Thought for the Week: Hallowed be thy name
Michael Golby considers the importance of a name
Early in Meeting for Worship a Friend rises to announce a death. One of our number has lost a son-in-law. We are asked to hold the family in the Light. Soon thereafter our Friend rises again. She says: ‘I must add that the young man’s name is Scott.’
The silence deepens. Though we know no more about the young man, we now know his name. And this somehow makes all the difference. This, we now more deeply realise, is not any death but the death of a singular and particular person. We hold Scott and his family in the Light.
In the chapel of the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital there is a daily Christian service at 2.15pm. A centrepiece of this event is the naming of those for whom prayers have been requested on the Prayer Tree or otherwise.
I have come to find this worship essential preparation for an afternoon visiting patients as a volunteer member of the chaplaincy ward visiting team. It is an indispensable reminder that we are meeting individuals as persons, not primarily as patients. Medical staff must treat the condition while, of course, respecting the patient. Chaplaincy visitors must meet the person first and foremost. Hardly ever do medical matters come up. Ward visiting is made of personal encounters.
In my excellent wards, patients’ names are displayed behind the bed, including on occasion ‘likes to be called’ names. I generally initiate all contacts with use of our forenames, as in ‘Hello Betty, I’m Michael from the chaplaincy’. My second sentence is along the lines of ‘I’ve come to say “hello and God bless”’. (I have no remaining problems with the ‘God word’).
As Meeting for Worship continues I reflect how good I feel when people use my name. I warm to them for it, this recognition. Also, how bad I am myself when it comes to putting names to faces and how embarrassing it is to forget a name. A picture flashes before my mind – Singapore war cemetery and hundreds of gravestones: husbands, fathers, sons, loved ones named forever. However, among them many, many inscribed simply: ‘Known Unto God’.
That’s another reason I rejoice in the ‘God word’ and in what I think I mean by it.
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