What’s in a name? A community.

There are quite a lot of things in our practice of our Catholic faith that we take for granted, or seldom ponder over in any prolonged sort of way.  Making the sign of the Cross, having our crucifixes blessed, dipping our fingers into a holy water stoup or font, and choosing of a Saint’s name for our children’s baptism.  We just ‘do it’, maybe not in a Nike sort of way, but we hardly question why.  But in all our traditions, both cultural and religious, one of the things that can result in our lives if we don’t take time to pause and reflect on our actions (or non-actions), is that we can easily end up just doing it for the sake of doing it, or in some cases, jettison it altogether, without knowing that we have jettisoned something very deep and beautiful and rich.  A bit like throwing the baby with the bathwater.

One of the things that have given me cause to reflect lately is the long-standing practice of naming our children after the saints of the Church at their baptisms.  I have been ministering to many couples in my years as a priest in the various parish postings that I had been assigned to, and one rather common occurrence in recent years seems to have parents making up names for their children.  Laquisha.  Perstwick.  Golf.  Fermyn.  La-La (pronounced Ladashla, so I am told). My deep sense of Christian charity prevents me from commenting on these ‘interesting’ choices, and when I asked the parents why these names were chosen, the answer inevitably boiled down to ‘because it’s original’.  I suppose the quest to make our personal mark on society, to leave something on it that is ‘our own’, stems from a silent need within the human psyche that refuses to be lost in the crowd of common human ordinariness.  Perhaps most parents know that not every child will grow up a prodigy, or a genius, or some scholar, or an Academy/Pulitzer/Nobel/Booker/Golden Globe/Golden Horse Award winner, so the least they can do is to give them something unique that marks them out from the common crowd.  And their name seems to be an innocuous place to start.  I can understand that kind of reasoning.  Not that I fully agree.  I understand.

But if I am wondering if we do a little reflection on the rich background of our religious tradition behind the naming of our children after the Saints, that parents would back-pedal a bit and appreciate the rationale of this strong recommendation.  It really is founded on the firm Christian belief that the world is not about us, and that we are part of a much bigger body to which we belong and from which we draw life.  The body of Christ.

There are landmark/milestone points in our human/social/religious life where something happens to our names.  We see something happening to our names at birth, at our Confirmation, at our Marriage/Vows/Religious Professions/ and at our death.  In every one of these high points of our lives, we are given a mission from the Church and the Community to which we belong.  The Jewish tradition of naming a newborn to the family requires that his/her name comes from someone else in the family having that name before.  This child is thus in a sense, given something that comes from the forebears of the community that he or she came from.  Just from the name itself one detects a sense of a community connection and involvement.

We are also given a mission at these special points of our lives -  baptism (becoming an anointed child of God with sins forgiven to make holy the world); confirmation (to be active cooperators with the Holy Spirit to sanctify the world in a conscious and purposeful way); marriage (to be a co-partner with our spouse to further expand the kingdom of God physically and spiritually); Holy Orders (one can also include Religious Vows and Professions here), and the reason for this should be self-explanatory; and at our deaths (where if we have been living as we should truly have, our names become immortalized with the Saints that have gone before us).  Each of these aforementioned points are mission points for us.  And very significantly, at each of these points, our names show a deepening of our human relationships within the matrix of humanity.  Something happens to our names.  We either get them, change them, or add something to them.  No one goes to a mission alone, not even a lone-missioner to any mission land. Such a person has the support of a huge praying community behind him or her.

I am wondering if this is what many parents are missing in the bigger picture of our faith when naming their children.  If the reason behind an ‘original’ name is to ‘stand out from the crowd’ or ‘to be unique’, perhaps it shows that the intrinsic link between baptism and mission is no longer acknowledged, or worse, completely lost.  What seems to be missing would be a certain sense of gravitas in life.  Life simply becomes ‘my story’, or ‘my way’, as Frank Sinatra would vaingloriously croon.  And if this attenuated way of looking at life begins at baptism, it easily then sets the tone for the rest of life from then on to have the same proclivity, causing Confirmation and Marriage (heaven forbid, Holy Orders) to have a similar exclusion of any form of mission or community link or involvement. 

Yes, I have heard many ‘arguments’ of people saying that if we recycle all these names of canonized saints, there would never be a St Ah Kow, or St Laquisha, or St Golf (?).  While I can understand that argument, it does seem to have only featherweight strength in the light of our united call to mission that has a community behind us, and a larger community that waits before us.