December 26, 2023
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.”
William Shakespeare uses this line in his play Romeo and Juliet to convey that the naming of things is irrelevant. Is it?
Does that apply to God as well? Karen Armstrong, in her latest book, Sacred Nature, writes that in the Bible there are 50 different names for God. I have noted that they often come with the annotation of “Creator of Heaven and Earth”, from which I dare say that this is how God wants to be known.
That makes sense. God wants to be known by what he has done and still does. Beware me. I am not a theologian, a designation in itself an impossibility, as God is beyond knowing. The very name ‘God or Yahweh’ is a mystery. Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman, in his book, The Hidden Face of God, on the very last page, the very last paragraph, writes, “The name Yahweh probably means, ‘that which causes to be’…..There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God”.
Bonhoeffer makes the same point, actually expanding it when he writes that God and Creation are unified just as all great artists derive their reputation from their creative works. Yet, in all my readings of interviews with sincere Christian leaders during this Christmas season, the words, ‘religion’, ‘heaven’, ‘Christ’ were prominently mentioned: yet, I never read about any connection to Creation at all, which makes me wonder whether Gnosticism is still the ruling force in Christianity; after all, Gnosticism separates mind from matter, heaven from earth.
God, the forgotten God.
Today, more than in any other era, God is the forgotten factor. I was again struck by this when I saw two of my adorable great-granddaughters, 4 and 6 years old, sing about the red-nose reindeer, and Santa Claus, not a word about ‘the real meaning of Christmas’. Secularization has changed all this: God is absent. Humans are on their own, even though the rumors about God still seem to be around, but these vague utterances are no longer regarded as relevant. Perhaps, very perhaps, the onset of global natural disasters, rapidly increasing in severity and ferocity may bring about a return to reflection and self-examination, and could start a period of purer living and a hesitant recognition that the world in which we live is bigger than ourselves, infinitely larger than our mind and intellect can contain and grasp. Just imagine: our acquired mode of life, has led to a situation where we pump heat into this world, akin to a daily injection of 600,000 nuclear bombs. This infinite heat has caused the totally unimaginable warming of our earth, air and seas by close to TWO percent Celsius.
A new year looms.
We are on the verge of entering a new year, for which the omens look ominous: wars, hardening of hearts, also known as right-wing thinking, while deficits, monetary and environmental, spiritual and intellectual, are rife, and solutions increasingly thwarted by ignorance, by lethargy, by unwillingness to sacrifice today to ensure a tomorrow.
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.”
What’s in a name? What’s the name of the times we live in? No matter how we slice it, whether we name it Anthropocene – rule by humans – or whatever, the naming of our time is irrelevant as the condition of the times we live in is dictated by its circumstances, of which the true signs tell us that they are defined by another Greek word: TELOS, the end. Homo proposit, sed Deus disposit, freely translated as, “If you want to make God laugh, you tell him your plans.”
We know it, we sense it, we experience it, and we ignore it that, “The Way of the Lord is taking shape”. Because we, we are his unwitting helpers: our catastrophic actions are speeding up the coming of the Kingdom!