In this conversation, Cultivating founder Lancia Smith joins Christina and Evangeline to discuss the power of naming and its impact on our identity and relationships.
But can a mere word—a name—really have that much impact? How do our names—given or taken—affect our fears? Our purpose? Our identity? What is the relationship between naming and being known? And how can we approach each other (and ourselves) in a way that does justice to our value as creations of God?
Lancia speaks from her work with Cultivating and her extensive experience mentoring people who seek to work through loss and encounter healing through a deeper union with God.
In this Episode:
Sound Bites
"Being named or misnamed can hold the power of life and death."
"Our names can take into remembrance our belonging to God and others."
"Naming has the power to put something back in place and give it renewed life."
Chapters
00:00: Introduction and Overview
02:59: The Power of Belonging
09:50: The Importance of Individual Names
19:06: Why Words Matter
27:24: Helping Each Other Remember
35:21: Naming as Love and Reclamation
39:15: Being Seen
46:44: Identity
57:36: Naming Our Fears: Taking Away Their Power
01:06:25: Myth-Making and Storytelling: Reflecting Eternal Truth
Transcript
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
CHRISTINA BROWN: Walking along a path at the roots of Pikes Peak, you take a fork in the road toward the Anselm Society digital pub. Inside is a raucous conversation on the arts, faith, and, well, the idea that a rose would definitely still smell as sweet if it were not called a rose.
In a corner by the fire are three people. One of them is arguing that no, absolument non, which I believe is French for heck no, they would absolutely not. And that's me, your co-host, Christina Brown. Welcome to Believe to See, a podcast of the Anselm Society Arts Guild.
Here at Believe to See, we explore the relationship between faith, art, and storytelling. Our goal is to connect the great story, the great stories, and our own stories so that we can better understand what it means to live with a Christian imagination. Today, we will be getting to the heart of Shakespeare's famous question, what's in a name? And offering the explanation that Shakespeare's character Juliet of Romeo and Juliet missed entirely. Being named or misnamed can hold the power of life and death. It has the potential to change everything. Or Romeo. Or Juliet.
So is it any surprise that the first thing God does after calling into existence the very first piece of our universe is name it? There are only five sentences written in the entire chronological narrative of Scripture before something is named. And it is God who does it.
Genesis 1, 3 through 5 says: “Then God said, let there be light. And there was light. And God saw the light that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light day. And the darkness, he called night.” God named our world, and Adam's first commission was to name the animals. So why is this? As Juliet asks, what's in a name?
Well today we're here to talk with Lancia Smith, founder of Cultivating and longtime friend of the Anselm Society, to answer this question. But before I introduce this lovely lady, let me welcome my co-host, Evangeline Denmark. Evangeline, how are you today?
EVANGELINE DENMARK: I am well, enjoying this beautiful day.
CHRISTINA: Awesome, I think you're wearing roses on your dress, so I'm gonna pretend they're roses. They don't look like roses, but okay. They're very pretty. Thank you. Maybe Lancia, the gardener, would know. Lancia, welcome to the podcast. What am I wearing?
EVANGELINE: I was going to say poppies, but I think they could be either peonies or poppies. It's a very comfortable, old-fashioned dress.
CHRISTINA: Summer. Or in a sense, goodbye summer. All right. This is an exciting podcast. We're looking forward to discussing a big question. I'd like to start with an initial question. Personally, I believe that naming is crucial for human development and flourishing. All humans long to be loved and to belong to a beloved.
I think as Christians we are able to say confidently that we are the beloved of Love himself. But how does naming have a relationship to belonging, both to God and to others? I'd love for Lancia to get a crack at that.
LANCIA SMITH: That's such a big question. Well, when I was thinking about this earlier, the immediate thing that came to mind is that one of my favorite verses is Isaiah 43 verse 1. It says, “but now this is what the Lord your creator says, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel, do not fear, for I have redeemed you from captivity. I have called you by name. You are mine.”
I remember the first time I ever read that verse; it gave me absolute shivers. Even reading it now, it still gives me shivers. It sounds like a lover in pursuit of a bride. There is something personal, powerful, and sensual in the way that God says this. Whether He's saying it to a single individual or to a whole people, the idea of being possessed by God as an object, as a living object, is the formation of identity. It's about belonging.
