmoil because of the tension between the need for change and the need to maintain the status quo.  These needs are necessary in any social body and even in any individual psyche.  If any of these opposing impulses prevails to the exclusion of the other, catastrophe will take place.  The need is for some “over-arching” concern that can unite the two, can offer an harmony in dedication to a common cause.

Rebecca Chopps On Our Country’s Malady of the Soul

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Barack Obama has answered the bell and has come out swinging, addressing the Republican morass of recent decades that has created our country’s present debacle, and yes, taking not-so-veiled jabs at the figure-head and spokesman for this roiling cauldron of chthonic energy.  I stumbled across a book just last week by Rebecca S. Chopps entitled, “The Power to Speak: Feminism, Language, and God,” which is relevant to this cauldron as she explores how language, including religious language, can be used to give expression to hidden dimensions of the heart, individually and socio-culturally. But for this “revelation” to occur, there must be a voice/voices from beyond the pale of the status quo who see into the heart of the poisonous mindset which is always oriented primarily to maintain the prevailing power structure.  Chopps writes as a feminist but also as a Christian…apparently…though if she calls herself a Christian she is certainly beyond the pale of the Christian power structure that would “legitimate” her wearing that label.

Here I will share a couple of paragraphs from Chopps’ book:

Proclamation, in feminist discourses of emancipatory transformation, resists and transforms the social symbolic order.  Proclamation is a form of resistance to the practices and principles of modernity that control, dominate, and oppress.  But proclamation resists by way of transformation, seeking to provide new discourses by a variety of strategies, methods, and ways, and to transform the ruling principles and order into ones that allow, encourage, and enable transformative relations of multiplicity, difference, solidarity, anticipation, embodiment, and transformation.  Transformation occurs by creating new images of human flourishing, new values of otherness, and multiplicity, new theoretical practices of solidarity and anticipation.

This is reminiscent of one of the most powerful of Paul Tillich’s sermons, “The Shaking of the Foundations” in which he argued that the purpose of the church is to, “rattle the cage” (my term) of the status quo.  But the status quo does not want to be “rattled” and will arm itself to the teeth in an effort to deny any affront to its comfy zone of satisfaction, where “they bask, agreed upon what they will not ask, bland, sunny, and adjusted by the light” of the unquestioned assumptions which give them privilege and power.  This is also obviously so with the power structure of religious culture though often those most ensconced in that power structure are basking even more in the comfort of a falsetto humility which does not permit any consideration or discussion of their motivations.

I conclude with another paragraph from Chopps:

Through discourses of emancipatory transformation, proclamation enables those marginalized voices who so often have not been heard, to speak: to speak of the beauty, hope, pain, and sorrow they have known on the margins.  Proclamation also speaks within the ambiguities of the order, the ambiguities, for instance, of the bourgeois who, though promised freedom in his autonomy, discovers few genuine possibilities for the community, relationships, and love he so desires.  Unable to find any “authentic meaning” the bourgeois attempts to fill in the empty spaces of his or her soul through the attainment of material goods that great momentary satisfaction with increasingly diminished returns.

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Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

The Intoxication of Lunacy!

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Colorado has a group of people who are apparently serious about the notion of a flat earth.  When I started reading this I suspected it was a spoof but the more I read I realize that these people are serious.  They really do believe the earth is flat and they have “proof” that this notion is valid!  )  I have often in my “career” as a blogger used the flat earth notion to illustrate complete lunacy, a private world view for people who have lost contact with reality and created their own little imaginary world which, at the extreme, is collective psychosis.  Ideas can carry us away and because of their intoxicating effect on our mind-set we can lose all critical capacity, believing our pet “idea” even when all evidence suggests it is self-delusion. (See Denver Post story at following link:  (http://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/07/colorado-earth-flat-gravity-hoax/)

I have my own personal spoof of this lunacy in which I facetiously and sarcastically postulate a world in which “the moon is made out of cheese.” Yes, suppose during the night I am the victim of a neurological convulsion in my brain and awakened the next morning to know, with great passion, that “the moon is made out of cheese.”  If this should happen, I might take this very seriously and suddenly realize that it is the truth, that the darkness I’ve lived in has finally lifted, and I see clearly that, yes, “the moon is made out of cheese.”  Furthermore, some friends might try to intervene and set me straight but they would make no progress because, “when you know the truth, you just kinda know the truth” and no one is going to dissuade you.  Of course, finding truth always requires that others be convinced so I would start evangelizing and before long I would have a congregation of like-minded souls and we would then have the solace of validation, a solace which would be enhanced by the realization that only we saw the truth and that any “truth” is always rejected by those who are enlightened.  This insight would give us the comfort of borrowing a theme from fundamentalists of every stripe and sadly and piously understand that “we are being persecuted for His sake.”

I am here addressing one of my pet themes, best described as a toxic version of group-think, a private referential system in which validation is found only in those who have found our view of the world amenable to theirs.  When this toxicity infects any idea, ideas which might otherwise have value to others is immediately rejected by these “others” as they have no meaning to them whatsoever.  The resulting ideology, a passionate belief system that has become delusional becomes a private prison guaranteed to repel anyone who looks on from the outside.  But the rejection itself is perversely rewarding as it leaves the “true believers” with the smug satisfaction of owning “truth” which only they have apprehended.  What has happened is that very unhappy people have crafted a belief system which isolates them even further than they were to begin with and they slowly die from the suffocation that always comes from what Paul Tillich called “an empty world of self-relatedness.”  Emily Dickinson described it as “a mind too near itself to see distinctly.”

