To Belong to a Name

In the post before this one, I talked about the challenges I've faced, inwardly speaking, due to my having a unique last name in my family.  That is, nobody else in my whole entire family, shared my last name with me.  Not even my parents.  When my wife became my relative through marriage, she was the first relative to share my name, and our children are the first blood relatives to share it.  For the nearly three decades of my life up until then, I was alone in bearing my name.  

In the other post about this I ended up speaking more heavily about the anxieties about keeping the name alive, a name that began with me, at least insofar as it belonged in my family, and therefore a name that I didn't want to see die out as suddenly as it had begun.  And it led me into some theological territory about time and eternity.  It's a rich topic, and I'm glad to have had a personal subject from which to segue into it.  But there's more than that to the inner challenge I faced because of my having a name that no one else in my family did.  There's a topic more personal than that.

I felt, on some level, that I didn't fully belong to anyone.  I felt that I belonged with my family, so don't get me wrong, but I was not claimed by their identity.  There was no symbol--and a name is a very powerful symbol--to mark me as belonging to them.  If you'd asked me and my parents for our names, you would have no reason to think that my parents weren't just close relatives but not necessarily my parents.  

It also meant that I didn't feel like I had an identity that extended beyond me.  A family name can give a child a sense of connection with an entire world of relatives besides himself.  No, it's more than that.  I had the sense of connection.  But the child whose own surname is a family name can also grasp a sense of identification with those relatives in a way that I never could.   "Great Grandpa, from Dad's stories, was a Malone (I just like that name, it has no relation to me whatsoever)!  So am I!  I'm like him!"  Yes, there was none of that for me.  There is not one relative of mine, who was a relative prior to my marriage, of whom I could say, "he/she is an X, and so am I!"  

Perhaps this is taking my words too literally.

This was hard on me, even though it would take me years to realize how hard.  Looking back on it, it was a reminder, however subconsciously, that I didn't know my biological father the way other kids did. Nor did anyone ever even suggest to me that it might be nice to change my last name to that of either my Grandmother or the man who helped her raise me (these are folks I knew as "Mom and Dad," and if not for clarity's sake I'd be calling them that here too, and make no mistake they were wonderful to me), so in a sense no one put that legal "seal" on me that said "You're mine."  Now I'm not saying this in resentment.  In my family, not much stock was put into legal realities and things that might have been considered mere formalities.  I have no doubt that my parents sincerely believed it didn't matter what my name was, that I would feel a sense of belonging just because they loved me, even if I shared a name with no one.

And to some extent, they were right about that.  I did know, due to the love we all shared, that I belonged among these wonderful, caring, and loving people who were my parents.  But what they had overlooked--and I am open to the thought that anyone could have easily made the same oversight--is that a sense of belonging to people who love me and a sense of having an identity that belongs to and is shared by people who love me are two different things.  I had the former, in spades.  But the latter?  No.  I felt "special," but in a way that was somewhat lonely.  I was unlike any of my Grandmother's other grandchildren.  They all, down to the last, shared names in common with both of their parents.  Even those whose parents divorced, it just so happens that to this day (or in the case of my birth mother, until the day she died) their mothers have kept the names of their fathers, and both have shared these names with their children.

Now that I'm grown, it would feel artificial to get my name changed.  And besides, to what would I change it?  My Grandmother's last name?  The name of the man who raised me by her side?  The name of my birth mother?  The name of my biological father?  Whose name would I choose?  A very good case could be made for at least three of them (I'm not telling which three), but in each of those cases I could cause people on all sides to think that I wasn't being grateful enough to the people whose names I didn't choose, and this offense could be especially grave because all of my parents are dead, meaning their blessed memories have become rightly "sacred."

And even besides all that, my wife rather likes my last name, and is rather content to keep it.

Rule# 9428 of Happy Marriages:
Never spring a surprise last name onto your wife AFTER marrying her.
I'm sure people have tried to obtain annulments for less!

I don't really have any answers, here.  I know the "right" answer.  I generally do, after all:  I'm Catholic, and there's a right answer spelled out for me for precisely 989,824,932 different highly-complex and specific situations, including this one, because the Vatican is crazy-prepared that way...

...okay, but seriously:  I know that the "obvious" Christian answer would appear to be that I should find my identity and my sense of belonging with God, and with my brothers and sisters in Christ.  I also know that the obvious "hallmark special" type of answer would be to get over myself, climb up onto the nearest balcony, and declare, with dreamy eyes and a wistful tone, "What's in a name?!" and ever after insist that my having shared my last name with  no one in my family in no way diminished my sense of belonging or identity.  And both of those "obvious" answers may be true.  I don't deny the validity of those propositions, because I'm not prepared to reject them as unrealistic.  

