Some guy on the Internet called me a “woke snowflake” the other day. Because I made a comment on someone’s post about … wait for it … the importance of empathy.
Now, to be clear, I’ve been called worse, and the jab didn’t bother me for more than half a second, but it did get me thinking about names. Particularly the names we call each other in a fractured country like ours, where tempers run high and we seem to have forgotten how to disagree respectfully.
And because I’m who I am, I’ve been thinking about how these names tie into our theology. See, I’ve been a Christian for the majority of my life, and one of the doctrines I've always struggled with is that of original sin. Because before that which we call sin was present, God spoke first a declaration of goodness. Out of chaos came stars and rivers, birds of paradise and koala bears, sequoia trees and mountain tops — life teeming with color and movement and shape and sound, and it was good, God said. And then: our first ancestors. Formed from the very earth we work and till and harvest, breathed into existence by God's sacred ruach — living beings with blood and bone and flesh and air, with emotions and thoughts and the capacity to love and create and care for other living beings; living beings made in the very image of the One who created them, with the fingerprint of the Divine in them and on them, and this was not only good, God said; it was very good.
So, when the fruit is eaten later in the story, and sin enters the narrative, I find it helpful to keep returning to God's original mandate as a means to remember that we are not merely the sum of the mistakes we’ve made. Yes, I believe something shifted, and separation from our Source occurred for the very first time. But does that mean it changes our identity, our concept of ourselves birthed with Imago Dei, God's first declaration over us as very good? Does it mean that our name isn’t Very Good anymore?
I'm not so sure.
Because I keep reading the story, you see. And there's this beautiful chapter where the First Man and First Woman, after they've partaken from the tree they were told to avoid, see themselves in a different light. Their identity up until this point had been Beloved and only Beloved; beloved by God and by each other. They walked with God and spoke face-to-face with God, and scripture goes so far to tell us that they did not know shame.
But then they have an identity crisis. They eat the fruit and suddenly, everything changes. They feel ashamed of who they are. They hide themselves from God when God comes looking for them, and they do so because they are afraid. Shame leads to fear, and they hide as a result of it. When God asks them why, they say because they had seen that they were naked, and it was this that caused them shame.
And God challenges them by asking three simple words: Who told you?
Who told you your nakedness was something to be ashamed of? Who told you that you had to hide yourself away from me? Who told you to be afraid? Who told you?
Because it wasn't the voice of God. It wasn't the voice of the One who calls them — calls us, still — Beloved. Wasn’t the voice of the One who saw them first in all the glory and mess of exactly who they were and declared it "very good." It wasn't the voice of Truth.
So, whose voice was it? Whose voice is it that tells us to be ashamed and afraid today, in our right-here-and-right-now lives? It’s a question I think is worth asking.
Who told you?
Who told you you were naked?
Who told you something was wrong with who and how you are?
Who told you you are too much, or not enough, too loud, too brash, too quiet, too reserved?
Who told you to stay small, to shrink, that you’re too big, take up too much space?
Who told you?
And that, of course, brings me back to names. Because at the end of the day, if we strip off every name someone else has ever called us, every name we’ve ever dared to call ourselves — we’re left with just two words. Very good. And I don’t know about you, but that makes me want to lean into that. My own worth, value, and dignity are far better motivators to embody very good than shame or fear are. Very Good is a much, much better story than Total Depravity and Original Sin.
So, I hope you take a moment of your time today to simply gaze at your reflection in a mirror. Notice all the different parts of you and imagine the Divine Mystery pointing to each one of them, calling them only this: very good.
xo,
