For the past couple of weeks these entries have been considering identity and the idea of the name. Central to us asking the question “who am I” is the question of the name. Conversely, when we ask someone “who are you” we are in some measure asking for the gift of their name. The rest of the information they may share with us, I would argue, is not separate from their name. The rest of what I learn about them (over minutes or over years) confects like coats of glaze on candy into an epithetic identity: this is “Captain Matt, son of ---, the bee-keeper, the boat-sailer, the spear-fisher, the husband of ---, the father of ---, friend and parishioner.” Those things that are true about someone become a part of the long name they bear.
And so, a part of identity is a long history of names and naming –even changes of our name.
Abram becomes Abraham (Gen. 17). There was a moment in time, in Abraham’s story, when God breathed an extra syllable into the name. Later, Abraham begot Isaac. He became, Abraham the father of Isaac.
And this is not just true of people in the scriptures, it’s true of all people (as a matter of fact, its true of all people because the Bible tells us true things about real people). In Les Miserables the answer Jean Valjean receives to his famous song “Who am I?” is in fact the named history of his life; the name transcribed upon him over time: 24601.
There is a great paradox here: For even as he identifies and submits to the penitentiary numerical code mapped over him in the correctional system, even as he identifies with the violent appellation given by cruel folk, he actually surpasses it. It is only when the legally free Monsieur le Mayor, accepts the violent name of 24601 (the reduction of all identity to object-of-punishment), that he is actually able to existentially move beyond the slavery and shame of the mere number.
True liberating identity does not come from some process of self-naming, rather, Valjean’s song illustrates that the whole edifice of Monsieur le Mayor only produces anxiety and nothingness within Valjean. Valjean receives identity in the story of forgiveness, re-habituation, fugitivity, fatherly surrogacy, and at last, clemency.
It is only after he confesses “I’m Jean Valjean” that he escapes the damnation and confusion of self-naming. This is why the final and highest note (which Colm Wilson achieves in perfect head-voice) falls at the end of his pronouncement that he is “24601.” The truth has set him on the road to freedom which comes not through narcissistic absorption, but an openness to the Other, to God, and to the names that those relationships give him.
Along the movement of God’s love for me I can move through names towards what He, in his fullness of time, knows me to be. I can simultaneously confess that I am the chief of sinners, that I am that hypocritical pastor’s kid who hurt people in middle school and also that I am no longer merely that. That name I must both reckon with and identify with while also no longer being exhaustively or comprehensively identified by it. In holding both the saintly parts of me (past present and future) with the sinner parts of me (past present and future) my names become a narrative unfolding of the grace of God who calls us each by name.