Inherently, we need that, but we also rebel against it because of the idea of being independent and having the deepest freedom. Our deepest freedom always falls within being at peace with not being independent. And the idea that the Lord, He says all these things together. He's redeemed us from captivity. He's called us by name, which means He not only knows us personally, He knows the origin of a name. And in that process, we're also claimed. So we're redeemed, we're named, and we're claimed. That gives framework in so many ways, I think, for what makes it even possible to be to be at peace and belonging to somebody. I mean, it's the same thing when we get married. For men, their last name doesn't change. For women, it does. And so there's the whole change of identity, too. But it has everything to do with belonging to someone being claimed and having the name as a banner, you know over you.
I remember reading that that we bear the surname of God when we belong to him and that always I have found very comforting. But you know I think about this whole issue on a bigger level there's a binding that's established and formed between between the namer and the named. Identity is sent by the namer and identity, when it's truly given and received, marks not only understanding of who we are, but of what we're made for. Our telos, or long purpose, that understanding and living into it is what allows us to become known, to be welcomed, to be received, to belong to another, and to others in a larger circle.
So in some sense, our name, especially as we understand and live into it, is really a passport into relationships and belonging.
EVANGELINE: I was thinking as you were talking how sad it is that the part of that that has come to the forefront and that is even hard for me to separate myself from is the idea of being a possession. And I think that's because of how sad and tragic our world has come to be and has been since the fall, that people have been treated as possessions. When the idea, and as you laid it out and explained it, the idea of being known and being kin to God is so much bigger and freer and more beautiful than how we have come to associate naming or having a name or being called mine. And we do get to go back through literature, especially romantic poems and the idea of calling...
The idea of saying to someone, you are mine; you we get a little bit closer and I love that you talked about God calling us in that intimate connotation, calling us out by name and how that is like a lover calling you mine. And we miss that. We don't have as much of that. And that's one reason I like to read those old poems where calling someone mine is an act of love and an act of protection and an act of kinship over an act of possession. So I really like that you hit on that immediately, the intimacy and the nature of a lover calling to their loved one. So that's what I was thinking as you were talking.
As to the question, I was thinking about being the children of God and just children of God or children of. It’s just such an easy way to hack into that, what it means to belong. And of course, as families, we have children and they have our same last name and it's just a way of saying, this child belongs in this family. And that's beautiful. And again, I love the aspect of kinship. To me, that's so much more safe and comfortable.
LANCIA: It's easier to understand when you think of it in terms of being claimed. That somebody is extending their identity and giving it to you. That's what we do when we get married. And honestly, even women do it. We may not do it by changing our husband changing his last name to ours. But there is an exchange of identity and who we were before we get married, who we were before we became a parent. We’re somebody who is changed. When we extend the claim of our life and our affections to somebody, then they come under the banner of our love and we're identified together.
And we do that as a church, in organizations; like here, people will call themselves Anselmers. That's true. Anselmese. Yes. And people in my work in Cultivating are Cultivators. We're looking for ways to be claimed. To belong. So when you take away the feeling of possession as slavery, then you end up with something that is much more human and much more primal in some ways.
EVANGELINE: Well, think if you're willing also to engage in the thought exercise of separating that from know, patriarchy from the patriarchal naming convention, if you just switch it and think of it as matriarchal, like what if it was? It still would be, this is a group that belongs. It's still encompassing, protective, you belong. So if you can separate that from the baggage of, say, patriarchy, then you can really see what it was intended to be.
CHRISTINA: Yeah, and it's interesting that you guys have jumped right to marriage too. And the idea of exchanging names. Way back when, even if it wasn't last names it would be now you belong to this clan or whatever it was when you're exchanged in marriage. We're belonging. We will all cling in worship to that word and have it expressed. It's such a good word. But I think of Paul saying husbands love your wives as Christ loves the church. And again, if you think about it in that way of claiming, that's like a sacrificial love. That's the kind of claiming that says, love you so much that my identity I'm giving to you. No matter what you do, you are mine and therefore I'm loving you. So it's a very interesting thing when you were talking about, Evangeline, being loved as kinship and not being claimed in an abusive way, but saying, if I claim you, like the vows till death do we part and in marriage, like I will, I will stand by you and come what may. And it can get dark and dirty and messy. And yet if husbands do love their wives as Christ loves, then obviously that's the kind of belonging that none of us can argue with in that sense that it's never taken away.
