As human beings we unavoidably name. Everywhere we go, we name. Everything we encounter, we name. Responding to the world around us means we will frame what we see in certain ways, and when we do so, we will be implicitly or explicitly naming whatever or whomever we encounter by attention, attitude, words, responses and actions. What happens when people in our world, individually and collectively, have no small army of faithful truth tellers from whom to hear and learn and practice their real names? What happens when people are alone, or worse, when they are trapped in systems or relationships through which their names are garbled, fractured, twisted or lost?
Our human capacity to name comes as a divine gift and vocation that reflects our being made in the image of God (Genesis 1). Part of the human crisis, however, is that out of our hearts we misname our neighbors, ourselves and God. No one is spared the devastating consequences.
01. Daily Injustice
Everywhere injustice thrives, people are misnamed. Injustice occurs daily by simple and complex acts of misnaming. Injustice breeds in and spreads through these poisonous distortions. Naming attaches to our outside even as it makes claims about our inside. In most cases we simply assume that the names we give are the right ones, and they go deep enough to assign in our hearts the further implication of whether, therefore, that person is relevant or irrelevant to us, a threat or a tease, entertainment or a distraction. On and on the list goes. Our emotional intelligence and our moral visions will cause variation in this speedy and ubiquitous process. When we stop and consider things, most of us realize we don’t know another’s heart, we don’t stand inside another’s experience, we truly do not know or see another as they really are. But all the time we act as if we do. Although we don’t know the whole story of a person or group of people, we blithely ascribe analysis, blame, responsibility, failure, disdain, worth.
Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words can tear our heart out. On the personal, social and global scale, naming occurs with relentless power. By our names we are defined and shaped, for good and for bad, with justice and injustice. By naming we grant and take away life. Yet most days and most times, this is so imbedded in the rhythm of life that we have little awareness of what is happening and its potency. Everywhere injustice is found, misnaming contributes to and sustains the lie, the destruction.
What is needed to change this is more than improved labeling. Naming is a matter of the heart; it happens everywhere all the time.
02. A Flair
It took less than five seconds for the young man who came into the coffee shop that afternoon to start being named. It had been a fairly quiet place and then, with flair and a flurry, with long, dyed-black hair—the front third of which was bleached very blond—and wearing jeans, a decorated white down vest and flip-flops, and carrying a red-and-white-striped fabric shoulder bag, he strode to the counter to ask the baristas in a loud and exaggerated voice if they were accepting applications.
“Hey, you guys, I am here!” he grinningly announced as he raised and lowered his palms several times on the countertop. “So, I really need a job,” he sang. “Can I work here? I really have lots of bills and I need to make some money. I suppose I could sell my body, but maybe I should sell coffee instead. This is a coffee place, right? Ooo, I like your earrings,” he said, holding up his fingers in front of his pursed lips for a moment before he went on. “So, what do you think? I don’t really like coffee. But they said next door at the pizza place that it would take a really, really long time to get a job there, so I decided to come over here.”
“Well,” the junior manager said, “we want people to work here who like what we sell.” In a few more minutes, after some kind words of discouragement from the barista referring him to some other place nearby, he was off, loudly announcing into the air that he was, in any case, “Sooo excited.”
There is not a chance he goes unnamed by those he meets. Is the primary impetus in his story his own self-naming that he enacts, or is he performing names others have given him? He is clearly aware of a public of some sort, and he has the need or desire to play to them. An inelegant dandy would be one way of naming or describing him. A cultivated flair and style of speech and dress meant to leave an impression. And he does. Out of his heart come all kinds of signs of distinction, need, hunger, confidence, insecurity, longing.
Out of the hearts of those in the café, in the conservative as well as hippie mountains near Santa Cruz, south of San Francisco, came names of various kinds, no doubt. I looked around, all the people in the café had at least turned their attention in his direction and presumably had sized him up and assigned some inner name to what was unfolding before them. It would not be difficult to imagine a wide range of epithets that might be assigned to him, and with each would come some corresponding sense of assessment, evaluation, humor, disdain, regard or disgust. The treatment this young man receives in the world is affected by his sense of self, which is both publicly framed and self-imposed. Whatever the issues of his inner life, they would seem to be of a piece with his outer life. The lens by which he sees is a projected image. What is fed back to him are similar images confirming that he sees truly, yet so much that is important about him is not visible and seems inaccessible. His sense of treatment in the world might seem entirely just (he gets what he expects and asks for in affection and rejection), but it might also seem entirely like an unjust charade and the tale of a truly unknown, unseen victim.