But I am prepared to say that, for me, it's not that simple.  Maybe for my brain it is, maybe even for my soul it is, but not for my heart.  I don't know why.  I know that I belong to God, just as I know that I belong to my family, and I even know that I belong to my friends.  But for some reason, some reason that I cannot just wish away or write off, I can't help but look at those--many of my relatives among them--who share their names with their families of origin, with their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, and think to myself:  "Wouldn't it be nice?"

And maybe that's okay.  Because there's another Christian answer that's not always so obvious, but a great deal more "real" than any platitude:  I can entrust this vague-but-recurrent sorrow to my Lord and Savior, not out of some hope that He will magically make it disappear (He could, but that's often not how He operates) but knowing that He will hold me as I mourn it, as He holds us when we mourn all things that we cannot change, from the trivial to the enormous.

Amen, Lord.  My heart, soul, and identity, I commend them all to Thee.  As long as I am Thine, I belong...

An Everlasting Name: A Thread in the Tapestry of Eternity

When it comes to family names, I'm in a unique position.  It's kind of complicated to explain, but suffice it to say that, although I grew up surrounded by my biological relatives, until I was married I was the only person in my whole family, biological or otherwise, who had my last name.  That's right, it didn't come from my father or from my mother.  It's not even the last name of a step parent.  There was literally no relative of mine, by any definition of the word "relative," who shares my name with me.  None living, and none dead.  I was it.  And for as long as I could remember, I'd always been it.

This may not seem like a big deal, but throughout my life it has often made me feel like I didn't fully belong anywhere.  Don't get me wrong, I never felt like an "outsider" in my own family or anything like that.  However I never knew the experience of belonging to the "insert-last-name-here" family.  This was even more jarring because my own immediate family was eclectic when it came to surnames, with none of my parental figures (and I had five of them--long and complicated story, that) sharing a single last name in common either, not even the two who actually raised me.  

For a long time, not having known who my biological father was, I supposed that he probably shared my last name, but when my mother finally revealed his identity to me (at age twelve, if you can believe it took me that long to pry it out of anybody) it turned out that wasn't true either.  

Of course not silly!  That would make sense!

What does this mean for me?  Well, growing up it meant that I never had a sense of pride in any certain name.  I think, even among a lot of families that don't take "family pride" seriously, there's at least some sort of subconscious pride or loyalty in the family name, even if--for the more argumentative types of families--it's only the "I can talk badly about them but no one else had better!" sort of pride and loyalty.  One's last name evokes images and associations of family, origin, and heritage.  I had none of that.  My name evoked nothing except vague (completely imagined) visions of a man who, until I hit puberty, I thought might be my father.  Once I no longer had that illusion, my name evoked nothing at all...

I've met a few other people who share my name, over the course of my life.  They always assumed maybe we were related somehow.  The sad thing is, although I knew better, I too entertained this notion, which goes to show how desperate I was, on some level, to know that I was actually connected to somebody who bore my name.  

What it began to mean to me as I grew older, on the other hand, has proven even worse in some ways.  It means that, for all intents and purposes, I am the start of a new family name.  While the name pre-existed me, it's a whole different branch than any other family, and I'm the start of it.  Because the name belongs to no relatives who came before me, the only way I will ever know that my name belongs to a rich heritage and lasting family history is if I start it myself.  

It's probably already occurred to you:  That's no small amount of pressure!  My wife, despite how immediately blessed we've been so far, has fertility issues that could flare up at any time.  Due to health reasons, we're not even the best candidates to be considered for adoption.  We always have to face the possibility--which for us is very distinct, and not just the "well, technically everybody has to face it" sort--that whatever children we have at a given time might be "it" for us.  Right now, that would mean we have two children, one daughter and one son, and that could be all.

Let's say that were true.  Or let's say our son ended up being our only son, even if we have more children.  Who's to say he'll marry?  Perhaps he'll be a priest, or a monk, or simply be called to live out the vocation of being single.  He could get married yet have no children, or at least no sons.  Then, just like that, my name, insofar as it means anything to my family, totally ends, and I may be alive to see the writing on the wall.  Also consider how absolutely certain this end would be:  Many people in my shoes might at least entertain the notion that somewhere in their family, even if it's only an impossibly distant tenth cousin on the other side of the world, there is a relative carrying on the family in both blood and name.  That weight, the odds are, is not solely on their shoulders.  My wife's father, for instance, is seeing his own name die with himself in his particular branch, but he does have distant relatives somewhere carrying on the name.  I know that I don't have that, because my name is not traced back through a series of ancestors who might have branched off five generations ago so that, I dunno, in Germany or Africa or wherever the name still carries their legacies.  The name began with me.  If the name lasts, I am the ancestor from whom all my descendants will have inherited it.