LANCIA: Yeah, I remember when I was single how loneliness was always a part of that, but I think one of the most bitter parts of it was the longing to be claimed. The longing to belong to someone. mean, and I don't know if men go through that feeling, but I'm guessing that at least some men do because they're happier when they can say this is my wife or this is my girlfriend. To belong to somebody means you matter.
CHRISTINA: And they've chosen you too, you know?
LANCIA: But there's also that part though that to belong to somebody because you're claimed does in infer some measure of establishing value. know, married women were treated differently and have always been treated differently than unmarried women and we have a whole generation of women now, but men also who are really trying to find a new path to understand what does it even mean to commit your life to somebody and to belong to someone. You know, that's the same on across a lot of different fronts.
EVANGELINE: Yeah, I'm thinking about married women being treated differently. I think it's different. It's a little bit different now than it was when I was growing up as a child of divorce. I remember how hard that was for my mom. In that sense, it was difficult. When you take away belonging or you break that. It has consequences, obviously, for everybody involved. And I think now we're working on identity for single people, for divorced, for whatever it is, that's kind of an area where we can continue to embrace and say, you belong, you belong. And I just remember that being difficult for my mom in the church growing up.
LANCIA: Mine too. Mine would be a generation before yours. Certainly there was always the loss of honor. To say that you were divorced was just one step short of saying something just short of being a harlot. Which is horrible. And I remember the social stigma of what it is to not have that covering. It seems to me. And we're now in a place where we're dealing with such a wide swath in society, of people who are coming out of that fragmentation, where their names have been lost through divorce and remarriage and sometimes multiple remarriages. Step-rothers, step-sisters. and all of those things.
So now we're kind of at a point, think, of at least as a church and as the body of Christ, being able to circle around and say, how do we help restore the original sense of honor to somebody regardless of where they are claimed in social relationships?
CHRISTINA: That's actually a perfect segue into the next question that I had because it has to do with the word remembrance. So remembrance is interesting in that it implies that we are seeing something seen before, or doing something done before. Weirdly, it's a verb, to member something is to categorize it and to call it to serve a specific purpose, naming it in belonging. So honestly, I wanted to ask Lancia what you thought naming had to do with remembrance. And as you were talking it again, I thought it was a good segue because in the Eucharist, and in the Last Supper in Scripture, this is my body take eat in remembrance of me and sort of the idea of, again, exchanging identity. It's right before Christ sacrifices everything for his bride, for the church, for God's people. And it's a bringing together and a reuniting. And I just love that.
LANCIA: I think the thing that naming has to do with remembrance is just also very elemental. It has to do with restoration, restoration of identity, of calling, of memory and purpose to remember.
One of the definitions is to reattach separated parts. To re-member. To put something back together. To reattach the parts that belong together, that have been broken and separated. So rightly naming has the power to put something back in place and to give it renewed life. As Christ followers, one of our most elemental purposes is to help one another recall and remember to whom we belong and where we are going home to.
Because in the lives we live, the memory of that is stolen every day. We have a thousand forces every single day trying to make us forget. That may be in some respects, maybe one of the most holy parts of our calling as believers: simply to help each other remember who we are and where home really is. Because we lose our way when we're in a fog, we lose our way when we're in the dark and we don't have any light. We lose our way when the compass is broken. And so the role of believers, especially in all of our creative endeavors, but in the ways that we love each other as well, is to speak to the dignity that's in us and the holiness so that we remember what we're made for.
CHRISTINA: How do ou rpersonal names work into this? We’re talking about being named by God and claimed by God and His name and His banner over us, and marriage and all that, But what about our personal names? If I were to say, Lancia or Evangeline, you you belong, but how do our personal names fit into this remembrance?
LANCIA: Some of it I have to say is how we say them. Stan Matson was the founder of the C.S. Lewis Foundation and he was deeply, deeply influential in my life. I remember I'd walk in a room and he had this great big voice, was like bourbon and butterscotch. He had an amazing voice.
