Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: “What’s in a name? The history of the human race is in names. Our objective friends do not understand that, since they move in a world of objects which can be counted and numbered. They reduce the great names of the past to dust and ashes. This they call scientific history. But the whole meaning of history is in the proof that there have lived people before the present time whom it is important to meet.”
Reading the Chronicles of Narnia as a boy of about 10, I was captivated by the tales of lions, witches, magic wardrobes and the fight between good and evil. I remember playing sword games in the garden of our family home for weeks after I read the first book, imagining that I was in a fantasyland fighting against evil forces.
All the great stories of the world elaborate one of two themes:
1) That all life is an exploration, a journey or (2) that all life is a battle. The Narnia books were full of both exploration and battles. Of course I was not an inhabitant of Narnia, I was not fighting evil forces and Aslan, the great lion was a character in a story. But, still, there were two things essentially right about what I experienced. One, there was far more to existence than had been presented to me in home and school, in the streets and alleys of my town, and it was important to find out what it was, to reach out and explore. Two, life was a contest of good against evil and the battle was for the highest stakes - the winning of good over evil, of blessing over curse. Life is a continuous exploration of ever more reality. Life is a constant battle against everyone and anything that corrupts or diminishes its reality.
After a few years I was forced to abandon that fantasy, and I did it readily enough when the time came, for I have always found that realities are better in the long run than fantasies. At the same time I found myself under pressure to abandon the accompanying convictions that life is an adventure and that life is a contest. I was not, and am not, willing to do that.
Some people as they grow up become smaller. As children they have glorious ideas of who they are and of what life has for them. Thirty years later we find that they have settled for something grubby and inane. What accounts for the exchange of childhood excitement to the adult apathy?
Other people as they grow up become bigger. Life is not an inevitable decline into dullness; for some it is a climb upwards into excellence. It was for Jeremiah. Jeremiah lived about sixty years. Across that life span there is no sign of decay or shriveling. Always he was pushing out the borders of reality exploring new territory. And always he was vigorous in battle, challenging and contesting the shoddy, the false, and the vile.
How did he do it? How do I do it? How do I shed the fantasies my youth and at the same time embrace the realities of life? How do I leave the childish yet keep the deeply accurate perceptions of the child that life is an adventure, that life is a contest?
1 WHAT’S IN A NAME?
The book of Jeremiah begins with a personal name, Jeremiah. Seven more personal names follow: Hilkiah, Benjamin, Josiah, Amon, Judah, Jehoiakim, Zedekiah. The personal name is the most important part of speech in our language. The cluster of personal names that opens the book of Jeremiah strikes exactly the right note for what is most characteristic of Jeremiah: the personal in contrast to the stereotyped role, the individual in contrast to the blurred crowd. The book in which we find this most memorable record of what it means to be human in the fullest, most developed sense, begins with personal names.
Naming focuses the essential. The act of naming, an act that occurs early in everyone’s life, has enormous significance. We are named. The name sets the course on the oceans of reality in pursuit of righteousness.
At our birth we are named, not numbered. The name is that part of speech by which we are recognized as a person. We are not classified as a species of animal. We are not labeled as a compound of chemicals. We are not assessed for our economic potential and given a cash value. We are named. What we are named is not as significant as that we are named.
Jeremiah was named and immersed in names. He was never reduced to a role or presented as a statistic or catapulted into a historical crisis. His identity and significance developed from the event of naming and his response to naming. The world of Jeremiah does not open with a description of the scenery or a sketch of the culture but with eight personal names.
Any time that we move from personal names to abstract labels or graphs or statistics, we are less in touch with reality and diminished in our capacity to deal with what is best and at the center of life. Yet we are encouraged on every side to do just that. In many areas of life the accurate transmission of our identity number is more important than the integrity with which we live. In many sectors of the economy the title that we hold is more important than our ability to do certain work. In many situations the public image that people have of us is more important than the personal relations that we develop with them. Every time that we go along with this movement from the personal to the impersonal, from the immediate to the remote, from the concrete to the abstract, we are diminished, from name to number, from personal to functional, we are less. Resistance is required if we will retain our humanity.
“It is a spiritual disaster,” warned Thomas Merton, “for a man to rest content with his exterior identity, with his passport picture of himself. Is his life merely in his fingerprints?” But passport pictures, more likely than not, are preferred, even required, in most of our dealings in the world.
I read this week a follow-up to the story that broke some time ago about a man named Derek Bond. He was arrested by the South African Police on behalf of the FBI on suspicion of being an international criminal. He was thrown into jail and nobody would listen to him and believe that he was not the man that they were looking for. It really was a case of mistaken identity.
But the incident itself, a major event in the life of this man and his family, is symptomatic of a major danger to our humanity: if I am frequently and authoritatively treated impersonally, I begin to think of myself the same way. Our names are far more important than trends in the economy, far more important than crises in the cities, far more important than breakthroughs in space travel. For a name addresses the uniquely human creature. A name recognizes that I am this person and not another.
No one can assess my significance by looking at the work that I do. No one can determine my worth by deciding the salary they will pay me. No one can know what is going on in my mind by examining my school transcripts. No one can know me by measuring me or weighing me or analyzing me. Call my name.
2 A WAY OF HOPING
Names not only address what we are, the irreplaceably human, they also anticipate what we become. Names call us to become who we will be. A lifetime of growth and development is announced by a name. Names mean something. A personal name designates what is irreducibly personal; it also calls us to become what we are not yet.
The meaning of a name is not discovered through looking up the meaning of that name. The meaning of a name is not in the dictionary; not in the unconscious, not in the size of the lettering. It is in relationship with God. It was the Jeremiah “to whom the word of the Lord came” who realized his authentic and eternal being.
