That We Would All Be Named

My kids and I have been listening to The Wind in the Door as we drive back and forth to school. I’ve read it before but today some of the phrases stood out to me in a new way.

If you aren’t familiar with L’Engle’s style in these books, it’s a bit like fantasy meets scifi with a little bit of allegory thrown in. I can see why she had trouble having the first book published because it was, at the time, and in many ways still is, like very little else that has been written.

One of the main characters, Meg, is being challenged, and faced with a test to prepare for a battle this is to come. She is faced with a person, a school official, who has brought her life nothing but misery.

This man, Mr. Jenkins, has been unkind to her family. He has spoken with thinly veiled contempt about her missing father and de facto single mother. (It turns out her father was trapped in another dimension, so I guess no one could have predicted that one). He seems to believe that her scientist mother would do the whole family a service if she would spend more time parenting and less in front of a microscope. He shows almost no compassion for the bullying of Meg’s younger, gifted, special needs and chronically ill brother, Charles Wallace. Meg, rather understandably hates him.

But she is challenged to love him. One of the most powerful quotes in the book, at least to me is when Progo (short for Proginoskes, who is a cherabim, but at first glance appears to be a dragon or in fact a drive of dragons. I told you this book was unusual), says to Meg

 "If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn't need to hate." Click To Tweet

He goes on to tell Meg that the universe needs more Namers, that Meg is meant to be a Namer. There are really only two choices, to be a Namer or to throw your lot in the with Echthroi. The Echthroi cultivate evil, they specialized in Un-naming, in X-ing people. When Meg hates Mr. Jenkins she contributes to his Un-naming. Some people like him, have never been Named. They have no idea who they are.

“That’s why we still need Namers, because there are places throughout the universe like your planet Earth. When everyone is really and truly Named, then the Echthroi will be vanquished.”

Obviously this story is fiction and yet there is truth to it that I cannot shake off, even when we arrive at our destination, turn off the CD and go inside.

Because I live in a culture where we much prefer to un-name than to name. We don’t just un-name people, we X them. Someone disagrees, cut them out. They say something we don’t like, shut them down. Cancel them, erase them, no longer even acknowledge them as a person.

What if we treated every person we interacted with as though he or she were a beloved child of the most high God? Because guess what, they are! Click To Tweet

But some of them don’t know it yet. No one has ever told them they are loved, that they matter, that they were worth the blood of Jesus.

But to love our enemies, to treat them with kindness even when they are unkind, has the potential to actually change hearts and minds in a way that no adversarial reaction can. I’m not saying you should agree, I’m not saying you should placate. But we can quietly, consistently, inject love and compassion into every interaction we have.

We have within us the power of naming, which has been given to us by the Creator of all things, the one whose Name is above every name. Click To Tweet

The challenge is for us is to remember who we are, and then to help others find their identity as well. We need to lean in with love when we’d rather retreat and just X people who are too hard or inconvenient to love. The kind of people we just wish would go away, or at best, keep their mouths shut. The ones who hurt us and others, and we feel justified in our hatred and un-naming of them.

We don’t get out of our mission that easily. Progo asks Meg if she will enter into the ordeal, if she will face the test. She doesn’t want to, but she angrily replies that of course she will because she knows the lives of people she loves depend on it.

It puts us all in peril of being X’d when we embrace a culture that defines worthiness in narrow changing terms. This is not something that can be solved on a legislative level only through the supernatural changing of hearts.

To Name others we must be so sure of who we are that no amount of hatred or X-ing can break us. Then we are empowered to do the naming. Then the Enemy of love and light will left powerless.