And I would walk in the room he would say “LANCIA.” I might as well have been Queen Cleopatra walking in; he did this over and over and over. I mean this is over years, this is in front of all kinds of very important people, in England and all over the United States, every place we ever did conferences together or did the work that we were doing, everywhere I went, Stan made me feel like my name was magic. Like it was so important. But it's amazing to me that listening to the way that he said my name made me feel beautiful. And it made me feel like I could matter, like I could be important; I think we all struggle on some level with thinking we might be subhuman. All the names we get called as children, all the things we suffer, have that horrible tendency to make us think that we're less than everyone else.
CHRISTINA: Yep, all those playground bullies really do matter.
LANCIA: They really do. And so I think about Stan's way of saying that or Brian's way of saying my name, or when Peter calls me wifey, which I have come to regard as my real name. and one time, I asked my little granddaughter, Ellie—when she was only four, she heard the little neighbor girl call me Nana. And I said, Ellie, do you know what my other name is? She said, “yes, Nana, your other name is my love.” Because that's all she'd ever heard Peter ever call me. And that's, going, okay, that works. That's fine. Out of the mouths of babes.
We can start with personal names that we don't have peace with. I certainly didn't have peace with mine. And other people can redeem it. I mean, our name can be said in so many vile ways. In my case, I hated my name as a child. I hated it as in my mid-20s. And in a lot of ways, my ex-husband redeemed my name for the first time. He changed the way it was said, and I've said it with his pronunciation ever since. But I remember that was the first time I ever heard my name that I could tolerate.
We don't know what our names mean half the time. And finding ways to say somebody's personal name…and sometimes it’s the way you look at people when you say it. if I look at you, Christina, I see all the little twinkles of the world falling down on your head. I can say Christina in a way that makes it sound magic. It's true. Because it's you. And I could say it in a way that doesn't sound like that. And you receive it either way. So, we have responsibility for the way that we say people's names. We can either give beauty into that, and permission to receive it well, or we could say it without that. I think the worst of it is when we say people's name apathetically.
CHRISTINA: Speak into that. We'll talk about this a little bit later in the podcast about how names can be damaging, but what makes you say that apathetic is the worst that we could do to someone?
LANCIA: I can think of the ways when people just say your name without any inflection. know, Christina Brown, blah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And they sound scientific. It's the apathy of not caring about who you actually are. I've seen teachers do this all the time. They're tired, they're burnt out, they've got 30 kids in a class. They go through the list and it's perfunctory. It's not naming nearly as much as it's simply assigning a category or a label. It's not imbued with the process of what it is to name the inhabitants of glory. I mean, each of us are in some way the embodiment of glory. And if we don't say, Evangeline, like it's magic, you hear the lack of recognition. You hear the lack of importance. You hear dismissive.
CHRISTINA: Well, you hear the lack of belonging is what you hear. But is that worse in your opinion than being named in a derogatory way?
LANCIA: I think so. Because derogatory names, no matter how vicious and awful they are, they still ascribe some measure of meaning. And I've been the recipient of both of those, very apathetic, very clinical. And I've also been the recipient of hundreds of ways of naming me something incredibly derogatory. Lots of therapy has been done about that. But the apathy was far worse because it means you're dismissed to a point of not even mattering.
CHRISTINA: That's crazy. I wonder how many if we were to ask magically a whole bunch of therapists or psychologists and neurobiologists, what they would say in their research has been worse in their experiences with their clientele, like people who have grown up feeling like they didn't belong to anyone and didn't matter, or people who felt they'd been abused by what they were called. What kind of lasting effects would kind of exist over generations, or through those two kinds of being misnamed in that sort of way? That's a very curious thought.
LANCIA: I remember being in women's survival groups for years and listening to people recount their stories, rape survivors and domestic abuse survivors. All of us were in there for various things that we had suffered. But the thing that I heard repeated most was that the physical damages were easier to live with than the psychological ones.
And the psychological ones, I can say in my own experience, were far worse than the physical things. Much more lingering. It’s impossible to really truly measure the power of words and how long words linger with their effect.
CHRISTINA: That's why I've always been so frustrated with that nursery rhyme. Sticks and stones can break my bones. The words will never hurt me. What a lie. I think that goes to the very power, the very beginning in Genesis. That is one of the first things that God does is he calls something by name. And so again, there is this sort of magic to naming that we don't often think about. And maybe that's partly because we have so much science now and we have so many classifications and so many terms. And we're all so familiar with so many different people's languages that we ascribe to a more of a dismissive way of calling something by its name. Again, I know that Shakespeare did not live in our time and I want to say he was on our side with this and he was using Juliet as a foil.
