The Name Nobody Here Says

His name has five syllables in it when his mother says it.

At school it lost three of them by the second week, and he did not fight that, because nobody fights that at eleven. At work it is on the badge in the short form, because that is the form he wrote on the form. And at church, going on eleven years now, it is the short form on the rota, the short form on the prayer list, the short form called across the car park on a Sunday by people who love him.

He was the one who said it. Just call me the short one, it is easier. He has said it in every doorway he has ever walked through, cheerfully, before anybody could get it wrong and be embarrassed. It is not a wound. He would tell you that himself and he would mean it.

Then it is his mother's birthday, and the whole family is jammed into one kitchen, and there are three conversations going and somebody is trying to get a tray out of the oven.

And his aunt calls him across the room by his full name. All five syllables of it, the way she has said it since he was four, with the stress landing where it is supposed to land.

And something in his chest goes off like a struck bell.

He is standing there holding a plate of somebody else's food, and he cannot work out why his eyes have gone hot, and then he can. He has not heard himself called that in any room outside this house in eleven years. And nobody took it from him. He handed it over at every door, cheerfully, before anybody had to ask.

That is the night he starts counting other things.

The way he prays when he is completely on his own, which is not the way anybody prays out loud at his church, so he has never prayed out loud at his church. The word he grew up using for the particular kindness of God, which he stopped using in about 2014 because twice he had to explain it and both times the conversation became about him instead of about God. The tune he hums without noticing, which he now notices, and stops.

None of it was taken. He filed it all down himself, in slivers, over years, so that he would be easy to have around.

And every room he did it in was pleased.

Now I want to stop saying he.

Because you have your own short version. You know exactly what you handed over at the door, and roughly what year, and you have never once called it what it is, because the word for it sounds dramatic and what you did was so small.

Every place that wants you wants you to be the same as everybody in it. Not one of those places is evil. Most of them do not know they are doing it. And you have been paying the difference out of yourself.

One is a number, not a mold

Paul is writing to a room with two kinds of people in it and a long history of not being in rooms together. And when he tells them what has happened to them, he does not describe a compromise, or a settlement, or a policy where each side gives up an agreed amount.

He did it so that in Himself He might create one new man out of the two, and so make peace. So then you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with God's holy people and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus Himself as the cornerstone, in whom the whole building, joined together, rises into a holy temple in the Lord.Ephesians 2:15, 19, 20, 21

You are part of one new thing that was made rather than a set of people who agreed to match, and one is not the same word as identical. That is what the passage says by describing a creating rather than a merging (Ephesians 2:15), and it is the Holy Spirit named at the end of it as the one in whom the whole building is fitted together, which is a joining and not a flattening.

One. Look at the word he chose, because everything is in it. Not identical. Not matching. Not interchangeable. One.

And then watch what picture he reaches for the moment he has said it. Not a mold. Not a uniform. Not a production line. A building.

Go and stand in front of an old wall that has held for four hundred years and look at what it is made of. Every stone in it is a different shape. Every one was cut for the space it sits in and no other. The mason did not make them the same, he made them fit, and the reason that wall is still standing while newer ones have come down is precisely that each stone is doing something no other stone in the wall can do. A pile of identical stones is not a building. It is a heap with ambitions.

Uniform is the cheapest kind of unity there is. It costs nothing to agree with people who are already exactly like you. What Paul is describing cost a crucifixion, and if sameness had been the goal, that was an extraordinarily expensive way to get something you can produce with a rule and a rota.

He made peace. He killed the hostility. Read the list of what died on that cross and notice what is not on it. The difference did not die. The hostility did.

And now let me say the other half, because this only works if both halves are said.

Nobody in your church owes you their difference either. You do not get to walk back in and start auditing whether other people have flattened themselves, or requiring anybody to keep what you keep, or making your five syllables into a test that somebody else fails. That is the same wall with the bricks turned around, and it does exactly the same job.

You are not being handed a cause. You are being handed your own name back.