Name That Thing
Monday, March 1, 2010 Humanity needs definition. Without words that name, that define our world, the world within or without, we are mere animals, living on instinct. To think, to know, to communicate, is to name things. Naming invest a thing with meaning. As Helen Keller, blind and deaf since an infant, wrote, “Everything has a name”. Definitions matter.
By naming a person, a thing, an idea—to name anything—is to distinguish one thing from another. In doing so we also locate it; if we can say what something is we can better say where it is. This includes ourselves. Definition helps locate us in the world. With good definition we are better able to know our relationship to others who have their own names, their own locations. We are better able to see where we are, where we’ve been, or where we might go.
However, if a word can mean anything it means nothing. Without meaning we are also dislocated, disconnected, indistinguishable in the world.
There are limits in naming, in defining things. Everything exists with an edge. To define something or someone marks a line, a boundary between what is and is not, what is mine and what is yours. Living with edges, painful though it be, is necessary. Without the edge definition creates we cannot separate or come together with any tangible meaning. We may become aliens to those we might have known by name.
Ignoring our need of definition and the importance of a clear identity creates and multiplies confusion, as well as frustration, anger, and alienation. Reality must be definable to be lived in and lived with.
With this said, I’ll ask a question I think is relevant today. How do I define my faith and practice in relation to God and others? (My reality is one of belief in God.)
How do I define my beliefs? How does history (events in time and space) shape or change my identity? How does culture? How does God? Each of these things has a name of their own. Do I know the relation one of these things bears to the other?
If I cannot name my faith, how can I rightly say I have one? And does the name I give it correspond to the name others recognize as the same? If I identify my faith and practice in a way that other “believers” do not recognize, how can I have any sense of unity with them in my faith and practice? How can they have a sense of knowing me as they know themselves if we both take the name but define it differently?
But let’s go further…how do the contexts of time and place, the proximity of one thing to another, and other such matters, how might these change the meaning of thing? Does a thing mean the same thing in a different context? Change matters to us. Does it not effect meaning and definition? If so, should we resist change for the sake of feeling safer, more well-defined in a secure past than in a less-sure future?
There is this problem of our less than perfect perceptions. Like all other things, we too have our limits, limits that very with age, education, experience, health, and so forth. What I perceived as a child changes as an adult. With knowledge in time, definitions may change, broaden, expand, or even contract, just as weather alters the boundaries of the earth.
Definition may bring certainty in an uncertain world. But the process of definition, the ongoing need to redefine the things I once knew by another name, may also bring doubt, if at least for a little while.
As the apostle Paul said, we only know in part. We see through a glass darkly. Therefore, we need faith, hope, and love to transcend the mystery of our living ignorance, something more to pierce the unnamed darkness that threatens us.
That “something” we need also has a name. They called his name, Jesus.
Just a few thoughts before bedtime, a little game of “Name that Thing”.
Jan McKenzie
The thoughts above came from meditating on a very specific question that relates to my own work and life. That question was: What is a Seventh-day Adventist? The question formed a link in my mind with the Helen Keller article I had read, one that formed a part of a larger, long-ago reading in semiotics (the study of signs and symbols in linguistics).
God instructed Adam to name the animals he had created for Adam. That’s a good place to begin if your looking to understand the purpose of naming the things of life. It raises questions of identity, location, time, authority, order, meaning, knowledge, cognition, imagination, ideation, and so much more. Everything has a name.
