This Is Somebody Else's Son

The bulbs were strung from the lemon tree to the corner of the carport, and somebody's cousin had brought a speaker that was slightly too loud for the yard.

Tomás carried the folding chairs out four at a time because that is what he does at these things. He is good at it. He knows where the ice goes and he knows which tía will want to sit facing the door, and by nine o'clock the yard was full and warm and smelled like burnt sugar and citronella.

His wife's uncle came across the grass with a plate in one hand, took hold of Tomás by the shoulder in the kind way that older men do, and turned him toward two people he had never met.

"This is Elena's husband," the uncle said.

They smiled. Tomás smiled. The uncle steered him three feet further along.

"And this is the one who married into the Ortegas," he said to a woman with a baby on her hip. "Ramiro's son in law. You remember Ramiro."

She remembered Ramiro. Everyone remembers Ramiro. Tomás nodded and said something about the weather and went to get more ice, and while he was standing with his hands in the cooler and the cold going up his wrists, he counted it out.

Nineteen years. He had come to this yard for nineteen years. He had driven three of these people to hospital appointments. He had put up that carport. And at his own daughter's baptism party he had been introduced four times in one evening, warmly, generously, by people who love him, and not once by his own name.

That is not cruelty. Nobody in that yard meant a thing by it. It is just how a family locates a person: it hangs you off the nearest famous branch, and after a while the branch is what people say when they mean you.

You know exactly what I am describing, and you have never once made a scene about it. You are the one on the form as an emergency contact and never as a person. You are the one people describe by their relation to somebody else at work, at church, at the school gate. And the small terrible thought that follows you out to the cooler is not that they were rude. It is the other one. The one that says: maybe that really is all I am. Maybe I am the attachment. Maybe if you took the famous branch away there would be no me left hanging there at all.

A hand raised over a crowd at the end of a day

Here is a scene worth standing in for a minute.

The day's work is finished at the tent in the wilderness. The people are gathered in the open, dust on everything, children on shoulders, the smell of the evening fires starting. And at the front, the priests lift their hands over the whole crowd and speak six lines out loud, slowly, the way people speak when the words are older than they are: the Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make His face shine on you, the Lord lift up His countenance on you and give you peace.

Then God says why He made them do it.

So shall they put my name upon the children of Israel, and I will bless them.Numbers 6:27

Read that again and watch what it does with its hands. The blessing is not a nice wish drifting over a field. It is a placement. Something is being put on people, laid across them, the way a coat goes over the shoulders of somebody standing in the cold. And the thing being placed is God's own name.

That is the picture the rest of this stands on. In the world of the Bible, when two parties bind themselves together, names change hands. The stronger one does not merely help the weaker one. He calls him by his own name in front of everybody, and from that day the weaker one is introduced differently for the rest of his life.

You are a person somebody has laid a name across. Right now, as you read this in whatever chair you are in, that is your actual standing, and I am not saying it because it sounds warm: Numbers 6:27 is God commanding that His name be put on people, and the Holy Spirit is doing that placing over you as the sentence goes by.

What God did to an old man's name

Watch it happen to one man, because it is easier to see on one.

He was ninety nine years old and his name was Abram, which is roughly what everyone thought of him: an exalted father, which is a hard name to carry with no child in the tent. God comes to him and makes His oath, and then does something to the man's name itself. He does not hand him a nickname. He takes the name apart and puts something of His own inside it, and from that afternoon nobody in that camp could say the old man's name without a piece of God's name in their mouth.

No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.Genesis 17:5

Nothing in his circumstances had moved yet. There was no child in the tent. His wife was still laughing about it behind the flap. What had changed was what he was called, and what he was called had been changed by the only Voice in the universe that makes a thing true by saying it.

So let me put this where it belongs. You have been introduced by your usefulness and your relations for years, and none of those introductions is the one on record. You were given a name in a covenant, and the giving happened outside your feelings and outside that yard. His word carries it, His Spirit seals it, and neither of them is waiting for the family to catch up.