ThroughSample

A successful author might say, “That was the book that made my name.” This statement is a reminder of the importance that we attach to names. We warn people not to throw away their good name, and we say of celebrities that they are household names. When people hear our names, what do they think?

Like it or not, our names carry associations. These may be linked to positions we hold in society – teacher, manager, mother, coach – or they may be related to our personality traits. People may speak of us as caring, concerned, complex, or irritable, arrogant, or shallow.

The old playground response of “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” couldn’t be more wrong. From the time we first gain meaning from language, we’re conscious of what others say about us and of the labels that are pinned to our name. Like the tail which gets stuck to the donkey, we go through life having adjectives attached to our name. Some we enjoy, while some we most definitely don’t.

Gradually, we start to believe all the labels. We rationalise them, explaining away why one person calls us a particular thing while another calls us something else. All the while, our egos are in the process of stacking up our supposed virtues, while trying to move on from the people who say negative things about us. Because we end up hurt by their words, we plaster over that wound and try to pretend that it didn’t injure us in the first place.

We make our way through childhood and then into adolescence, which is even more filled with challenges to our identity. Comments about how we walk, or talk, or the people we hang out with, or the car our parents drive, seem to bombard us every day – always, there’s a sense of evaluation taking place from those around us. Or even if there isn’t, that’s certainly what we perceive to be the case.

We weave an intricate web around ourselves, trying to cover over the inner person, which we’re convinced no one could love. Soon, we’re not sure quite where the real person starts and ends, and where the illusion that we’ve created takes over. For most of our lives, we persist with this fabricated version of who we are, always protecting our ‘name’.

Theologian Thomas Merton reminds us that:

“All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus, I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge, and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.”

He goes on to say:

“But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasure and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone, there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake.”

Who are we really? When people say our names, or we introduce ourselves to others, what associations float around the two words which represent us?

The wilderness is a good place to take an honest look at ourselves.

Beneath all the facades we construct for ourselves is someone who is created in the image of God. My beloved, he calls us. A child of the living God. That’s who each of us is, whether we’re willing to accept it or not. The Father loves us just as much today as in the days when he helped to weave our body together in our mother’s womb. So how about a bit of self-examination? After all, what do we really have to lose? Just as parents think the best of their children, so God thinks the best of us.

In the same way that Jesus died and was resurrected, so we need to put our own ‘false self' to death. It’s only by dying to that illusion of who we are that we’ll be able to have our true self resurrected. This isn’t a quick or easy process. No death ever is. It demands an honest, scathing look at those parts of who we are that need to be purged. It means thinking twice about falling back on our titles and positions in society when we’re asked who we are. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with those things. They are, after all, part of what makes us unique. But they’re not all that sets us apart. Someone once said to me, “Wouldn’t it be good, when we’re asked who we are, simply to be able to reply, ‘A child of God.’?”

In a sense, each of us has a choice of what people will say when they hear our name. Those descriptors can still be changed. We have the rest of our lives to be known by new adjectives. While we’re so close to the furnace in the wilderness, we need to allow its heat to burn away the dross which has floated around us for too long. We should think of Jacob, who wrestled with God during his own wilderness experience, and who was given a new name and a new purpose. As God said of his holy city, Jerusalem: “you will be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will bestow.” So too for us.

A few thoughts to ponder:

• As you read the extract from Thomas Merton's writing, what stood out for you?
• To what extent might you have been hiding behind a 'false self' facade? How can you start living more authentically because of how God sees you, as his child?