In a Name

Dear, Dear Friend,

I think I have told you about a group that a friend and I facilitate. It is, and for years has been, one of the high points of my week. In case you have forgotten, we usually have around ten folks, and the group goes like this:

1. We silently thank our inner filters and even our inner critics for all the hard work they have done for us over the course of the day or the week. We recognize how often they have kept us from swallowing our own feet or hurting another. We acknowledge how difficult we sometimes make their work, and how often we seem unappreciative. So we thank them, offer them a soft pillow and a warm blanket, and invite them to take an hour or two simply to rest. We promise we’ll wake them before we leave the group.

2. We next take a few minutes to sit silently and, when necessary to reassure our filters and critics that it will truly be all right for them to stand down, and we rock them back to sleep.

3. The facilitator encourages participants that when we begin, to keep writing without worrying about how much sense their writing makes or if it’s good enough or anything like that. “Just keep writing,” the facilitator says, “even if it’s just squiggles on the page.” Then he or she picks a single random word, reads it to the group, and starts a ten-minute timer. And we’re off…

4. After ten minutes, participants set down their pens, and are then invited to read aloud, without introduction or explanation, what they have written. The reader’s filter often tries to jump in at this point, but we try to reassure him/her that it’s not quite time to wake up yet. (At this point the filter usually slips away like an eight-year-old Golden Retriever to a warm place on the sofa.) We keep going. The person reads aloud. Once, and again.

5. And the people around the table listen. They only listen. They don’t evaluate. They don’t analyze. They listen and let the reader paint a picture for them, or inscribe a poem into their hearts, or whatever metaphor you want to use here. The important point is that there is nobody to say, “That was good,” or “That was okay.” Nobody to say, “I agree” or “I disagree.”

This is a group of paintings and poems - always with words, where there is no good or bad or right or wrong. It’s simply a place where we release a word into the room and members follow it where it leads them. Then each member is invited to share (or not to share) what they saw. As they listen, other members are invited to tell the group about the journey the reader took them on. Questions are fine, but not to analyze the intent of the reader, or demand what the reader meant by this word or that word. This is not therapy. Rather, it’s simply riding along with the reader and looking out the windows and maybe even pointing out some sights that they noticed as the readers read. It’s uncanny how often some folks see the same things, and how some members notice things that eluded everyone else’s vision, altogether.

This is the magic of the group. It’s not a place without fear. Imagine how terrifying it might be to read your unfiltered thoughts to a group of strangers, or even more terrifying, to a group of friends. There is definitely fear, but I want to believe it’s a place where courage swallows fear up. Where members are free to shed their adornments and all the pretty things they are required to put on outside of this gentle place. Things that make them worthy of society’s affirmation. They leave those things behind, and a far deeper beauty is usually revealed.

People tend to keep coming back. Of course they do.

(And yes. We actually do wake our filters on the way out. We do our best to let our inner critics sleep, but they always, always wake up.)

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I wonder what our ordinary communities might look like if we agreed to suspended analysis of each other, and agreed to do away with the requirement that we must agree to get along. I wonder what our communities might look like if we were more confident that our paintings would be viewed through a lens of generosity and compassion and grace rather than suspicion. What they might look like if we could learn to cherish others’ willingness to share their visions, rather than evaluating their vision or assigning them a grade. Instead of imagining how they might better conform to our ideal for them, we take the time to look for the image of God in them, which, we are promised, is already there. Suppose we lived in communities where kindness and charity, even toward those who view things differently, were valued and not dismissed as naive or winsome or merely cute. That is not to say that we agree to accept or validate everything about everybody. Rather, it is to wonder what might happen if we agreed that beginning this very moment, we commit to starting from, and genuinely working to stay in a place, of generosity and compassion toward those we meet, whether their beliefs align with our own, or whether their beliefs sound to us like fingernails on a chalkboard

What might our communities look like? I wonder.

(Sometimes, my inner Pollyanna insists on a turn at the keyboard. No apologies. I’m glad to share whenever she asks.)

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Last week I tossed out a Kierkegaard quote. “When you name me, you negate me.”