Naming is a way of hoping. We name a child after someone or some quality that we hope he or she will become — a saint, a hero, an admired ancestor. Some parents name their children trivially after movie stars and millionaires. Harmless? Cute? But we do have a way of taking on the identities that are prescribed for us. Millions live out the superficial sham of the entertainer and the greedy exploitiveness of the millionaire because, in part, significant people in their lives cast them in a role or fantasized an illusion and failed to hope a human future for them.
When I take an infant into my arms at the baptismal font and ask the parents, “What is the Christian name of this child?” I am not only asking, “Who is this child I am holding?” but also, “What do you want this child to become? What are your visions for this life?”
Parents, be aware of the names that you give your children, for they just might become what their name calls them to be. The name you give your child might be the perfect name for the child being trained to be a successful consumer. If you want your child to grow up getting and spending, using available leisure in the shopping malls, proving achievement by getting things, the name that you give your child might be one of the factors that shapes a person for whom the ritual of shopping is the new worship, the department store the new cathedral, and the advertising page the infallible Scripture.
One of the supreme tasks of the faith community is to announce to us early and clearly the kind of life into which we can grow, to help us set our sights on what it means to be a human being complete. Not one of us, at this moment, is complete. In another hour, another day, we will have changed. We are in process of becoming either less or more. There are a million chemical and electrical interchanges going on in each of us this very moment. There are intricate moral decisions and spiritual transactions taking place. What are we becoming? Less or more?
John, writing to an early community of Christians, said, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 Jn 3:2). We are children; we will be adults. We can see what we are now; we are children of God. We don’t yet see the results of what we are becoming, but we know the goal, to be like Christ, or, in Paul’s words, “to arrive at mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4:13). We do not deteriorate. We do not disintegrate. We become.
I once did a course in learning to be more artistic and the results weren’t too bad. In that course, I learnt that everyone is born an artist. Being an artist has little to do with drawing painting and sculpting, those are techniques that can be taught. Being an artist has to do with learning to see and, as a result, representing the reality that we see, not what we think we see. Children draw what they see, but as they grow up they get laughed at, they get teased and so they begin to draw not what they see, but a picture that looks like everyone else’s picture.
Jeremiah kept on doing what everybody starts out doing, being human. And he didn’t stop. For sixty years and more he continued to live into the meaning of his name. The exact meaning of Jeremiah is not certain: it may mean, “the LORD exalts”; it may mean “the LORD hurls.” What is certain is that “the LORD,” the personal name of God, is in his name.
On the day that their son was born, Hilkiah and his wife named him in anticipation of the way that God would act in his life. In hope they saw the years unfolding and their son as one in whom the Lord would be lifted up: Jeremiah “the Lord is exalted.” Or, in hope they saw into the future and anticipated their son as a person whom God would hurl into the community as a javelin-representative of God, penetrating the defenses of selfishness with divine judgment and mercy: Jeremiah — the Lord hurls. Either way, it is clear that God is in the name. Jeremiah’s life was compounded with God’s action. Jeremiah’s parents saw their child as a region of being in which the human and divine would integrate. The life of God in some way or other (exalting? hurling?) would find expression in this child of theirs. They named him in anticipation of what he would become.
No child is just a child. Each is a creature in whom God intends to do something glorious and great. No one is only a product of the genes contributed by parents. Who we are and will be is compounded with who God is and what he does. God’s love and providence and salvation are comprised in the reality of our existence along with our metabolism and blood type and fingerprints.
Most names throughout Israel’s history were compounded with the name of God. The names anticipated what each would be when he, when she, grew up. Josiah, God heals; Jehoiakim, the Lord raises up; Zedekiah, the Lord is righteous; Jeremiah, the Lord exalts, or the Lord hurls. Some of these people lived out the meaning of their names. Jeremiah and Josiah did. Others, like Jehoiakim and Zedekiah, were an embarrassment to their names, betraying with their lives the great promise of their names. Zedekiah had a glorious name; he betrayed it. Jehoiakim had a superb name; he abandoned it.
Jeremiah could have become one of the religious professionals of his day: prophet, priest or wise man. He refused to become a religious professional and this put him in conspicuous contrast to those who were shaped by the expectations of popular opinion. His integrity exposed the shallowness in which they lived. They were provoked and then enraged: “Come, let us make plots against Jeremiah, for the law shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet. Come, let us smite him with the tongue, and let us not heed any of his words” (Jer 18:18). Priest and wise man and prophet alike felt that their professional well being was threatened by Jeremiah’s single-minded focus. Panicked, they plotted to bring him down.
There is always the option that we will sell out, that we will become just like everyone else: a doctor who cares more for his Porche than his patients or a lawyer that cares more for winning the case than for seeing justice done. The sell out to which prophets and priests and wise men are subject is to market God as a commodity to use faith to legitimize selfishness. It is easy and it is frequent. It happens without our thinking about it much.
A personal name, not an assigned role, is our passbook into reality. It is also our continuing orientation in rea1ity. Anything other than our name: title, job description, number, role, is less than a name. Apart from the name that marks us as uniquely created and personally addressed, we slide into fantasies that are out of touch with the world as it is and so we live useless, irresponsible lives. Or we live by the stereotypes in which other people cast us that are out of touch with the uniqueness in which God has created us, and so live diminished into boredom, the brightness leaking away.
Jeremiah — a name linked with the name and action of God. The only thing more significant to Jeremiah than his own being was God’s being. He fought in the name of the Lord and explored the reality of God and in the process grew and developed, ripened and matured. He was always reaching out, always finding more truth, getting in touch with more of God, becoming more himself, more human.
