What's in a Name?
“Afterthoughts” is a new Fear of God blog series featuring co-hosts and guests further unpacking thoughts, themes, and ideas that keep them up at night from the conversations and content covered on the show. This entry is from (brand new) staffer and FoG Legal Counsel, Dave “C-Man” Courtney, and is a follow-up to this past week’s episode featuring My Life as a Zucchini. Enjoy, then, the latest entry in this new chapter of The Fear of God…
What’s in a name? According to the 2017 feature film by first time Swiss Director Claude Barras, My Life As a Zucchini, quite a bit. Every name has a story, and to understand who Icare is, the young boy who stands at the center of this particular story, it becomes quickly clear that we also need to understand the story behind the name Icare chooses to identify by- Zucchini. This name goes with Icare when a tragedy early in the film relocates him into an orphanage, with the film ultimately leaning into the theme of adoption as a way to shed light on the different relationships that are named and thus made real within his life as a Zucchini.
High School Nicknames and a Contest of Birth Names
When I was in high school I wasn’t exactly part of what I would describe as the “in” crowd. I relate far more to being the recipient of a name like Potato, the nickname Icare receives when he first arrives at the orphanage. For me the name given to me was C-Man- a wayward and suggestive nickname intended to mock my supposed naïveté with its obvious connotations and determine my rank near the bottom of the class. This name, however, also managed to define my days in high school in some unexpected ways.
What began as a belittling and intentionally humorous slight grew into what is still today a legendary story. To be sure, very few in what was my fairly large school knew who I actually was. But they knew my nickname. Having caught fire with the masses, the name eventually emerged through a mock campaign in the battle for class president. It actually garnered me enough votes for the win through a write in ballot, frustrating the actual candidates who had their potential votes spoiled. I still remember passing by two of them in the stairwell and overhearing a heated conversation expressing their very real disdain for this mock campaign. They didn’t know it was me, and I was happy to leave it that way. It was a name I would eventually come to wear with a bit more pride down the road.
Meanwhile, my actual birth name (David) apparently evolved from the Hebrew word “dod” which translates into English as “beloved” (thanks google). At face value, my actual name seemed to be even more popular than my nickname. Which of course is what led to me having to distinguish myself as David C. in school, which is what led to the unfortunate nickname in the first place. But I digress. For what it’s worth, apparently the same google search tells me that David has been a top 35 name since 1880, the year they started keeping track, hitting number 1 in 1960 before finding its way into relative obscurity in the 90’s. Which is somewhat ironic, because for as silly as it sounds, being the only one in my family of two siblings and two parents without the name John does do something particular to the pysche (one Jonathan, two Johns, and even my mother’s middle name happens to be Jane, which is of course the female version of John). Especially when you are also the middle child- shout out to all the middle children out there, you know what I’m talking about. For the record, I also googled the name John, cause you know, sibling rivalry. It assumed the number one spot from 1900 to 1923 and stayed in the top 20 through to 2009. My siblings don’t need to see this data.
To be honest though, despite the above drama, I don’t think I became fully aware of how much power a name held until my wife and I went through the process of adopting our son Sasha back in 2014, an experience I spoke a bit about on the recent Fear of God episode covering My Life As a Zucchini, my choice for what saves us. One of the reasons I chose this film was because of the ways it connected s directly to that experience.
Finding Our Smirnoff
Every country has a different adoption process, complete with their own unique set of rules and regulations. In Ukraine, once you finish all of the paperwork and interviews and gain all of the necessary approvals (and if you want an idea of how vulnerable and invasive this process is, I highly recommend the first season of Trying from Apple TV+, the home of the now legendary Ted Lasso) you then fly to Ukraine for approximately 2 to 3 months where, assuming everything falls into place, you then choose a child out of a collection of photos, travel to meet this child in person in the part of the country where they live, agree together (after a meet and greet that lasted not even a half hour) to begin the legal process, wait for your court date (typically a month) and documentation while spending time with your child under the watchful eye of the orphanage Director, get approved in Court with the full recommendation of the Director, and eventually fly back home to Canada as a family. In the FOG episode I mentioned how quick the initial meet and greet was, being given an hour to say yes or no to beginning the process. One part of the story that I did not share was what happens after you say yes. You then (immediately) reconvene with your potential child where you have to decide in an even shorter amount of time on a legal name.
