Monica Joan and being Real

Be warned: if you haven't yet watched the end of Season 15 of Call the Midwife, you might prefer to stop reading now! 

We don't celebrate Catholic Sisters' Week here in the UK; but if we did, then it would have begun very appropriately on Sunday evening with the nuns at Nonnatus House, home of BBC's Call the Midwife... And it would have begun with people across the country weeping and grieving with and for them, both for the fragility of their continued mission, and for the death of their longstanding doyenne, Sr Monica Joan.

Even when we know someone is dying, their body worn out, we still seek to hold on to them, even as our grieving begins in advance of that final, irrevocable, heartbreaking loss. And certainly there was heartbreak, as well as an inevitability about Sr Monica Joan's death. Already elderly in 1957, when the first series was set, she was almost as old as a century by this season's 1971, having struggled with increasing diminishment for several years. She had also been beset by anguish and anxiety: thankfully, her death, when it finally came, was the gentle, peaceful homegoing we would all desire for ourselves. 

Earlier, having guessed that Rosalind is pregant, she gives her her teddy bear, as old and worn and faded as she herself has become - and just as well-hugged and well-loved. And as I saw these two, the threadbare bear and the worn out woman, I thought of the Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. In this book the little toy Rabbit discovers what it means to become Real, after the process has been explained to him by the extremely shabby old Skin Horse...

Real isn't how you are made... 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... It doesn't happen all at once, 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 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. And... once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always. 

As a character, Monica Joan was believably real and as multi-layered as any one of us. She was flawed, greedy and temperamental, and devilish in her creative interpretation of rules she disliked. And she was also wise, intuitive, and instinctively kind and compassionate. She had undoubtedly become Real: wrinkled, fading and worn out (or fatigued, as she would have preferred to say) by decades of unstinting service, and unstinting love; by a lifetime of giving love, and being loved in return. And she had become Real gladly, even through times of sacrifice and pain, periodic doubts, and darkness in prayer, because Love - even when her seeking and her longing seemed in vain; even though she was flawed - was always at the heart of her life, and her constant quest. 

And I wonder - how Real am I? I don't mean the external wear and tear, or the ailments and aches which come with growing older - whether I gladly accept them or not! But interiorly: how much have I allowed my sharp edges to be worn smooth, my brittleness to withstand knocks and bumps with grace, my wounds to become a source of tenderness and healing? How much more love, given and received and shared, do I need, in order to become indelibly, always Real...?