Wrestling the Angel
Wrestling the Angel
Bonita Jewel
One day, during the 12 years I spent living in India as a missionary, I read about 200 girls attending a renaming ceremony. They all had been given a single name, Nakusa (also spelled Nakoshi or Nakusha). Unwanted.
For every thousand boys in India, there are 914 girls—a number that increases to 50 million when considering the nation’s population of roughly one billion. Female infanticide still exists in some places as a harsh result of centuries of naming women as “less-than.” Although laws are in place now to protect women, the traditions remain deeply rooted.
In many places, men are the wage earners, the ones with strong names that endure. Women are the unwanted, with dowries upon their heads and scars upon their hearts. But in that single renaming ceremony, 200 girls took on new names. Aishwarya. Puja. Shruti. Wealth. Worship. Revelation.
I wonder if they had the strength to leave behind the labels they had carried for so long. I hope so. There is such power in language, such power in naming—to clarify and create and give credence… or to cast away and objectify and demean.
*
Something about naming a thing makes it more real, more substantial. You can suddenly hold it or grasp it. You can come closer, in a way, to understanding it. Naming a thing can offer clarity to a feeling, an emotion, a state of being. You put a name to it and a description upon it and suddenly you hear from others who are able to say, “Yes, I know how that feels. Yes, that's my experience too.”
In this way, naming gives a sort of freedom, a common ground from which to start. A place where people with similar understanding or experiences can gather under that name to know they are not alone. A place where they can find freedom and belonging, can draw upon each other and find strength.
Perhaps this sort of clarity is true for naming a person as well. You name a child and suddenly you have a label to place on that child. A name can hold such meaning. The act of naming can hold such power.
*
One Christmas, when I was five or six, I saw a card with handwritten script addressed to “Dave, Detrah, and family.” It never seemed odd to me, as a child, that my mom went by two different names. Detrah seemed the name of a stranger, someone from another life, or another world. I knew my mother as Merryheart.
My mom was 17 when she dropped out of high school and into a unique mission-minded Christian group where members lived communally and adopted biblical living practices. They took on new names in order to become new men and women. Names from the Bible, naturally.
Mom received the name Nogah within a few days of joining the group. I guess the few women’s names found in the Bible—Mary, Sarah, Rachel, Ruth—had already been taken. Nogah was one of King David’s more obscure sons from the Old Testament. I try to fit that name into the image of my mother from stories she would tell the six of us children at bedtime. Nogah with long brown hair and round glasses, flowery shirts and bellbottoms, finding her place and purpose in a Christian commune in Texas, then Washington, then Georgia.
My mom—Nogah, Merryheart, Detrah—related her stories with a sense of belonging and purpose that never seemed a part of her narration before or since. I would lie in the bed I shared with my three older sisters and picture those stories. More than anything, I wanted that same sense of belonging, of knowing where I fit and who I was. Of knowing my name.
*
Name-changing had a biblical precedent. It naturally followed that a group hoping to live out an ancient biblical lifestyle in modern times would adopt the practice. Abraham is one of the most well-known characters given a new name. His name had been Abram, which means “exalted father.” But at some point in his desert wanderings, God gave him the name Abraham, popularly defined as “father of many” or “father of a multitude.”
The narrative of Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, supersedes all others in the drama surrounding a person’s name change. Jacob means “heel-grabber, supplanter.” The stories about him tell how he neatly fit into that name: persuading his twin brother, Esau, to trade his family birthright for a bowl of porridge; tricking his blind father, Isaac, into giving him the family blessing meant for Esau.
When Jacob escapes the land after such trickery, one can only assume he hopes to escape his shameful deeds. On the first night away from home, Jacob finds a place to rest, his only pillow a stone beneath a sky broken with stars. He dreams of a ladder leading to Heaven, of angels ascending and descending toward the throne of God.
But that is not when his name changes. That dream is merely an introduction to this God that his father and grandfather knew. From the dream, God speaks, promising Jacob a people, a land, and a blessing. Although Jacob makes an altar of the stone pillow, he makes a deal with this God. He grabs onto God’s heel, agreeing to believe if he returns safely home again one day. It would prove a long journey.
I sometimes wonder, would the story have changed if God had given him a new name there, from the throne at the top of Heaven’s ladder, at the start of Jacob’s story? Perhaps not. Perhaps, at that point, Jacob would not have accepted a new name or known what to do with it. Perhaps he had more miles to go, more deserts to cross, more stones to serve as pillows through long desert nights.
