Names

A few years ago I stopped by a field of sunflowers to take some pictures, and filled a CF card with some fairly predictable, cliched pics of big gaudy yellow things that look like daisies on steroids. The best things are usually not the ones we were looking for, so, even after fiddling with them in Photoshop, I wasn't really pleased with any of the sunflower shots except this one; :

which the more observant amongst you will have spotted is probably not a sunflower. The colour's wrong somehow. The shape is odd. So what do you call it? A thistle? A nodding thistle? A musk thistle? Carduus nutans? A weed? A noxious plant? A reminder of the Highlands? A thing of beauty? A nasty nest of prickles? Now you need to be careful with your answer because what you call something doesn't define the thing named. It defines you.

The little ball of purple spines is completely unaffected by the name I give it - it lives on, soaking up sunshine, seducing bees, photosynthesising, nodding. The name I chose to give it states my relationship to the plant, my education and history, my emotional and affectional states with regard to it. In the same way, the names people give me - Kelvin, son, Vicar, Kel, sir, Dad, Reverend, IRD #465399, Sweetheart, you prat, Next! Yes you - define them, not me. That is of course, unless I make the mistake of taking the name to heart and using it to name myself, in which case I allow myself to be defined by some other's idea of who and what I am.

Which is the point of Jesus' question to Peter in Matthew 16, who do you say that I am? I notice that although Jesus doesn't refute Peter's insight, Why you are the Christ! he doesn't pick it up and use it himself and he was fairly insistent that people not go telling others their opinions of who he, Jesus, was. The conversation delivered Peter to a place he didn't even know he was traveling to - a new sense of Jesus and a new sense of himself.

Jesus is who he is; what Peter calls him defines Peter. What we call Jesus defines us.

Comments

Kathryn said…

Kelvin, yes, I have always called you Kelvin. That is who you are to me, before you were a Vicar, a Reverend, a Dad.
But Jesus, now that is another name altogether; Saviour, Redeemer, Friend, Son of God.
Jesus, what a beautiful name..... so many wonderful things to me.
And that beautiful thistle, is way prettier than those nodding sunflowers. I too, took photos of thistles while in NZ, with big fat bees buzzing amongst those fluffy purple pompoms.
Kathryn, Kate, Katy, Mum, Grandma...

20 August 2008 at 12:21

Kelvin Wright said…

I have always liked Revelation 2:17, "...to him who conquers... I will give a white stone with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it." I think it means that at the end, when all striving is over, we will be known to ourselves and to God, and we will not be defined by anyone else, ever again.

20 August 2008 at 13:16

Kathryn said…

That sounds wonderful to me :-)

20 August 2008 at 14:16

Anonymous said…

Romany children are given a secret name, whispered to them by their mother at birth -and once again when they come of age. A recognition of the power of names.
Think too, of the way that lovers' secret unique names that they have for each other, become utterly banal and ordinary when the love is gone and the hate is in full flow - and the txt msgs are being shown to the jury.
Finally - to the source of the superiority of the camel - who alone is privileged to possess the secret of the 100th name for God.
J

20 August 2008 at 16:54

Living the lies

In 1969, when I was 16 I left school and got a job as a labourer. My wages weren't high but to me they were a fortune and within a few months I bought my first car, a 1938 Morris 8 sports, this one here. It had a minuscule 4 cylinder engine and a wood framed body which meant it was slow and it flexed so much when going around corners that the doors would sometimes fly open. Nevertheless I thought it was pretty damned cool, especially with the modifications I made to the muffler for performance and advertising purposes, ie, removing it. Back then, the most popular TV program was The Avengers, in which the suave and resourceful hero, John Steed drove a 1928 3 Litre Bentley. Which looked kinda like my car, right? Yeah, right. Anyway, John Steed usually entered his car by leaping nimbly over the door, so I emulated him whenever possible. Now all this is preamble. I want to tell you about something that happened to me one day in Papanui Road, Christchurch. My car ...

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...

Why I Hold the Views I Do

St. Hilda's Collegiate School, taken with my phone after a recent meeting. This picture has nothing whatsoever to do with what follows, but I like the interplay of shapes and particularly the shadow on the wall. My mother is a Methodist, liberal in her theological and social opinions. My father was a socialist, just slightly to the left, in his politics, of Karl Marx. My siblings -there are 5 of us- are all bright, eloquent and omnivorous in their consumption of books and other intellectual fodder. One of my most cherished childhood memories is of mealtimes in our little state house. The food was ingested with copious amounts of spirited, opinionated, clever and sometimes informed debate on whatever subject happened to catch the attention of one of the family that day. Or whatever one of us thought might get a rise out of someone else. So, sex, politics and religion it was then - oh and motorbikes, economics, international relations, demographics, cricket, company ownersh...

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...

2 More Years

An autumn leaf, the evidence of the death whereby the grapevine lives and bears fruit There are 31,102 verses in the Bible, or at least in the Protestant version of it which the conservative section of our church recognises. Of these, there are 6 verses which explicitly condemn homosexual practice. The best scholars in the Christian world have pointed out the ambiguity of even these scraps of scripture, but this does not prevent their becoming the basis of an antipathy to contemporary same gender sexuality which I was repeatedly told, during General Synod, was "First Order". I'm not sure what "First Order" means exactly, but I was told that this is a "Salvation Matter". So, presumably, holding a proper view on homosexuality is right up there in importance with belief in the doctrines I would consider foundational for the Christian faith: namely the Holy Trinity, Incarnation and Resurrection. In any event, antipathy to homosexuality has already ...

Available Light

Search This Blog