When we asked our potential son what name he might like (sticking with his birth name, adopting a new name) his first and immediate choice was to change his name to Smirnoff. Looking back in light of the film, I honestly wonder whether there is a connecting point here with Zucchini’s own story given his dream (of his mother) and his cherished possession (a beer can). Feeling in the moment though like this might not be the best choice, despite both of us being quietly gung-ho to spring our little Smirnoff (or not so little- he was 12 when we met him, 13 when he eventually arrived in Canada) on the world, we started to throw out some different options before ultimately landing together on Sasha. This name held significance for him because it was the short form of his given birth name, and it was the name that he asked most people to call him at the orphanage. We also gave him the middle name of Jen’s father and the last name from my side of the family, effectively working to symbolically bridge these identities, the life he had lived for 12 years and the new life he was now stepping into as our son.
Given that our signature held the authority to give Sasha his new name, I can only ever imagine what it must have been like to see his name being legally registered as something wholly new and unfamiliar at 12 years old. What sort of emotions might come with that. This was in fact indicative of the whole adoption process. One thing both Jen (my wife) and I learned very quickly was that for as easy as it is to get swept up into the romanticism of the adoption experience and the feel-good story of It all, when you actually arrive at the orphanage it becomes very apparent very quickly that adoption isn’t simply about us doing a good deed and saving someone from a tragic situation. As the film also depicts, Sasha, like Zucchini, had a life there, including friends, routine, family, memories, history. And yes, there was and is a tragic side to his story, as we see in the stories of the different children in Zucchini’s orphanage, but as was so wonderfully put in the podcast episode, wholeness doesn’t mean not wounded, rather wholeness emerges with the wounds as part of a more complete and more beautiful story. This was a realization that humbled us, and it was something we would have to learn to understand better as we worked to keep this part of his story alive this side of the ocean, be it through cultural celebrations, sharing memories, special meals, etc. The name Sasha means something to the person he now was and is (our son), but it also means something to the story of who he was and also still is. Seeing in the name Sasha the bridging of these stories is precisely how I think adoption as a process and as a reality allows him to then grow into this new name for all that it declares to be true and beautiful in his story.
Ancient Names, Ancient Worlds
It’s worth mentioning here how names in the ancient Biblical world were likewise deeply rooted in their meanings and associations. They defined you according to the god you worshipped, the tribe and family you belonged to, and even according to significant events within your own story. Names would generally consist of two elements joined together that would work to tell these stories in new and particular ways, which for me imagines the story of adoption in terms of God’s relationship to humanity.
According to the Judeo-Christian scriptures the first act was an act of naming. Interestingly this is an action that both God and Humanity does in relationship to one another. God eventually names “Adam” (earth, or the whole of creation, or the whole of humankind), while, following the call to name the creatures of the earth, “Adam’s” naming of Eve (life and the life source of creation) occurs in 3:20, an action that then distinguishes one in relationship to an other (familial language) and in the shared image of God’s self. To be named is to be distinguished, to hold meaning in the eyes of another. This is what defines our sense of personhood and gives us a story to then live in to and to tell and to uncover from the muddiness of life itself (to join these two names together).
And yet (or “even if”), this is something that I think we all intuitively wrestle with as humans, even as it remains true in our lives and our stories. We often seem to prefer the idea of the self made individual, the one who holds the power to name ourselves. We don’t like the idea that something or someone has the power to name us, especially when that power sometimes results in something negative, abusive, neglecting or destructive. When the promise of being named doesn’t match ones experience it becomes easy to believe that this name then enslaves us to the tragic. A name becomes a label that now defines us according to these false identities that fail to see the bigger story of the God-Human-Creation relationship as it is. As Genesis seems to suggest, being named by one with the Power to do so in truth and love is precisely what gives us the freedom and ability to rise above these labels, these experiences, and to see ourselves as part of this larger story.
The Story of Torah, The Story of Jesus, the Story of Us
“So also when we were underage, we were in slavery under the elemental spiritual forces of the world. But when the set time had fully come, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.”
