Every year, a group of my best friends all get together over a vacation. Inevitably, on the last night that we’re all together we do a little thing we’ve come to call “year in review.” Usually, it centers on talking through a major joy and a major challenge from the year past, and sometimes includes some forward-looking hope and excitement to come.
I remember, years ago, when we reached this point in our gathering, my wife, Katherine, was standing next to me sipping water while we sipped champagne. She was six months pregnant with our first child. When my turn came up, I don’t remember exactly what all I said. I do remember one eager hope I shared: that in the upcoming year, together with Katherine, I would get to name my daughter.
I’ve long been fascinated by names, particularly as relates to our faith. In Genesis, Adam names the animals of Creation. Throughout the Pentateuch, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is invoked over and over, naming the patriarchs with whom God closely walked – and, we must say, the women, from Sarah and on, who became mothers and matriarchs of a whole heritage of faith. God declares himself to be “I am who am,” the first mover and Creator of all. In Jewish piety, naming something is a way to assert control, which is why piety both invokes the forebearers of the faith and only names God peripherally and sparsely, and why exorcisms in the Gospels seek to identify and name the demons possessing people. Names, too, become a way to identify a transformation or passage – Abram and Sarai to Abraham and Sarah in the covenant, Jacob to Israel in struggling with God and becoming father of a nation, Saul to Paul on the road to Damascus, even modern expressions of religious life in which men and women (and popes!) take on new names for this new phase of life.
When it came to parenthood, the prospect of naming a child awed me. It was a small way to assert control as a parent – this is the name you’d call your child by, whether in love or scolding, and the way you identify who they are and will become. Even more, it was your way to identify the child to God, the name you’d tell the Church when you brought the child for baptism, and the name by which God would call this child.
To me, excitement about naming a person had nothing to do with decorating a nursery, embroidering clothing and towels, or designing a birth announcement. It had everything to do with the way this child would relate to God, particularly in prayer, and who that child would receive as their first patron in the communion of saints.
Personally, I have found great strength in the martyrs, particularly St. Maximilian Kolbe. The idea of one’s life of faith as a witness, whether one is called to witness to the point of death under persecution or not, is foundational for me. I am not one to be a street-corner preacher or even to evangelize with eye-catching actions; I try to be the one who lives a quiet but strong example, and shares it in subtle but steady ways. This is witness to me, and I think the martyrs provide the ideal toward which I hope my witness will strive.
Knowing that we were expecting a baby girl, my heart was drawn to the great women martyrs of our tradition. While we had a few names in mind, I was hoping Katherine would land on a name that belonged to one of these martyrs, too, and I not-so-quietly rooted them on. The variable in this equation was that I had this weird insistence that I couldn’t name a kiddo before I got to see her, hold her, and look at her.
We had a long talk. My heart was broken open and poured forth all kinds of sappy, drippy love, largely through hypothetical stories and questions I set up to try to capture a love I had barely started to realize I had. And as I just stared into her sleeping face, I felt like I knew.
The next morning, the casual conversations Katherine and I had already volleyed about names suddenly got real. A rather nondescript worker with a push-cart rolled in and handed us a very simple form. She was from records. We had to write our daughter’s name for the birth certificate.
We found pretty easy agreement on Lucy. We had played with some middle names but hadn’t settled on any. With similar energy to the “you have to go” she told me ten days into our relationship when I was offered a one-year placement in Ireland for post-grad service, Katherine told me she should be Lucy Karen, a namesake girl for my late mother, who died at the age of 60, four years earlier. I was flabbergasted and of course on board. Our daughter would carry the name of a canonized saint and a woman believed to be in heaven by a locally attested life of virtue and popular acclaim.
I’ve always felt great about our choice, and it does feel good when others compliment the names you choose for your kids. But what has made me the happiest has been the way that my wife, my daughters, my dad, my brothers, my in-laws, and so many of our friends have taken to the patronage of St. Lucy for her.
Every year, we invite Lucy to put on a white dress and wreath crown, and she mugs for some fun pictures. This year, reviewing the story of St. Lucy and the customs around her feast, my Lucy even asked if she could get a tray and “serve” the ice cream we were going to pick up; I declined, so as to avoid a mess, but you gotta love the thought!
The response is always lovely on social media – people so enjoy seeing her emulate this beloved saint. But I even get unsolicited texts from family and friends, those I’ve seen recently and others with whom it’s been a while, reconnecting, even if briefly, over this occasion. An aunt and uncle sent a picture from their parish because Lucy’s cousins had recognized a St. Lucy poster on the wall and got excited.
I hoped when we found out we were expecting that our kids’ patronal feasts would be special. In the early going, I’m settling for an ice cream outing and a special emphasis on our intercessory invocation at bedtime prayer. The last couple years, Lucy and I have talked through the stories of St. Lucy we hold in tradition. As the kids get older, I hope we’ll go to Mass together, maybe start lighting candles with special intentions. Maybe when they’re teens, we can plan a service project to go with it.
No matter how it goes, the excited hope of naming a child has been everything I hoped for and more, both with Lucy Karen and now our boisterous Cecilia Jane, another martyr-grandmother combo. It calls to mind an early moment of this realized excitement that sustains in special days like these – the baptismal sacramental prayer that strikes upon a beautiful image of our home in God and with the communion of saints:
Parents and godparents,
this light is entrusted to you to be kept burning brightly.
This child of yours has been enlightened by Christ.
He (she) is to walk always as a child of the light.
May he (she) keep the flame of faith alive in his (her) heart.
When the Lord comes, may he (she) go out to meet him
with all the saints in the heavenly kingdom.
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