It’s no small thing to give someone a name … It is a huge responsibility … it is one of the most personal, and at the same time, one of the most public things about us … and it holds a huge power in our lives … when our parents get it right, it is a significant part of our identity. And we can’t imagine ourselves with a different name. If our name were different, we’d be different. When our name doesn’t fit, we search for the one that does and somewhere along the way it finds us or we find it.
When someone speaks our name they call us out of anonymity … when someone misspeaks our name, we am misrepresented in some way. When someone forgets our name, some part of our identity is forgotten.
It would be fascinating to pause here and each tell one another the story of our name as we know it or the relationship we have with our name. We have a family name that carries a long story of ancestry and place. We have given names that have been our face in the world … sometimes our name carries the legacy of others, or the creativity of our parents, or it is the name out of all possible names they recognized us to be in those first moments of relationship with us.
In many cultures there are traditions around naming … birth order assigns a particular given name … in other cultures names are descriptive … our indigenous brothers and sisters name the world in powerfully descriptive ways … with names that carry something important the identity of what is named … you are the one who sees, or you are running … The ancient Hebrew language and culture was like this too … in the story we heard a moment ago … you are Moses … you are the one who is drawn out of the water … that is your name … to tell someone your name is to tell them something very significant about you … you are the one who was drawn out of the water … that is your identity … that is who you are …
Our capacity to name everything is so fundamental to our species that even our creation myths reveal this about us … One of the stories of the emergence of our species in our Jewish Christian tradition ends with the creating energy bringing the creatures to the human to give them names ….
“out of the ground every creature of the field and every bird of the air was formed and brought to the human to see what the human would name them; and whatever the human called every living being, that was its name” Genesis 2:19
The power to name is an amazing creative capacity and a powerful responsibility of our species. When life is brought to us, we name it … whether it is a child, a pet, a community, an organization, a building, an experience, an insight … or whatever …
In my first position in ministry, I served a very small congregation that had named itself Valleyview PC which seemed someone ironic to me because it had a fantastic, breath taking view of the mountains! It was a small community where I could have learned everyone’s name quite quickly except that even though they were few in number … they named everything … their horses, their vehicles, not just their birds and cats and dogs and children. So I was always afraid to ask about someone by name because I might have been asking how their horse was doing at university!
Finding a short handle to say something about our own essence is a usual practice … Try it with your own name … I am Nancy … she who seeks to stitch thoughts together on a thread of meaning … I am have often heard my friend Carolyn do it … I am Carolyn … she who sings in a long voice …
It is our nature to name … to identity peoples, places and things … it is integral to our human capacity to try to name life, to name each other, to name our experience …
We know all too well, the dangers of name calling and labelling. In this month in which we honor national indigenous day, we know all too well the dangers of taking away one’s name, one’s identity, one’s essence. And we know how to name ourselves and one another in ways that inspire pride, enable us to thrive and help us to learn there are so many ways to use our incredible power to name.
What better time could there be for us to plant seeds of identity … seeds of potential … seeds of aspiration …. naming our highest humanity, naming our essence … naming how we seek to live and with whom we seek to grow … what better time to consider the name we call ourselves … beyond the name we were given to wear in the world .. what is the name of that deepest truth we seek to express in being ourselves in the world .. in this moment … we hold silence with one another as we consider that question.
-Nancy Steeves
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