What's In A Name?

“That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet.” ~Shakespeare

The play Romeo and Juliet was on our high school syllabus and most of the language Shakespeare used admittedly went right over my head. I read it because I had to when I was about 14 and the love story seemed so distractingly tragic to me that at the time I didn’t fully appreciate him as one of the greatest and most influential writers of the English language that ever lived.

It seems like that with any good poem or song, the subtle brilliance of how words can be strung together can hit you as that second wave does…it sneaks up on you when you least expect it or haunts you years later and his words came to mind to me today after all these years…

“A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet” to me means that what matters is not what we call something, the essence of it remains unchanged.

Words are merely symbols for our thoughts about what we experience in life.

Learning the names of things is what we are taught to do as soon as we learn to speak so we can communicate. The names themselves are not essential or elemental in what they describe. Even when we get them wrong it can still feel right. When our three-year-olds want “gubble-bum” or refer to their jacket pockets “snack holes”, we know exactly what they mean.

The best made-up words make us smile because it’s like our children’s own brilliant new way of seeing a wonder-filled world. In some cases, they seem like better descriptors than the actual words themselves. In a child’s imagination, a rhinoceros becomes a “battle unicorn”, your beard “face grass”, and fruitloops “pride cheerios”. Seagulls are “beach chickens” and the backs of our knees are “leg pits”. It makes perfect sense.

Over the centuries we have named and renamed things. We are meaning-makers and we love to label and categorize. We endow words with meaning and they in turn seem to have a powerful impact on us. Things can also get lost in translation, especially with sacred or ancient texts being translated from ancient languages like Aramaic, Greek, or Latin to English.

If you’ve ever played “broken telephone” growing up you’re familiar with the belly laughs when everyone hears what comes out of the last person at the end of the whispering circle. More often than not the message sounds nothing like what was originally intended and that is in the span of 5 minutes, let alone 2000 years.

There is something profound being pointed to for all of us to consider with that quote.

It’s no coincidence that for our own awakening, every spiritual tradition has some form of cleaning of the slate so we can have a new experience of ourselves. That includes deconstructing the names and the old meaning we’ve given things since the beginning of time. We’re told that all things can be made new.

In Christianity, we call it Kenosis or self-emptying. Jesus encouraged us to have the mind of a child so we could grasp this new “way” of being that was very different from the thinking of the world. For us to have the ears to hear and the eyes to see beyond our physical senses. In Buddhism and Zen, the practice could be as simple as a metaphor, like coming to the table with our minds cleared out like an empty rice bowl. Śūnyatā in Sanskrit can be translated as emptiness or openness.

The first few weeks of the daily workbook in “A Course In Miracles” is about undoing the thought system we’ve inherited. By working through the lessons we eventually come to experience for ourselves that the things we name don’t mean anything in and of themselves. We add the meaning. And I’m so glad we do, otherwise, if we all had the exact same interpretation and perception of things all of you would be in love with my husband too. The world would be very complicated without our own unique perspectives.

Experiencing contrasting perceptions seems to be what being Human is all about and by the end of this year or mid-November, when our population is projected to hit 8 billion people there will probably be 8 billion different meanings on earth given to the word I’d like us to dig beneath the surface of this month.

I’d like to introduce a 3-part series on one particular well-worn word that depending on our chosen perception or interpretation of it, has huge implications for not only the foundation of our own lives but for our greater global community.

The G word.

GOD.

Yes, we’re going there. I promise it will be a fun exploration and you’ll maybe even walk into the end of February with a whole new and deeper understanding of its meaning. At the very least, you’ll no longer feel triggered by it or feel any need to avoid or resist using it.

The intention of the series is to develop a God of your own understanding.

One of the earliest comments on my substack was a reader confessing that while she was very interested in this topic, the word “God” didn’t really exist in her life. In fact, most of us have unconscious beliefs about what the word God means based on innocent misunderstandings or on what we were told when we were young by the adults around us based on their own fear-based belief systems and perceptions.

Let’s approach this compassionately and tenderly from every angle. Intellectually. Theologically. Historically. Geographically. Culturally. Spiritually. Philosophically. Let’s take a step back, unscrew all of our assumptions and look at the bigger picture and then tune into our own knowing from this new perspective. Or notice even if you even care about naming it at all. Maybe you won’t and that’s okay with me.

