I wonder what it is that authors find so appealing about rabbits as significant characters in their literary works–Peter Rabbit, Hazel and Fiver, Heather and Picket, the white rabbit, the velveteen rabbit–and the list goes on. I always feel that these characters want so much to be human, to be more than rabbit. Each author imbues these rabbits with anthropomorphic characteristics so that we can identify with them as readers, importantly leading us to ponder what it means to be courageous or foolish or to consider why we long for something greater than ourselves.
Kate DiCamillo’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane is no different, but the gorgeous illustrations by Bagram Ibatoulline and the simple story resonated with my heart unexpectedly. Recently, I’ve been reflecting on what it means to “be redeemed.” Yes, I understand the technical definition; it means, within a biblical framework, that if we are believers we have been “bought back” through a “price” and are being “made better and restored” to one day be fully “complete.”The beauty of a good story allows us to comprehend this multi-faceted truth as our mind meets imagination. DiCamillo adeptly leads me on an imaginative exploration of the redemption story through a toy rabbit.
Edward Tulane, this precocious china rabbit with fur ears and whisker implants, dressed regally in his satins and silks, does not know what it means to love. His owner Abilene loves him dearly, but Edward takes her generosity for granted and believes there is something significant in and of himself that makes him worthy of recognition and a seat at the family’s table. The ridiculousness of Edward’s mindset exposes my own immediately. I have a faithful master who loves me with indescribable love, who has seated me at his table, and yet how often have I found my own heart cold and my ears closed, blinded by a pride in my worth.
When Abilene loses her beloved Edward on a ship as two rascal boys rip him from her and toss him overboard, the rabbit’s ego sinks along with him to the bottom of the ocean. He is rescued by an elderly fisherman and his wife, who offer him a much more unassuming life, yet a life of love. They have redeemed him through their love. His redemption does not include a place of prominence, but a position in which his presence offers comfort to a lonely couple. When Edward gets trashed by the couple’s unfeeling daughter, he ends up in the company of the sensitive-souled vagrant, Bull. The lonely, the lost, the weary all come and speak to and share their hearts with Edward as he walks the hobo life with Bull. The china rabbit learns that listening is part of loving, for that is all he can do. His life is far from glamorous, but the more names of people he loves that he can repeat in his mind, the more he learns that he has the capacity to love.
Edward continues to meet, to love, and to leave and be left. I admit–I hate moving on. I hate when the people I spend time loving move away (or perhaps it is I who moves away.) I hate when my special friends stop sharing their secrets with me and confiding their most precious longings. The loss doesn’t seem worth the love.
Edward Tulane reaches this impasse. He doesn’t want to hurt again. He doesn’t want to lose the ones he has learned to love by opening up his cold heart. “My heart,” Edward says, “my heart is broken.” He cares no more for his fine clothes or the pristine shape of his china head even when the doll-maker restores him after his head has been cracked into twenty-one pieces.
As he sits on the shelf, having been put back together, he exclaims to the other dolls, “I have no interest in being purchased.” The pain in his statement rings true for me. I have been in the place where my broken self has been mended and restored, but I don’t want more restoration. I don’t want to be hurt again, to lose someone again. Love through sanctification just hurts too much. Yet I secretly long to belong to someone who will love me, someone who will love me without letting me go.
I won’t give away the ending. But I see redemption a little more clearly now. The ways God chooses to restore us by breaking us first and by teaching us the glory of sacrifice, only to to piece us back together— are ways we don’t understand and ways we wouldn’t choose. Yes, he has bought us and seated us in the heavens, but we are also moving through this redemptive process here on earth as he crushes our china vanities and cotton stuffed hearts. As Edward repeats the names of those he has loved, I am reminded that learning to love in this journey of redemption will be worth it. The tears, the loss, the brokenness, the good-byes, the never-see-you-agains are not the end, but an integral part, of our individual redemption stories. And we do have our one owner who will never stop loving us, who will never truly let us go.
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