But I think the power of words is just way too powerful and creates way too much baggage, or associations, or beauty. It just matters.
EVANGELINE: I was thinking like all of what you're saying is consequence of forgetting how important language is. From the beginning God spoke. And created. And we are so used to language and so accustomed to it, it's everywhere around us that we forget that it is magic, that it is meaning, that it is existence. And that we as humans understand everything through language and more importantly, I believe through story.
But it's so easy to forget even probably those of us who love words remember it a little bit more often, but even for us. And so, as you said, I think Shakespeare would definitely be on our side. He definitely called for the importance of language. If anyone could claim to understand the most beautiful words, it’s Shakespeare. But yeah, it was it just made me think how we have lost our perspective on that.
I work with engineers and geologists and here I am, the lone word lover. And so I will exclaim over things that no one else notices. And it is funny because I do see the like blank look. To them rocks are the most beautiful things in the world, which is fantastic. They see a different beauty, but I get to once in a while remind them how much fun it is to put words together in just the right way. But it is magic. It is magic. There is something to it.
LANCIA: Part of our job is to help people remember that words have power. It is true. And whether we say them or whether we write them. You know, even when we're writing simple things, know, postcards, grocery lists. There is still something holy being enacted. We were spoken ourselves into existence by someone who gave the original logos. But because we're made in his image, because we're made in his likeness, we make because we were made. But we also have the power to speak because we were spoken.We live because we were spoken into existence.
That part always mystifies me. The idea that there's still a process, and what we say carries a ripple effect into the formation of reality, experiential reality, and tangible reality.
EVANGELINE: There's still magic. We still have the power that is given to us to go around calling people beloved and beautiful and good. Even if we're not saying those exact words to them, we can recognize the beloved, the beautiful, the good in them—and therefore create beauty and love and goodness. in anything that we do, but in simply…what you did was beautiful, what you did was kind. You know, those kinds of things. And how that is God making through language.
CHRISTINA: I love that, Evangeline. I think that's so cool. You go back to Genesis and you think about Adam having that commission, and being asked to name. And there's a beautiful quote that I found, from a Plough article by Hadden Turner. He said, naming is an act of love because knowing the names of the creatures around us enables us to see them. And I love that.
If you go back to certain kinds of psychology, there's being seen, soothed, safe and secure, I think, something like that. But the idea is that you have to be seen and in that being seen, soothed and safe and all that stuff, there is a claiming being made. There is a belonging being made, an establishment. And so that whole idea of you speaking those words of affirmation over someone is a reclamation of this person for God, for beauty, for goodness.
LANCIA: Curt Thompson describes this in a couple of his books, but it's really lingered with me, especially in this last year. He said, we were all born looking for someone looking for us.
Looking at you, Evangeline, while you were talking, I was thinking, we have this magic that we do when we name, when we say things out loud, but the punctuation of naming is what we do with our faces. Because how you look when you say something, I mean, we're 3D beings, and so, yes, a phone call or a disembodied voice can still have profound influence. We all know what that's like. But there's something different when you see the twinkle in your eye or the anger. I mean, you can say words that sound beautiful and say them when you're angry, and they don't have the same effect of what the words themselves mean. Meaning is something so much more than the words alone. So it's what you pour of yourself into the way that you say those things. But I really think that the twinkle in the eye or when your loved person walks in the room and your eyes get big and go, “it's you.” That's the punctuation and the grammar of how we use our language is how much love we bring into it.
We should write about that.
EVANGELINE: I just made me think of something this morning. My oldest has is on the spectrum, autism. And so we've been talking about interpreting body language. But that kid reads me like a book. And so he said this morning, he said, “how come I can understand your body language and I can't understand other people's?”
So we had this conversation about neuroscience and pathways and how the autistic brain has more neurons but has fewer neural pathways. So we're talking about how he's created neural pathways through 23 years of knowing me. And that's why. And the reason, Lancia just said the real reason is love.
CHRISTINA: That's amazing. Dang, that makes me want to cry.
EVANGELINE: It makes me want to cry too. Forget all the science. It's just love. It's just love. I'm going go home and tell him that and he'll be like, I understood the science part. Kidding,he knows the love part too.