One of my favorite Quaker teachers Parker Palmer once used a metaphor that stuck with me. He said that our souls are like wild animals. So elemental and wild that if we want to have an encounter with them we need to approach them slowly, reverently, and even sit down at the base of a tree and be still for as long as it takes for them to trust us. If we do, they just may put in an appearance. If we barge ahead into the woods thrashing and crashing we can’t expect them to stay or engage with us they will bolt. If we slow down, become willing, open, and are prepared to wait it out we may just catch a glimpse. Our souls will emerge and we’ll get to experience the most hidden and precious part of ourselves.

Dante’s dark woods of error in our minds are so filled with thick underbrush of our own learned ideas and fear, assumptions, and egoic judgments that most of us innocently live our whole lives without fully knowing ourselves beneath the artificial surface of our day-to-day psychology.

Like the buildup on the surface of an old beautiful piece of art that’s been locked away in an attic for centuries. The restoration back to what is beneath the dark layers of dust and detritus may take some painstaking patience. Someone that knows not to harshly wipe away the buildup, but who will consider the best way to gently reveal or best restore the beauty hidden underneath the layers obstructing it. It will take as long as it takes, this can’t be rushed and what we are actually seeing, in the end, is something that was there all along but was just covered over.

In the bible, it says that all of us are called but few of us choose to answer that call. There is an innate capacity in all of us to have this encounter with our essential nature. With our soul. At our cores, when we’re still we will discover a power, strength, resilience, and a knowing that we may have overlooked most of our lives. We first need to be willing to let down our guards and step aside from our know-it-all egos and initiate contact. We live in a perfect integral system and we won’t be forced against our will into this.

From my own personal experience, when things are going okay in our lives our egos will barely let us sit still long enough with our eyes closed to even learn HOW to meditate, pray or even be mindful let alone practice it daily to experience this more essential part of ourselves. I know we have the Insight timer App, but maybe what we really need is a Strava App to measure our levels of consciousness and give each other kudos when we do and maybe more of us could stick with it the way we enjoy working on our physical bodies. Just kidding, but your ego’s very existence and survival are only guaranteed if you don’t sit still, so it seems some days that it will do all it can to make sure you spend more time outside of yourself on Netflix or scrolling on your phone and will be guaranteed to make you want to throw the rich and meaningful sacred text back on the shelf long before it has a chance to transform your experience of life. I had “A Course In Miracles” and different versions of the Bible just sitting there for decades collecting dust before I could read either of them it was much easier for me to just listen to my ego and judge them.

One of the most amazing revelations to me was beginning to see that when we stop denying the divine, it seems to fall away on its own. Like how the wicked witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz dissolves into a puddle. When we stop identifying solely with our thinking minds and we stop “edging god out”, our egos melt away once we see them for what they are. They no longer seem so real or ultimate. Like a bad dream or a monster under our beds. We just turn on the light and they disappear like the illusions or “Maya” that they were.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in most of the courses I participate in with this topic most people’s hair is silver or white. They wear sensible shoes and Tilley hats, and I teasingly call them my bird-watching friends. Most of them are retired, have mellowed with age, and are just discovering this inner knowing for themselves at a slower pace and with less urgency in their day-to-day doings.

This wise inner knowing is in all of us and the part of you I’d like to bring forward to read about God this month.

John Phillip Newell, the creator and my teacher at “The School of Earth and Soul”, said it best at the beginning of his latest book “Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul”:

We know things at the core of our being that we have not necessaritly been taught, and some of this deep knowing may actually be at odds with that our society or religion has tried to teach us. This book is about reawakening to what we know in the depths of our being, that the earth is sacred and that this sacredness is at the heart of every human being and life-form.

This deep knowing is like the experience of smelling a sweet rose. The event, the experience, the truth. Beyond what we name or call something. Plato, Jung, and many others throughout time have argued that to recognize the Truth, there must be something within us that already knows it.

Are you ready to join me for this deep dive into one of the most incredible and largely misunderstood words in History?

This a word some of us hold lightly or not at all, but no matter what we choose to call it, it points to a mystery to which none of us has absolute answers. What a person calls it doesn’t really matter to me, but THAT we call it something matters a lot.

This month we will climb up above the tree line of our own lives and belief systems together and take a nice long look from different perspectives to see what feels most true to us. We’ll take our time to smell and experience the sweetness of this particular rose that most of us for our own good reasons have been living entirely without.

Thanks for your encouraging messages about the Q&R video last week. I was so surprised to see that it was viewed hundreds of times and I feel like this work is striking a chord in us.

With love,

Rev Nona

ps. If you have any questions please comment below and I’ll see if I can address them in this upcoming three-part series or during next month’s Q&R video.