In my clinical career this phenomena was known as “insanity,” succinctly capsulized in a clinical bromide, “Mental illness is a reference problem.”  The individual who is completely mad…and we are all mad to some degree…has cut himself off from all external reference and finds great comfort in his delusional system.  For the intoxication of self-delusion resists any sobering-up that critical thinking would afford. It is easy for an out-sider, i.e. a non-believer, to quickly isolate the premise of a delusional system but just dare try to challenge that premises and you will meet great resistance.  For this “premise” represents an emotional investment the person/persons have made which cannot be relinquished without great pain.  Hypothetically, if one could reach into the heart of these people and surgically extirpate the premise, one would witness a complete melt-down.  For this premise is an existential anchor which holds its victims prisoners in a fortress from which they dare not escape.

I conclude with, still again, my favorite bumper-sticker, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

A Believing Cynic Looks at Faith

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CONFESSIONS OF A BELIEVING CYNIC

The election last month, and the conservative support of Donald Trump, really rattled my cage spiritually and helped me to understand more fully the origins of my faith.  These origins were very childish, but then how can “origins” be anything but childish.  We started out as children and most of us were introduced to faith in our very early childhood.

But, “ When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”  The Apostle Paul realized that maturity in every dimension of life brings a changing perspective.  Without the ability to change, one will inevitably spend his/her life trapped in what Ronald Laing described as a “post-hypnotic trance of early childhood.”  In this trance, we will bask in unexamined assumptions with a naivety that is dangerous to the whole of our life.

But here I want to address naivety in faith, an exploration which required delving very deeply into spiritual/religious cynicism, an exploration warranted by the recent Presidential election.  Cynicism will jeopardize one’s faith but I have found that by venturing into this jeopardy one’s faith can be deepened and broadened, though it has cost me the certainty which I had when as a child; for in my youth I had so readily imbibed dogma, the “letter of the law.”  This loss of certainty, which I see as a perquisite of meaningful faith, did cost me my religion/faith in a certain sense as I had to learn to approach the Bible, faith itself and even my own identity with a critical perspective.  I could not do this until the middle ages of my life because my identity was too tenuous to subject itself to criticism, a “criticism” which from the perspective of the the Apostle Paul can be seen as an ability to let “the Spirit of God” penetrate into one’s depths and there be “a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”  This process taught me the wisdom of, I think, Richard Rohr, “God is the best way of avoiding God, Jesus is the best way of avoiding Jesus, the Bible is the best way of avoiding the Bible.”  For when we bask in early childhood certainties, God, Jesus, and the Bible will only be seen conceptually and therefore devoid of any “spiritual” dimension.  The “letter of the law will predominate.”

Cynicism taught me to recognize the dilemma of “believing in one’s own belief” which is basically trusting in reason which, upon closer scrutiny, is merely trusting in one’s own ego-ridden self.  And the ego does not want to relinquish its grasp in any part of our life, certainly in the area of faith.  No less a conservative Christian luminary than Oswald Chambers in his Collected Works warned against the fallacy of “believing in one’s belief or having faith in one’s faith.”

“Believing in one’s belief” is the subtle procedure of keeping faith confined to reason and, in the safety of the resulting imprisonment, one can have his head/heart filled with gospel jargon which will then be abutted by even more jargon.  For, one’s cognitive life will be the rattle of sterile jargon careening around inside one’s head.  Cynicism has given me the ability to follow the admonishment of a bumper sticker I often quote, “Don’t believe everything you think.”  I now realize that when I was believing everything I was thinking I was merely an echo chamber, living in a context of other echo chambers which protected me from any critical view of my faith, of my “self.”  And the “self”, when imprisoned by the ego, does not tolerate any criticism as our President-elect illustrates on an almost daily basis.  When the ego-ridden collective echo-chamber grows large enough it can even gain political and social power, necessitating that someone or some groups will inevitably be left out.  The ego only knows exclusion, “us vs. them.”

A Lesson from a Rabbit

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Becoming real means finding the courage to wade into the difficult dimensions of human experience, a courage which is usually the function of the wear and tear of daily life, the relentless oppression of those “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”  Becoming real means you find the courage to tippy-toe…at least…into the “unreal” in that you find that what was once so certain is no longer certain, discovering only then an inner core which has always been present but unexplored due to your lack of courage. Becoming real is a liminal moment, approaching the boundaries of existence itself which is always humbling. Becoming real is finding what Paul Tillich described as “The Courage to Be” which always means flirtation with non-being, its presence announced by intense anxiety.  Norman Brown summed it up pithily decades ago, “To be is to be vulnerable.”

Here is a beautiful summary of this experience from the children’s classic, “The Velveteen Rabbit”:

What is real asked the Rabbit.. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often 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 all 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,” by Margery Williams. see http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/williams/rabbit/rabbit.html)