Rector's Letter May 2007

Dear Friends,

What’s in a name? Does it matter if people call us by the wrong name, muddle us up with someone else or just can’t remember who we are? In a way it does, and I say that as someone who once had a very acute memory for names, which is waning fast in its acuteness. We are all unique and our names are part somehow of who we are, even if we don’t much like our particular names.

I was thinking about names after the recent baptisms. It’s not in the new liturgy but I like the bit in the old one where the parents/godparents are asked to ‘name this child’. I’ve been using it – it’s better than a surreptitious aside just to make sure they haven’t changed their minds and forgotten to tell me or just to double check I  haven’t muddled it up with a marriage from the previous day. I’ll probably be told by someone who knows about these things, that it isn’t a liturgically correct procedure, but I think it says something important. We are always told never to name an animal that we don’t intend to make a pet of; there’s wisdom in that – naming is an act of forming a relationship.

Putting a name to someone, as I said, gets more difficult, perhaps just because the older one is, the more people one has met in more localities – that sounds so much better than bemoaning the loss of grey matter. I found myself staring at a gentleman and his wife in the hall after the aforementioned baptisms, desperately and annoyedly trying to place them. It turned out that I knew them from a church in Milan one of my sons belonged to. The world is indeed shrinking even if its population keeps expanding. We had chatted in Milan, not knowing that we had numerable acquaintances in common. Perhaps it’s true that you could select just about anyone in the world and find they know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows you.

Recognising and naming people is important. Unfortunately, one can go astray. Mary said last Sunday should have been named ‘The Feast of the Dangerous Assumption’ after I had related to her my tale of jumping to conclusions about people. Someone ushered a family into the hall, saying they’d arrived too late for the baptisms. Oh dear, said I, but wishing to be helpful told them that the family I assumed they were part of had gone up to the Hydro. As I was going there, I proposed they should take me so I could show them the way and it would save me getting my car out (good ecological thinking) or walking up the hill. We chatted away, the woman telling me ‘Bill’ must have muddled the times. I should have done a double take there and then, but as I didn’t know a lot of the folk I didn’t give it another thought that ‘Bill’ was not a name I’d come across à propos of this baptism. She did say she’d been told it was the church on the roundabout and that, to my mind, is us. Anyway, as you will have gathered, when we got there it was the wrong baptism. Why is my life so muddled? Why do I make assumptions? No need to answer these questions.

God says ‘I have called you by your name, you are mine’. ‘Call his name Jesus for he will be the Saviour of the world’. We name a child with great care. They are special, unique, beloved children of God. A name gives us an identity. But God doesn’t make assumptions about us – he knows us. It is in that intimate knowing that we can rest – rest sufficiently to be able to value others, be they ever so different from us, because God cares deeply about them, too.

Janice

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