CHRISTINA: It’s still funny. Okay, so going back real quick, to the personal names. I know, Lancia, that you have an interesting story, and you had mentioned it already; that you used to hate your own name. And I used to hate mine too, until you helped me see it differently many years ago when you led this beautiful artist retreat. And you talked about this.
So how should we approach our own birth names if we don't like them? Or if in them we can't find the identity that we crave? I used to have all these grand ideas of what I used to want to be named and they were all so romantic and gorgeous and in my opinion, way better than Christina. In fact, my mom almost named me Christiana, which I always thought was so much more beautiful. And I was like, “Mom!” But Christina was so popular when I was growing up and I felt like there was every other girl was Christina or Christie. And of course my parents were new Christ followers and I was like, that's so nauseatingly sincere because Christina just means Christ follower. And I was like, but I wanna be “garden goddess.” I want to be like “queen of the night” or something. “Unicorn tamer,” I don't know.
EVANGELINE: Nice, ‘cause many last names are like occupations. Unicorn tamer. That's your last name.
CHRISTINA: I should say it in elvish too. I should make it an elvish. Yes. That would sound a lot more cool. But anyway, obviously it's taken me years, but I see my name differently now, and I see how simplicity is really what I, Christina Brown, needed.
Anyway, can you speak briefly into that for yourself, Lancia and then for the other people who are listening who maybe really dislike their name or wish it meant something different?
LANCIA: I think a big part of that is being able to go to God in the beginning when we really don't like our names and speak to Him with a voice of grief.
I really wish I had understood this earlier in my life, because my strong dislike for my name had a profound impact on me as a child, a teenager, and even into my twenties. It wasn't just the sound of my name that bothered me; I also didn't like the way people said it. My name is actually the name of a car, so I would often get teased at school. Kids would say things like, "Why didn’t your parents name you Volkswagen?" The adults in my life made it even worse. Looking back, I realize that I probably needed to seek comfort and understanding from the Lord, but it didn't occur to me to do so until much later in life.
But being able to lament about the way your name is used, or what you think it means or what it doesn't, I think is a starting place.
There is a well of grief that's attached to the misuse of our own name, because it's the misuse of our own identity. And when we don't have a way to understand that in context of something holy and good and redeemed, then we live in a well of grief about who we are. There's no other way to dig out of that, except through tears and surrender. I spent probably 25 years trying to find any place that would say what the meaning of my actual name meant. And I didn't find it until I was 55.
I remember the night. It was maybe two in the morning, I'm searching through all this Ancestry.com stuff and dictionaries that have been out of print for like 300 years. I'm looking in the craziest places because it just doesn't show up anywhere. And I can still see the words on the screen from the night I saw the words: that in old German and old Italian, Lancia means “armor maker,” one who fits those going into battle.
My entire life suddenly made sense. Amazing.
So I love the meaning way more than I love the name. I still wish I was named Eden or Elena and that my name met garden goddess or something else that was suitably feminine. And I'm still sorry sometimes that my name is Lancia. And so I take a certain amount of comfort in Revelation.
The way that Revelation closes, when he's talking about overcomers, he says, it's Revelation 2:17, he says, “he who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone and a new name written on the stone, which no one knows but he who receives it.”
I hear that and know that at the end of this whole long story, there's going to be a resolution to the disconnect about my name. And I know that there's a long story between the giving of that name and the end of it. But there's something very comforting to me to know that the Lord not only says in Isaiah that He named me and redeemed me, but at the end of earth when all things are redeemed, my name will be redeemed too. That really matters. And it puts a framework about what it means to wait with a name that you may not love.
EVANGELINE: It makes me think of Through a Glass Darkly. And just the idea of language being symbol and I believe that we can understand our own existence as a symbol. And so I think when we pass through, we will finally be able to connect the symbol that we have only been able to grasp through a glass dimly. Just like we can only understand through story, that that name, that being will be finally clear to us. So I don't know, that just made me think just how we don't fully know who we are, and what we were experiencing, and even what we are as human beings.
LANCIA: That's so true. Do you think about Sam and Frodo talking about stories, and when Frodo's saying maybe someday they'll tell stories about us. And Sam's like, “Mr. Frodo, don't tease, I was being serious.” And Frodo says, “I'm being serious too.” Maybe they will, the way that we tell stories about Corrie Ten Boom. I mean, you think about the heroes that we've had over the years, and we do tell stories about our heroes because we need to have them.
