"What's In a Name?"
by Rev. Kimi Riegel
December 8, 2002

Readings: May 24 2002 “What’s in a Name?” Free Press, Sheryl James
In the beginning, there was South Lyon , there was Brighton and there was Howell.  

They were separate places, each with their own boundaries, folklore and famous hallmarks. Howell had its melons, for example, Brighton its Mill Pond and South Lyon its Pumpkin fest. Traffic jams on 1-96 and U.S.-23 were all that united them.  

But that was way back in the 20th Century. As of May 1, something happened to South Lyon , Brighton and Howell. They got hyphenated. Not willingly, of course. And not legally. After all, South Lyon is in Oakland County and Howell, in Livingston , is within hollering distance of Fowlerville, a place Brightonites want nothing to do with. Residents in all of these once-outlying areas have fought the whole notion of urbanization.

No, this was a shotgun hyphenation. According to the May 1 Federal Register, the municipalities and the territory between them are now a single, new urban area called South Lyon-Brighton-Howell, population 106,139.  

"They saw the low-density nightmare that we have become and, presto, defined this blob as an urban area," said Mike Craine, managing director of the Livingston County Road Commission.  

It happened quietly; as such marriages do, with the participants not entirely willing to take part in the proceedings. Actually, the participants were oblivious to the proceedings, and most still haven't heard the big news.  

Jeffrey Potter, mayor of South Lyon , said he didn't anticipate the new status and isn't thrilled about it, either. "You can have it back," he said recently.  

Kate Lawrence, Brighton mayor, was clueless, too, that her town was database-linked to the others. "It's a good thing I get along with South Lyon and Howell," she said.  

Others were equally amused or bemused.  

"Where's the Starbucks?" asked Carol Lathrop-Roberts, a Howell lawyer. "You can't be urban without a Starbucks."  

The Register on the other hand defines an urbanized area as one that "consists of a densely settled territory that contains 50,000 people or more."  

Becoming urban has some potential benefits. It might bring federal highway funds. Might not; no one can say for sure.  

But now that they are urbanites, South Lyon-Brighton-Howellians, like it or not, need to make some changes.  

First they need to practice saying South Lyon-Brighton-Howell, get the hang of it. Or maybe get a nickname. New York is the Big Apple, Detroit the Motor City , Chicago the Windy City . Craine suggests "Bigger than Billings " since that Montana town went urban at about 100,000. Or how about The Big Melon? City by the Interstate? Halfway to Lansing ?  

Fowlerville, Hartland and Pinckney need to be told they are suburbs of South Lyon- Brighton-Howell. Their property values ought to skyrocket.

The new urbanites, meanwhile, should start practicing aggressive driving. They'll need to install a smog alert system and some civil defense in the event of an attack. They’ll also need a subway, a skyscraper with a revolving restaurant, and a mounted police division for crowd control. And they'll need a mayor and city council that don't get along and try hard not to get anything done.  

Finally, they should develop their downtown. According to the map, the approximate epicenter of the new South Lyon-Brighton-Howell area is at Bauer and Herbst roads in Genoa Township .  

Right now, the area is a dirt road with a few homes on multi-acre properties. Jeanine, a 30-year Livingston resident, lives in one of them. She is neither surprised nor pleased to learn she lives in downtown South Lyon -Brighton- Howell. The newcomers flooding the fields in the last 10 years are plenty urban "rude and nasty," she said, constantly cutting her off in traffic and the like. "They can take their Suburban Assault Vehicles and stick them where the sun doesn't shine," she barked.  

You can't talk more urban than that.  
 
Reading: Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates by Tom Robbins
In a reality made of language, the people who get to name things have psychological ownership of those things. Couples name their pets and children, Madison Avenue names the products that dominate our desires, theologians name the deities that dominate our spirit -- 'Yahweh' changed to 'Jehovah' changed to plain ol' generic 'God'  -- kids name the latest cultural trends or rename old ones to make them theirs; politicians name streets and schools and airports after one another or after the enemies they've successfully eliminated: they took Martin Luther King's life, for example, and then by naming their pork barrel projects after him, took possession of his memory. In a way, we're like linguistic wolves, lifting our legs on patches of cultural ground to mark them with verbal urine as territory that we alone control.  