One reader responded:

I googled the Soren Kierkegaard quote, "If you name me, you negate me." My thought is the names we give ourselves often represent just pieces of us, that may be appropriate for the situation/conversation. I know it isn’t “me”, but important elements of me. If someone else chooses to use it to define me, too bad, they’re missing all the love I see. Also love the line “Nice to meet you! Tell me more.” Asks for more than the ways we name ourselves.

When I read these words, it makes me think about Fred, my inner filter, and all the hard work he does to ensure that I present myself appropriately in a given situation. How Fred works very hard to encourage me and to remain respectful for those around me.

I so appreciate Fred. Even when I try to ignore him. And I so appreciate the comment.

For me, however, there is often something far less charitable going on. All week I have wrestled with this, and have come to think that to name myself is to negate myself by covering over who I am with what I do. It is rejecting who I was made to be.

My metaphors are imperfect at best, and I recognize I am stacking metaphors on metaphors which is always a risky endeavor. But stay with with me if you can:

Imagine Fir tree, tall and green and lovely and standing with friends in a secret and beautiful part of the garden. But when Fir considers his branches, especially compared to those of his friends, all he notices are bald spots. There are so many ugly bald spots.

What does he do? He rolls up his sleeves and gets to work. He invites the birds to fill in the bald gaps with their nests. And when they have done all they want to do, he gathers up the fallen leaves from the oaks that live nearby and arranges them just so to finish the work that the birds have begun. But of course, it’s not enough, so he borrows flowers from a friendly magnolia, a transplant from Mississippi who came up to get away from the heat a couple of years ago. The effect is remarkable. Marvelous even. And when children happen upon the secret spot in the garden, they gaze on him in amazement.

He calls himself Bird Nursery. Leaf Collector. He tells the children his name is Magnolia Gatherer and Flower Arranger.

Before long, the chicks hatch, learn to fly, and the whole family of birds moves on. The leaves from the oaks turn brown and the magnolia petals begin to wither and turn dark. So Fir restarts the process, and then restarts it again, and again. But it never lasts. It’s never enough. It cannot be. He is not a host for birds, nor leaf collector or flower arranger. There is nothing wrong with these things, but they are not who he is. He is Fir. That is his name, and it was given to him before his first leaf poked out of the wet humus. Somehow, in his imagined inadequacy, he has forgotten this.

When I name, or perhaps rename myself, I think it is the same. I reject the name that the Great Love of the Universe whispered into my ear:

And in my rejection of that name, I work so hard to cover up my imagined inadequacy by doing and doing, rather than simply being. How often I introduce myself as Career Naval Officer, Former Math Professor, Caregiver, and/or Counselor. I even wonder if I don’t wear the name Brain Cancer Patient with a certain degree of pride. I grasp for anything I can find to cover up my bald spots, to convince others, to convince myself, that I am accomplished, interesting, worthy of their love, and worthy of my own love. I, at best forget and, at worst reject the name that the Great Love of the Universe already bestowed upon me. That name is “Beloved.”

There is a famous quote from Augustine that reads:

He who has God has everything; he who has everything but God has nothing.

C. S. Lewis famously rephrased it this way:

He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.

And this is my offering:

To accept the name, “Beloved. I am and will be with you” from the Great Love is everything. Can I just stop rejecting that unfathomable grace by my constant striving, my constant re-naming of myself and others already? Do I really think I can do better than:

“You are my Beloved. I am and will be with you”

given directly to us, to each of us, by God?

Dear friend, I don’t want to tell you what to do, but can I share something that reminds me? Sometimes, usually early in the morning when I am the only one awake in the house, I go outside and sit on the porch. Maybe I pray. Maybe I meditate. (Sometimes the line between the two is barely a trace.) But whatever is happening is happening without my words, without my guidance - without my directing things at all. These are surrender moments, and they are elusive and it’s only occasionally during these times that I get a tiny glimpse into something that defies description. All the names I have collected on my path for the last fifty-eight years fall away, my vision and my hearing become just clear enough to make out the outline of the Great Love and me at my first naming ceremony. In these moments, I begin to remember, and to believe that I belong to God.

I wish I could give you the secret formula for this, but I cannot. I don’t know it, and I wouldn’t trust anybody who claims to know it. But how deeply I long for you to have one of these mornings. Because I know that you and I share the same name:

(I think the word for these mornings is Grace.)

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Oremus,

C