How many people have named their kids and their dogs and their cats Sam? Like you don't see a lot of people naming their kids Frodo, but there's an awful lot of people who name their kids Sam because of that role. mean, how many people will someday do the same looking back? The things that we wrote and the things that we left, know, as artifacts and legacies.
EVANGELINE: I named my cat Neville after Neville in Harry Potter. He is one of my favorite characters. My cat has absolutely none of Neville Longbottom's attributes, but that's unfortunate. He's still quite cute.
CHRISTINA: You're claiming it for him.
LANCIA: You're giving him more dignity than he's been able to live into. See? And someday... And then, someday, when he's talking to you in heaven, he'll say, you should have named me Eden, or something I could have done something about. Or Mouse Killer. Yes, yes.
CHRISTINA: Nimrod the Mighty Hunter, that's what my dad named ours. Well, I had one more big question. I also want to talk about how naming something evil can take away its power. And you said that before, Lancia, that as Christians naming our fears and naming the horrors that come to us, or even just naming Christ's blood over our fears changes their power. Can you just speak a bit about why that is true and how we ought to kind of take that more seriously as Christians?
LANCIA: The thing that I would say most about that is to name something is basically an exercise in authority. It's an exercise of agency. An agency itself, just as a single element, agency is the opposite of powerlessness. And in every instance of somebody being victimized, and it doesn't matter in what way, the core issue is being powerless to prevent what is being done to you. To be able to name something is a way of taking back the original authority that we were meant to have about our own persons. Agency is the action backed with authority. It's not power-mongering, it's something that's true and it's founded on something that is authorized; divinely given authorization. Naming our fears takes them out of a place of power. sends us back into the shelter of the Almighty. And in naming them we state a measure of both authority and need. The need part is really important to say. Because if we cannot say what we're afraid of and if we cannot say what our need is, there's a part where the Lord cannot answer us. This is really critical to look at this. All recovery, whether you're recovering from rape or sexual abuse as a child or addiction or depressive disorder, all the things we recover from are core through the process of what it means to come to the Lord and say, I am broken. And there are a lot of reasons for that. I mean, we can be born broken, or we can be broken by other people. But in naming those things, we state a measure of both the authority and the need, both of which have a rightful place in our prayers and in the presence of God who hears us and delivers us.
The verse that I want as an epitaph on my tombstone, assuming that I have a tombstone someday that we're all not wiped out by nukes or some other equally traumatic thing, is Psalm 75:1. In the Amplified Classic version, it reads this way: “We give praise and thanks to you, O God. We praise and give thanks. Your wondrous works declare that your Name is near and they who invoke your name rehearse your wonders.”
The word Name is capitalized in Scripture, when it's capitalized for the Lord's name. It signifies His actual presence. So it meant that when He says, your Name is near, it's talking about a dwelling place. His name is a dwelling place. We take shelter in the name of God.
This is not just like idly saying it out loud and I believe it's one of the reasons that it is one of the commandments to not take the name of the Lord in vain because we don't understand the holiness of what that means. But the reason I'm saying what I say about fear is that to name anything is in some senses reclaiming the ground of our authority.
We know it's the first task that was given to Adam. We know that the task is bound into the nature of all human beings. We're namers by birthright and origin. When we cease to exercise this faculty, we become shadows of what we're made to be. And I think that that is true globally. When we stop being able to name what we need to name, we become less of what we're actually made to be. Fear's terrible power is rooted in the unknown. I've spent my entire life dealing with fear for very real reasons. And anxiety is fear's twin. It's the anticipation of suffering that's not materialized.
You're not afraid when you're being beaten, you're experiencing suffering. So the fear is always about anticipation. It moves us to focus on the unreal rather than the created and the tangible. It's the opposing state of hope. When we're afraid, it is the opposite of hoping. Hope is also about anticipation and expectation.
A verse I like to look at every single day, and it's largely because of my whole life and past, is 2 Timothy 1:7. “For God does not give us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and a sound mind.”
