Fingers brush the baby soft brow as the scent of chrism oil swirls upward. Salt touches the sweet rosebud lips, which curl back at this primeval betrayal. Then water runneth over and a name is gently called.
What is in a name? Would a rose by any other name smell so sweet?
Words have become so twisted, so used this last century. Their meaning is extracted or injected, and voices forget that meaning comes not just from our befuddled intention but also from the breath which first enlivened the joined letters.
I watch this loss of understanding unfold in my home, especially in the names which ascend to the cheap, ill-fitted rafters. From Eden times, we have sought to name others. And so we continue. Pumpkin. Sweetheart. Love. Liar. Poopy-head. Cookie. (That last one has me puzzled currently, as it is also spoken with venom. Whose baking-cookie skills fell so far under the three-year-old’s analysis?)
Why do we name? Is it to control somehow, as if our words entrench others or exert control which, contrarily, must always be given? Do we long to possess the other, to assume them, or do we identify a lover whose gifts we desire to affirm and cover with our voice, thereby mingling our being with theirs?
Yet, in lieu of how our society has deconstructed meaning – indeed, in consideration of how my little people misappropriate terms – I must ask: do my words expel life? Or break down what breath therein lies? I think here of not just my terms of endearment or my issued commands, but more of the thoughts that circle my mind. Boy: who cannot practice self-control-at-all. Toddler: who always whines. Husband: who never sees. How many times I name them each day.
Have these definitions changed my vision? Altered my reality?
Speaking a name always extends a calling, or summons. And recognizing that each sounded word merely reflects an already living, beating inner word, I must earnestly beg of my heart: how do I seek to call them?
From the beginning, He has called each of our names. When our children are baptized, we are his instruments to voice the chosen name, and in that intimate calling are wrapped up all His desiring and beckoning and loving. If I truly want to love this person before me, this heart-note – whomever is in our gaze as we reflect here – I must know them.
There are so many levels of meaning in that word “knowing”.
Yet is not the truest way to know a person to re-name them? To speak once more the word given to them from the eternal Word, with all the being and loving behind and around it?
When I ponder this person before me, am I labeling them? Or naming them? Our little nicknames for each other indicate intimacy and can be sweet reflections of part of each of us, a “nic” of the immensity of our names, but a nickname should never dismantle a person – it should return us to their whole. I must also ask, do my thoughts ever obscure God’s artistry in them? Utilize and diminish them? There are such depths in each of us that decades of gazing into one and savoring the folds, the soft and the hard parts, the color and music of this soul will never reach the fullness of their original calling.
I don’t want to categorize my loved ones or deconstruct my friends. Rather, I want to murmur their names in a way which reflects the love which first bestowed that name upon their brow and imprinted its life on their soul. I will commit anew to think of them in a way which grants life and then communion. So, just as I preach to my children, I shall now admonish myself: no more “name-calling”! Only true names will be allowed hereafter in the courts of my mind and mouth.
