On Names

When someone speaks your name, it has the power to turn you toward them – to turn your head, or your attention, or your steps, or sometimes your life.  Just the sound itself has that power – even before you consider what the sound means, before you start to remember all the stories and take account of all the synapses of relationship that are submerged in the meaning of such a simple thing as a single name.

The discovery of the true meanings of our names takes most of us a lifetime.  By the time most of us are adults, it’s as though a name has walked through the deep woods in all the ripest seasons, picking up meanings and memories that cling to it like burrs and milkweed fluff and the smells of life.  And when you speak such a pungent name as that, it not only turns the head of the person who bears it; it conjures something of the truth of the person you name.

  - A very reverend man that serves at my college