I know a lot about not having a sound mind. And I know a lot about being broken by fear. And in my own process of recovery, learning to name fear was something super simple when I've taught this before, talking about when we talk about the string theory, when we practice doing a string of fears, so that we can get to the bottom fear, the thing that we're afraid to name. But basically, naming our fears is to begin to name and identify our enemies. It's an act of power, and it's entering into God's presence, confessing fear as a place of desperate need. I still have to do it. This is a place where I can expect God's deliverance. Deliverance that first comes, I think, largely as a peace that God gives when we tell him what we're afraid of. I have seen people become at peace long before they could see things resolved in their circumstances. It doesn't mean that the deliverance is not being worked. But it does mean that where we start is a place of peace. It's exactly what the Lord said to Mary. Fear not. How many times are we told in Scripture, fear not? Like so many times. The real battle, I know, with fear is that it's always done and won in the inner landscape first. It's not that our circumstances change, it's that we change, and then the circumstances do.
CHRISTINA: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like I said, it's such a powerful question and it could deserve a whole podcast of its own, but I did wanna touch on it. I have just kind of just one last kind of wrap up question for you before we end our time.
Obviously, the elephant in the room is that the abusive power of a name is real. We've already talked about it a lot. And the history books are littered with wars and divisions over names. Humans claiming power over a place or a person without the right to do so. And our current cultural climate is no exception. So the damage that naming does is irrefutable. We kind of already established that. But if all that is true, then the reverse is also true. The power of naming was once and still is ultimately a power for good. So as Christians, how can we use the power of naming to reclaim what was lost and to help restore this world to God?
EVANGELINE: I think it might be a good place to start in humility and quiet and listening, especially when there's been damage done. Seeing in your own mind and calling whoever you're dealing with—as beloved, as good—listen when people tell you who they are. You know, so in terms of names, it's hard, but allowing people to express who they are to you and taking the view of them as good and beloved before you name them anything. You know, even if it's just different or someone who's not from my country or even those things. You know, and I'm circling around uglier words that we might apply to people. You know, if we can just sit with beloved of God in our attitude towards them and allow them to take the first step in revealing their name that God has given them, I think that's where we need to be now in terms of the damage, so much damage that's been done.
CHRISTINA: No, it's true. My story is not nearly as traumatic and awful as so many people's, but even to your point, Evangeline, having someone listen to your woundedness and you're struggling with your identity and who you are or who you've been named or who you've named yourself. I think of Brian, my husband, who has always listened to me. And finally, one day he came up and he's like, Christina, I think you have another name you're not paying attention to. And. He called me Lusita, which is bringer of light. And I don't know where it came from. And he said, “I think this is part of who you are and you can't see it. And I want to help you see it. And I want to help you live into this part of you that you can't see.”
For him to actually speak into me a part of myself that I think is true. And it takes a lifetime to process, but it's beautiful and it's helped me through so much of my shame and pain and struggle and all that.
EVANGELINE: That's so cool. I love that. What a gift.
LANCIA: That's such a critical question. I know. And I love the way that you have the word in there to reclaim. Because really as Christians, I believe that a large part of what we do in our lives is really about reclamation. Honestly, in many ways, beginning to end. I love what you said, Evangeline.
I think the thing I think about connected to this is this comment from Tolkien. I mean, lots of us have read this before and thought about it, but I love the way he ends it more than anything. He said, “you call a tree a tree, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a tree until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star and say it's just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that's merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them, you're only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas. So myth is invention about truth. We've come from God and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed, only by myth-making, only by becoming a sub-creator and inventing stories, can man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the fall.”
CHRISTINA: Well there it is. That's pretty much the answer. I think we can pretty much just end the podcast there.
EVANGELINE: Always good to let Tolkien have the final say.
CHRISTINA: Well ladies, this was amazing. I wish we could go on, but things are definitely winding down. The day has to move on and our fire is down to embers. Customers are already trundling home, probably for lunch. We've polished off our final glasses long ago. So here we go.
And once again, Believe to See is a podcast of the Anselm Society Arts Guild. To find out more the Anselm Society for you our listeners, please visit us at AnselmSociety.org. And while you are at it, please rate and review the show on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you again for joining us and we'll see you next time.
Believe to See Podcast
A podcast of the Anselm Society Arts Guild. Join a colorful cast of co-hosts and a rotation of guests at the digital pub table to explore how art and storytelling matter for faith and to connect our stories, great stories, and the Great Story.