Sermon: “What’s in a Name?”
This sermon has its beginning in the fact that my husband took my maiden name for his last name and changed his first name, too. For some of you, this is the first you have heard this so let me repeat: my husband took my last name when we married and took a different first name too. To say that this has caused a few raised eyebrows would be an understatement. The most relevant story to this congregation might be the one from that first dinner I had with the search committee. It was very early in the dinner. We were still introducing ourselves and saying a bit about our past. Ray was nearly last and mentioned that he had retired from 30 years with the Livonia schools. I casually mentioned that my father had worked for Livonia schools for 30 years as well. “Perhaps you knew him,” I said. “What is his name?” Ray asked. “Alan Riegel.” I responded. We continued with the last few introductions, then I excused myself to the washroom. Upon my return the table was completely quiet. “Oh expletive” I thought to myself. “How did I blow this so soon.” Thankfully, Colleen spoke up. “OK, I’ll ask,” she said, “How can your dad and your husband have the same last name?”  “Whew,” I thought and then explain that Alex took my last name when we married. I will tell you why a bit later. But the happy end of that story is that, unlike some others we have encountered, the search committee thought it was kind of cool.  

Naming is a core part of most human cultures. The belief that language is power is nowhere more prominent than in the tradition of naming. The understanding that naming or saying a name has power is prevalent through out history in many cultures and religions. Many ancient people believed in the magical power of names. For instance, in ancient Egypt the goddess Isis was able to dethrone the sun God Ra because he divulged his name to her. Knowing Ra's name gave Isis power over Ra. Belief like this gave rise to magicians and sorcerers who could control or manipulate the gods with magical formulas. 

Another example would be in the Jewish tradition. Only the high priest was allowed to pronounce the name of God, because the act of uttering a name was to take power over a thing. Thus, to utter the name of God would be to have power over God. This idea that to utter a name of a thing is to have power over a thing is nowhere more evident than in the Genesis story in which Adam names the animals. According to tradition, God created the animals in search of a mate for man and brought them before Adam. Adam named each animal, thereby taking dominion over it. We won’t talk about the fact that Adam got to name woman, too!

For Christians, the power of naming is most obvious in the act of Christening, during which a child receives its "Christian name." It is that name which is written in the book of life which shall be opened on the Day of Judgment. As George Foucart states, "Spirit-raising, exorcism, possession, sorcery, and oaths, in all their infinite variety, are based on [the] imperious handling of names."  

Names are important. The power of naming is important. One need not look too far in our own culture to understand this. We think of names as inextricably bound up with identity. Sigmund Freud suggested that a person's name is a principal component of who that person is -- perhaps even a piece of a person's soul, he suggested. To some extent, names do give us a piece of our identity. They seem to have some direct correlation to who we are as individuals. They provide us with a concrete sense of our own selves and they provide others with a concrete sense of who we are. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the female, Jewish, and black experiences in the United States .

Most everyone here is old enough to remember the early days of the feminist movement in our country. Women moving into the workforce by the millions were a significant symbol for female autonomy. But even more significant than this was the insistence on the use of Ms. rather than Mrs. Or, to maintain one's maiden name in marriage. What one calls oneself, how one names oneself, became important to the feminist movement because it understood that to name oneself empowers one, while to be named disempowers one. Insisting on the name by which a woman would be called became a powerful symbol for the feminist movement.

The Jewish experience is not terribly different. Their struggle with identity is evident in the historical account of Jewish names. The fact that a name is part and parcel of who one is was well known by the Nazis. This is why when a Jewish person entered a concentration camp he or she was stripped of his or her name and a given a number. But it was not only in Nazi Germany that the Jews struggled with identity. Here in the United States , Jewish people continually ran into anti-Semitism. This fact is nowhere more powerfully symbolized than in the litany of Jewish people who felt compelled to change their names in order to assimilate. Did do you know that Woody Allen was once known as Alan Stewart Konigsberg? Or that Tony Curtis was once Bernard Schwartz? Rodney Dangerfield was once Jacob Cohen. And George Burns was once Nathan Birnbaum. The power and significance of naming did not escape Jewish consciousness.

This is no less true for the African-American experience in the United States . As much as, if not more so, than any other culture African-Americans have had their personal perpetuity stripped, as captured Africans became American slaves. In popular culture the pride of African heritage was probably no more clearly demonstrated than in the mini-series Roots. At least this mini-series caught the eye of white America in an unprecedented way. I remember one image from the beginning of the show in which a newborn African child was held up against the stars at night and proclaimed to be, Kunta Kinte. What tradition and aspirations such a name must have held! And how shallow and impersonal it must have felt to be named Brown merely for the sake of the color of one's skin in colonial America . Black leader Malcolm X best symbolized this stripping of African identity in the form of names. The taking of a generic symbol was an astute indicator of the loss of identity. I believe the name Malcolm X, as much as the bleaching skin and straightening hair epitomized the oppression and disempowerment of the experience of black America .