- Galatians 4:5
Theologian and historian N.T. Wright locates this passage in his commentary on Galatians, using the larger context of the letter, within the Exodus story, thus presenting Jesus as a New Exodus. In the first Exodus God names Israel as God’s “sons and daughters”, thus delivering Israel from slavery in the light of this given identity. In the New Exodus, the story of Jesus, God delivers humanity and creation from slavery and thus declares us to be sons and daughters of God, reclaiming our true given identity. So what is the difference between the first and the second? The answer to this question is found in connecting the two Exodus stories together, and this brings us into direct encounter with Paul’s use of the word adoption.
Historians like John Dickenson, Tom Holland, Suzanne Dixon, Hugh Lindsay, and Carolyn Osiek, to name a few I encountered on my own deep dive into the subject, have all noted in their work on the ancient world - and more specifically adoption in the ancient world - the role the Judeo-Christian story played in shifting us from the honor-shame systems of the past to a world in which, as John Dickenson notes in his book Humilitas, “humility went from being a vice to being considered a virtue.” At the heart of this revelatory movement in history is Paul’s redefining of adoption. Paul takes a singular word and practice embedded in Roman culture as part of its sacred family structure- “huiothesa”, which emphasizes the act of “placing” an “adult son” in to either a new family name or a new family responsibility- and breathes in to it two more words- “Brephos” (newborn baby/fetus), and the word “teknon”, which was used to define a younger son who was in the process of growing up and maturing. This is hugely important for understanding the role of adoption in the connecting stories of Torah, Jesus, Humanity and Creation. For Paul, our adoption doesn’t begin with our new found adopted status, it begins with the story of Creation, this act of naming in which we then find our true identity as sons and daughters of God being declared. In this sense, for Paul we are not being adopted to (salvation) as much as we are being adopted for (a world thus named), effectively bringing Torah and Christ together and placing our identity back within God’s story of a good creation. In other words- In the Torah we begin with goodness as the defining mark of Creation. In Christ, we are reminded of this goodness in a world where our true identity as God’s good creation often gets lost in translation.
Wright suggests that one of the dangers with reading this passage simply as a move from the slavery of the old to the freedom of the new without any attention to the world that exists in-between, is that we can then grow a tendency to see the new as superior to the old, failing to see the fuller story in context and often creating a necessary scapegoat in its place. Which is precisely what happens when we view the Torah (the Law) as the thing that must be overcome, or likewise in some Christian Traditions where we see humanity itself as the thing that must be overcome in our depravity. This is similar to our romanticizing of the adoption process that I mentioned above, where the orphanage, along with the life this represents (including the birth parents) become the scapegoat.
So how do we recover our true identity, our true name in the midst of the messiness of this already-not yet reality that shapes this in-between space? Wright imagines the Torah like a box or a covering surrounding the ordered universe and identifying it, or naming it as good. This covering represents that which is not bound to circumstance or our abilities and accomplishments, and it is a box which has the Power to give us our true names, our true identity- sons and daughters of God made in the image of Christ and bound and defined by things like love, acceptance, goodness, beauty, and justice. Where this identity gets clouded and forgotten or left behind or sometimes even opposed, we then find the things that scripture so sharply observes, condemns and calls us to reorder according to Christ’s own witness- division, social oppression, hate, discrimination, a lack of unity, a lack of forgiveness, a lack of diversity, violence, pride, greed, ectc. We are called to reorder this both in our own lives and in the lives of others, and not for some far off future when we can be swept away to heaven, but in the here and now where we can see heaven being made true and real here on earth. And this begins with recognizing that we, you, I, all of us, have been so named children of God for the sake of attending to stories of failure, suffering and struggle where we can name it in our lives, saying with the final scene of the film, even if, even if, even if. This is precisely what Zucchini finds in his adoption to a new home, and this is precisely what we find in the larger story of the God-Human-Creation narrative made True in the person and ministry of Christ through our adoption into the human family of God. In Christ we are not left to succeed or fail at living in to an uncertain future, but rather we are invited to find freedom in living out of a new identity already declared and established in an uncertain present, freeing us to then so name one another.
