Words That Bring Growth With Them

She was Judy Hopps personified—bouncy and blond and boundless. Her necklaces—there were three—were gold. One, a cross, larger than average, with a crystal of some sort in the center. Two, a (probably cheap) almost-choker. Small geometrical jewels in jewel tones ran right in a row. Three, a long, thin chain, not links, with a small pendant (I couldn’t quite get a good glimpse) that pulled the long, thin chain into a V.

“So, where are you at in your relationship with Jesus?”

This was the first thing she asked me, with her small, sharp nose and her small, sharp chin and a smile as big as the world. (Okay, already I lied. It wasn’t actually the first thing she asked me. She first asked which group I was with, and when I said none of them, she was rather confused. But reality doesn’t quite serve my narrative purpose.)

So she asked me about Jesus, and I rambled something about following him the best way I know how. Her grin flickered for a second as she shook her head.

“Okay!” she said, “Well, I love Jesus!”

I resisted the urge to say, “I know.” It wouldn’t have been snarky, not at all. I stood in awe of her conviction, her assurance, her confidence, the sheer fire she had in her heart for the LORD. Her mom—fifty-one and about a year out of a nasty, dragged-out divorce process—stood with me, astonished anew.

Christine, the unadorned woman, the mother, standing in the back with her hands in the pockets of her black zip-up sweatshirt, had already told me she felt old there in that room of young college-aged twenty-somethings. Despite that discomfort—and she didn’t tell me this, but I think it is true—Christine was in this room because she felt like there was no other place she could possibly be. Her faith, right now, was held in and carried by the exuberant belief of her daughter. And when Christine looked at her daughter, it was as if as at a stranger, a beautiful and astonishing stranger who called her Mom, who idly high-fived her over and over, comfortable, as they talked together about praising the LORD.

What a beautiful name it is: LORD. When it’s written in all-caps, LORD often is the translation of the Hebrew Tetragrammaton, the four-letter word for God, reconstructed historically as Jehovah, or more recently, Yahweh. As an act of reverence and profound respect, most Orthodox Jewish people did not (and still do not) pronounce this name of God, instead substituting others.

Right now, I’m three and a half weeks into a master’s program in English at the University of Maine, so I am thinking a lot about words. I’m thinking about words and how they are written together to make meaning, and how that meaning is influenced by literacies, ecologies, discourses, histories, concepts, people, and systems. I’m thinking about words and how they can construct or reflect reality. I’m thinking about words and about how they are slippery little buggers that can do almost anything you want them to, and several things you probably don’t intend. I’m thinking about signs, about signifiers, about the signified. But ultimately, I’m thinking about how words, effectively, exist to name things.

Is Kenneth Branagh hot? Well, this depends on several factors. What does “hot” mean? Does it carry a connotation beyond conventional attractiveness? Is confidence a part of this equation? What about his context? What about the ways in which our own romantic “types” influence our answer to that question? How, exactly, might our own “types” be created for ourselves by our contexts? What might those contexts be?

I sat in a cement office with two other people discussing these questions, our laptops open and abandoned on expanses of desk as the sun set. Together, we tried to pin down exactly what hotness was—name it, if you will. We named our own “types” by describing our experiences of the people we love(d) and why we think it is that we love(d) them. We told each other the stories by which we understand our existence, naming ourselves and the world with more words than I could possibly fit here. Ultimately, we were learning the names of each other—Christian, lapsed Catholic, idealist (ish)—and what those names, for us specifically, actually meant. But also, we were learning beyond those names.

Names are powerful and necessarily limited, because how can reality be both captured and/or constructed by simple units of sound? And still, what a powerful name it is: LORD. A name so powerful that people choose not to speak it, because somehow, it signifies more by staying unspoken.

“What a Beautiful Name” by Hillsong Worship starts like this: “You were the Word at the beginning.” I’ve always loved John 1:1 for its poeticism, the implications of “the Word” as another way to name Jesus, the idea of the incarnation, the making human of a word, the Word. The interpretative potential of this passage is beautiful to me. So in a room with Christine, I sang that Jesus was the Word at the beginning. I sang that the name of the LORD is beautiful. I sang that the name of my LORD is powerful, and I believed it.

I sang these words alongside apologists, my brothers, and alongside crusaders for Christ, my sisters. Despite the fact that I’m becoming increasingly convinced that it is impossible to ever fully name God, despite the fact that these siblings and I would probably disagree on an epistemological level (I’m becoming increasingly convinced it’s impossible to argue someone into belief, and that we can’t actually prove, or even know, everything we say we can) all of us still named the same reality: the LORD’s name is wonderful.

I sang other things at this worship night, too. I named other realities—about heaven and power and hell and death and destruction and mercy and love, and I couldn’t help but wonder about the truths and the mysteries in those words.

The people who are interested in the mysteries, regardless of what names are used to describe them—these people, too, are my brothers and sisters.

So when I sing about the powerful name of Jesus, as I acknowledge and enact through my speech the gloriousness of the day that the LORD has made, so too I acknowledge and ruminate on words I’ve been given—given by my new friends, image-bearers who don’t see themselves that way.

Those words—words like: “tension is where knowledge comes from” and “go piss girl” and “I am comfortable with ambiguity” and “hot guys are bad at sex” and “the only true love is honest love” and “the Swedish version of Jesus Christ Superstar is hilarious” and “all that to say”—name (and leave unnamed) truths, relationships, people themselves, all of which are worthwhile.

So, to the man who asked me if flipping a coin was really that different from praying, thank you. To the woman who gave me the phrase that now titles this text, thank you. To Judy Hopps with three necklaces and a child-like fervor, who asked me if I love Jesus, thank you.

All of these words (even—or especially—the 1,221 I’ve just finished writing) brought growth with them.

Blessed be the name of the LORD!

(whatever that name may be)

Blessed be Your glorious name.