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The first verbal sign of belonging is a name. To hear one’s name is to know an invitation; to use someone else’s is to extend one. Ashley M. Jones offers this passionate narrative on names, and calling them.

When God Calls My Name
by Ashley M. Jones

For my cousin Armand, who we lost on April 16, 2020, to COVID-19 complications.
For all of us, called by name.

“And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth.  And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go.”
John 11:43-45, Holy Bible, New King James Version

Once, I heard my name yelled in a flurry of fear. My dear friend in Oakland and I were on one of our weekly calls—a Sunday of giggles, as usual. She was walking back home after picking up some dinner. I was doing laundry in Birmingham. I remember she mentioned some boys she passed by, and I remember the sound of struggle. The sound of terror and bodies against bodies, bodies against pavement. A scream I will never forget. My name, yelled into the night when I could not reach her.

The silence that followed felt impossibly long. All I could hear was my own name, reverberating in the world of that scream, for the hours it took to verify that she was alive. Ashley! over and again. I felt the weight of my alive against the uncertainty of her silence.

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Sometimes we read history; sometimes it reads us. The historian Barbara Tuchman writes, “when the gap between the ideal and the real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.” For those of us who insist on the liturgical work of telling stories of pain and possibility, systems breaking down can be moments of great hope and imagination: finally we can see the world for what it is, so that we can make it into what it could be.

Donald Trump Is Out. Are We Ready to Talk About How He Got In?
By Ta-Nehisi Coates

I’ve been thinking about Barbara Tuchman’s medieval history, A Distant Mirror, over the past couple of weeks. The book is a masterful work of anti-romance, a cold-eyed look at how generations of aristocrats and royalty waged one of the longest wars in recorded history, all while claiming the mantle of a benevolent God. The disabusing begins early. In the introduction, Tuchman examines the ideal of chivalry and finds, beneath the poetry and codes of honor, little more than myth and delusion.

Knights “were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed,” Tuchman writes. “In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century, the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder.”

The chasm between professed ideal and actual practice is not surprising. No one wants to believe themselves to be the villain of history, and when you have enough power, you can hold reality at bay. Raw power transfigured an age of serfdom and warmongering into one of piety and courtly love.

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