大象传媒

Art Historian, Dr Jim Harris:

聽I went to a rodeo the other week, at Cheyenne, Wyoming, where the cowboys are the toughest and the cowgirls are the prettiest.聽 Or is it the other way around?

聽The skill of the rodeo riders is astonishing but perhaps the most astonishing thing of all was the names of the cowboys. Ty Fast Taypotat.聽 Lane McGeehee.聽 Tyler Waguespack. Jammie Tinker. And, best of all, Bubba Buckaloo.聽 If they鈥檇 been anything but cowboys those names might seem unlikely, but as it was they were perfect.

聽My own name is reassuringly ordinary but when I was in my mid-teens, my friends decided it would be hilarious to give me a new one and they started calling me 鈥橲murf鈥�.聽 I grinned and bore it and died a little inside until I was rescued by my cross-country coach, the great Barry Goater, who told the rest of the team that he refused to have a Smurf running for him.

聽I was lucky.聽 Name-calling is easy to start and much harder to stop.聽 No matter how often we say that names will never hurt us, they actually do.

Names are important and powerful and naming is a privilege. When we were trying to name my unborn second daughter, it took her Mum and me a four-hour lunch and (for me at least) a lot of wine to come to a consensus on Esther.聽 We care about names, even the informal ones. I鈥檓 happy to be Jim, but also somebody鈥檚 Sweetheart, someone鈥檚 Darling.

聽Long before the birth of Jesus, the prophet Isaiah wrote of his coming and said that 鈥榟e is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace鈥�.聽 Those weren鈥檛 just titles, but names that spoke to Jesus鈥� role, his longevity, his care, his priorities and his character.

聽And, remarkably, Christians believe that God names us.聽 We are 鈥榗alled by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will give鈥�.聽 We are 鈥楾he Redeemed of the Lord鈥�.聽 We are called, 鈥楽ought Out, A City Not Forsaken鈥�.聽 We are called 鈥榖eloved鈥�.聽 We are called 鈥榗hildren of the Living God鈥�.

聽At a time when the news is full of whatever new and hateful names we devise for people not like ourselves, I reckon it鈥檚 worth remembering that that is what we all are, that is the privilege of our shared humanity.聽 We are all, every one of us, named 鈥榖eloved child鈥�.