I suppose you thought being a patriarch was easy, did you?

I realize I'd be jumping the gun to start planning what I want on the tombstone for my family name (1985-?), but it is a concern that I can't help but call to mind.  And if the worst case scenario does occur, I'd be lying to say it wouldn't bother me deeply.

Why does it bother me so much?  It's surely natural that it would bother a person, but when it does get on my mind, I get outright anxious about it!  

I'm convinced that some of this anxiety comes from having too much focus on seemingly fleeting moments and not enough on eternity.  You see, I'm looking at my name--and my life, for that matter--as something that takes place and finds existence for as long as it lasts on Earth, and then passes away when that time ends.  I don't mean that I think I won't exist for eternity; as a Catholic I'm deeply aware of that, but what I'm failing to consider is that, if God stands outside of time, then to Him each and every moment, down to the smallest instant, must be engraved into eternity, never to truly pass away.  There is no accomplishment, no triumph, no beauty, by the Grace of God, that will turn to dust, because even though it may become dust with the passage of time, the moments where it was not dust stand before the eyes of God for all eternity.  

Just as God could see the future before it happens, so too He will see the past even when countless aeons have seen it turn to dust from our vantage point.  And this is not merely because he will "remember" it in the human sense of the word, it is because to Him every single moment to have ever passed or that will ever come is present before Him, as real and concrete as "now" is to us.  When we are privileged to stand in eternity with Him, it will be the same for us.  That's what it is to live outside of time.  As scripture states, time does, indeed, pass away as something in which we are contained, but by the very nature of what eternity is--a constant now--it cannot be a place where what happened in the confines of time is truly obliterated.  Because that would mean eternity had changed, that once there was "time," which God could see from His vantage point outside of it, and then at some point there is no such thing.  Because change and eternity are incompatible, we can safely say that all of time is frozen in eternity, it's just that we will not be bound in it.

If, however, you find that in eternity time is frozen in the middle of a workday,
you may want to check your surroundings for agonizing flames and consult the nearest thermometer.

Therefore, whatever becomes of me on the "timeline," my name and my bloodline will exist forever, even in time, by virtue of the fact that those moments will exist forever.  It cannot die, it's just that there may be one point on the timeline in the future where it is no longer found.  But this moment, all moments where it is found, are set in stone.  Will always be.  In that way, it is impossible for anything to become lost to time, because time itself is never lost.  

I'm aware that this is going to sound horrible to many people.  If time is frozen in eternity, then doesn't that mean that all the terrible moments will stand for eternity too?  Will we be forced to relive agonizing, regrettable, or terrifying moments from our lives for all eternity?  No, it's not like that, and there are two reasons.  The first is that, as I said, we won't be bound by time; we will no longer exist in time, so we won't be "reliving" anything in the strict sense of the phrase.  

The second reason, and the more important one, is that we will see it from the perspective of the eternal.  Scripture tells us that "all things work together for the good of those who love the Lord."  We also know that all things will ultimately glorify God, no matter how terrible they seem in the moment.  I believe that in Heaven, all of time and material existence will be like something of a beautiful tapestry.  That tapestry, perhaps, will be like a story told in pictures, the history of humanity and of God's works.  And we know that, like any excellent story, the complete tapestry will be brilliant, beautiful, and awe inspiring.  But there will also be "moments" in the story, or "threads" in the tapestry which, if taken by themselves out of context of the whole, will appear ugly, and perhaps even which are ugly on their own.  But when these threads are woven into the overall tapestry, we will find that somehow the contrasts they create with all the beautiful and fine threads makes the tapestry just as beautiful as, if not more so than, it would have been without them.  

This, I think, is the balance between saying that nothing in this life matters next to eternity (if that's true, then why should it matter how we live our lives?!) and saying that what we do in this life has a chance of spoiling eternity (which would be a bleak and terrible idea!).  Yes, we should strive to add only the most beautiful of threads to the tapestry of "time," but we can also rest assured that when we stumble, or when others seem to introduce plain, unimpressive, or even outright atrocious threads to the tapestry, somehow God will see to it that these compliment the rest of the tapestry so that the final work we will behold in Heaven will be breathtakingly amazing.   Looked at this way, "time" and every single instant in it does have eternal significance, but cannot taint eternity for God nor those who remain faithful to Him.

And it's by that perfect, artistic tension that I may know that my name, as fragile and precarious as it seems to be, is in no danger of fading into obscurity.  Neither is yours, nor anyone else's.  

------
I actually intended to go somewhere else with this originally, but this is where it went instead!  There's an even more vital element to the anxiety I sometimes feel around this topic, so I do want to dive into it in a future post, perhaps the next one.  So be on the lookout for it!