Virtually every segment of our culture finds significance in the act of naming. Not only feminists, Jewish people, and African-Americans, but Native Americans, modern-day pagans, and even some white males see the act of naming as a powerful linguistic symbol. Artists, too, are very careful about the use of names. I think the most profound symbol of naming in the art world is seen in the person of Marilyn Monroe, who was formally known as Norma Jean. The words of Elton John's song, whose birth name, by the way, was Reginald, tells the tale well: "They set you on a treadmill and they made you change your name." In these few words Reginald invokes the image of a helpless victim grinding out her days in a futile struggle on a treadmill. Norma Jean was stripped of her identity and disempowered. She eventually took her life. 

Oscar Wilde, for his part, gives us his play, now a movie, The Importance of Being Ernest, in which he challenges the notion that names correlate to character. And the rock star formally known as Prince takes for his new name an ancient Egyptian symbol that cannot be uttered. What are we to make of this?

Of course not all names have such profound significance. Rock star David Bowie named his daughter Zoe, presumably for the rhyme. A former parishioner of mine, whose last name was Hardy, had a sister named Laurel Ann. 

Of course we all hear stories about how people named Carver become wood workers and people named Sterling become Jewelers. When we hear of instances like this we begin to wonder whether the Latin phrase, Nomen est omen, "names are destiny," does not bear some truth.  

To some extent even we modernists still believe in the magic of names. We seem to believe that what we name something will have some effect on what that thing becomes. Consider the turmoil parents undergo in choosing a name for their child. Like all parents-to-be, Alex and I struggled over what we would name our child. We went through the usual gyrations over various names. The girl’s name came quickly: Chaundri, which Alex made up, and we all liked. The boy’s name was harder. For a while he wanted to call our son, Chance. He thought this name would have deep meaning. He thought it would articulate a theological notion that ran contrary to the idea that everything is set according to a master plan. Our daughter vetoed that one. We also tossed around the idea of Palmer. I liked Palmer because I was taken by the character Palmer in the film Contact. That idea too was vetoed. It just didn't sound quite right. Suffice it to say that the process of naming our child bore with it all the gravity historically associated with naming. What future course were we setting for him by giving him that name? Would he become a different person because we named him Chance than he would become if we named him Palmer? Who knows? But that possibility rooted in the ancient belief in the power of naming, hangs upon every parent who names a child. So it took us some time to settle on a name that we thought would fit our son-to-be. Eventually we settled on the name Alexander because Alex, who was not Alex at the time, had always loved the name. 

Then came the process of deciding on last names. New to today’s culture the last name of a child is not a given. For instance, my daughter has my maiden name as her last name. Our blended family could end up with as many as four names, which is not uncommon today. At the same time one of the things that troubles us most about modern society is our tendency toward fragmentation. Being ministers we consider such things when naming our children. We wanted our family to be as cohesive as possible and we thought maybe a name would help. So shortly before our son was born Alex decided to change his last name so that our entire family could share the same last name. So he took my maiden name, Riegel, which I have always kept. At the same time he decided that since he was the one so in love with the name Alexander he would change his first name to Alexander. After all, our son had no attachment to that name as of yet. So once again our family gathered around the kitchen table and contemplated first names. We just happened upon the name we ended up selecting. It is not a namesake in either family. But we liked the sound of it and so we named our son. 

Alex says he has been very happy with his change of name. It does cause some people a double take; like the poor woman at the vital records office when I ordered our son’s birth certificate recently. There it says Kimi Riegel for mother’s name. And then my maiden name: Riegel. Then the father’s name: Alexander Riegel. She said, “Were you married when your son was born?” “Yes,” I reply, faking surprise knowing that she is struggling  -- and getting a kick out of it. Silence on the other end of the phone. I didn’t let her suffer too long but explained that Alex changed his name and there is no place for husband’s maiden name on the form.  But in addition to surprise, he has also faced a surprising amount of resistance. So much so that some refused to call him Alexander. Some wondered about his stability and criminal record. And some, it was obvious; saw the name change as a symbol of weakness – only women take their partner’s last name! But he did not do it to make a statement about identity, to make a matriarchal statement, to flee from his past, or for any other reason than to symbolize the unity of our blended family.  (Besides, he likes to jab me in the ribs a little bit every time someone assumes that it is I who took his last name.)  

The point I really want to make this morning is that the act of naming, rooted in the idea that language is power, carries with it significant meaning. To be a “namer” is to take power over a thing or a person, so we must be careful how we use names. On the other hand, to be named is to be disempowered by another, so we must be careful not to abdicate our right to name ourselves. For some, naming is an act of oppression. For some naming is an act of empowerment. For others it symbolizes autonomy. For others it is a form of self-expression. But whatever it symbolizes, it has deep roots that get to the heart of who and what each of us are as human beings. So I encourage each of us, when we hear names uttered, when we say someone’s name and when we utter our own, to consider this utterance a sacred act. The magical power of names is an ancient tradition.