On Naming And Un-Naming

(Note: As I said in yesterday’s post, my look at Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Wind in the Door ended up going in two different directions, so I decided to split it into two posts.)

Early in A Wind in the Door, Proginoskes the cherubim tells Meg Murry about their role in three tests.

When I was memorizing the names of the stars, part of the purpose was to help them each to be more particularly the particular star each one was supposed to be. That’s basically a Namer’s job. Maybe you’re supposed to make earthlings feel more human.

Isn’t he right? Isn’t that our job? To help each other know ourselves better and become the persons God meant us to be. Not just in close circles, though, I have a responsibility to help Name each person I come into contact with. You have a responsibility to do the same. And if we do our part, the whole of God’s creation becomes more perfect.

The next question flows naturally from this idea. So how do I go about Naming someone, even someone I don’t like? If we’re supposed to Name each other, then we must have the tools we need for the task. Progo has the answer:

Love. That’s what makes persons know who they are. You’re full of love, Meg, but you don’t know how to stay within it when it’s not easy. Oh—you love your family. That’s easy. Sometimes when you feel awful about somebody, you get back into rightness by thinking about—well, you seem to be telling me that you got back into love once by thinking about Charles Wallace. But this time it can’t be easy. You have to go on to the next step.

That’s not just cloud-talkin’, it’s downright Biblical. Progo’s right, it isn’t easy, but Naming someone who hates you can be a freeing decision. An important step for me was to realize that as angry as I am at someone who treats me as a subhuman, to a certain extent that person is a victim as well. When they decided to hate rather than love, they didn’t do it in a vacuum, it’s something they were led to.

Understand, I am in no way excusing the hateful things that happen. There’s a long and growing list of my brothers and sisters who have been victimized because they were gay, and I make no excuses for the person or persons who did it. Clearly those people should be brought to justice. But in the words of Dr. Horrible, those people are a symptom and the disease rages on. In the battle for equality, we need to be mindful of both the foot soldiers in the enemy’s army and the Generals.

In A Wind in the Door, those Generals who lead people to hate are called the Echthroi.

War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming—making people not know who they are. If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn’t need to hate.

In the documentary For The Bible Tells Me So, Rabbi Brian Zachary Mayer makes the point that the cheapest way to make people feel like they’re part of a group is to create an “other”, a group to be different from and better than. The leaders of the Anti-Gay movement work hard not just to lie about and suppress the rights of LGBTs, but also to actively keep people in a hating frame of mind and keep them from knowing who they are.

Make no mistake, that’s the goal of the opposition. They’ve shown that they’ll do anything to keep not just their LGBT victims, but also their followers as irrational, as un-Named, as possible. That’s one of the reasons they’re so dangerous. And it’s one of the reasons they have to be stopped.