*
My parents met a few years later, in the same group. My dad had kept his given name, David— naturally fitting in with the Michaels and Johns and Stephens around him. The name changes were not legal or permanent—that would have required more entanglement with the secular world, which was highly discouraged within the group. Biblical names were used among members; with outsiders, legal names were usually maintained.
My dad’s parents had mixed feelings about their son joining the group. But even if he had chosen to change his name, he might have argued that he was just taking after them. One of my sisters informed me that our dad’s mother, born to Austrian immigrants, was christened Katarina. At some point,our grandma chose a name that presumably helped her fit in better in the United States. Katherine, later shortened to Kay.
I only know snippets of my grandmother’s story, later – after her death – wishing I had taken the time to gather more of it. As a young woman, she moved from Ohio to California in the 1940s because she wanted to meet and marry the actor Jimmy Stewart. Instead, she met and married my grandpa, Mike. At least, most people knew him as Mike. His given name was Jewell.
*
When I was eleven, Mom bought me a Bible with a scripture reference etched into the front: Malachi 3:17, right below my name. She told me that our relatives had assumed my middle name, Jewel, was a namesake of my grandpa’s, but it wasn’t.
“I got your middle name from the Bible.” My mom explained to me one day. Perhaps she had opened the Bible to that specific verse, or perhaps she loved the promise embedded within the third chapter of Malachi. This portion of scripture narrates a time of great loss yet holds a promise that the names of those who remembered God were recorded in a book. “They shall be mine,” the passage reads, “in that day when I make up my jewels.”
I loved the idea of my name being part of a special story.
*
I don’t know when my mom changed her name from Nogah to Merryheart. I know it was a name she chose herself rather than it being chosen by someone else. Merryheart is a phrase found in Proverbs: “A merry heart makes a cheerful countenance… A merry heart does good like a medicine.”
When I was born, my parents already had four kids. I wonder if my mom adopted the name Merryheart around the time I joined the party. With four young kids and the discovery of a fifth on the way when the youngest is not even eight months old, a merry heart is a necessity.
Did she take on that name because she had a heart of joy brimming over and simply wanted to share that with everyone? Or did she, in her heart, find so much of the opposite—sorrow, darkness—that she chose Merryheart as a reminder, every time someone called her name, of what she wanted to focus on? The person she wanted to be. The name she wanted to become.
*
As a child, I rarely wondered about my own name. My older siblings told me that bonita was Spanish for silly little fish. I had no reason not to believe them. It took a long time for me to hope my name meant anything but that.
How strange, these labels we use to call each other, by which we are called and to which we answer. Even from earliest times, names held meanings… like the earliest name from the biblical creation story. Adam means “of the earth”—of that place from which Adam was taken. God had used words to create galaxies and stars in constellations so vast, then reached down to that earth and fashioned a human.
I picture God kneeling down like a child with his hands in the dirt, forming and molding and then breathing life into that being. Then, finally, giving him a name as a reminder of that place from which he came. That place to which he would, one day, return.
*
The summer I was eleven, I took a class at a local elementary school in Central California. I wanted to learn Spanish. I still get the question regularly that my Spanish teacher asked on the first day of class: “Do you know what your name means?”
I still feel uncomfortable answering. Sometimes I wish I still believed it meant silly little fish. Strange, how long it takes sometimes to grow into our own names.
*
Jacob, who gave God a hesitant promise after a dream of a ladder leading somewhere like home, became the father of twelve sons and a daughter. Interestingly, in that time and place when men had so much say over so many things, Jacob did not name his 12 sons. He did not choose the names that would eventually become the twelve tribes of Israel. His first wife, Leah, bore six of those sons, and she named them.
We all know the dramatic love story of Jacob and Rachel and Leah. Jacob had not meant to marry Leah. He had chosen Rachel, Leah’s beautiful younger sister. But after working seven years to marry Rachel, he woke the morning after the marriage to find Leah in the bedchamber. His uncle, Laban, shrugged it off saying the younger daughter can’t marry before the older one, and he’d be happy to give Jacob his second daughter for another seven years of work.
Few details are given from Leah’s perspective. I believe the greatest insight we can find of her heart is through the meaning of the names she gives her sons:
Reuben: the Lord has seen my affliction.
Simeon: the Lord heard that I was unloved.
Levi: this time my husband will become attached to me.
Finally, the name she gives her fourth seem to reflect an understanding. An acceptance of a relationship with a husband who had not wanted her. And a God who loves her in spite of it all.
Judah: this time I will praise the Lord.
Each name was chosen by a mother whose heart broke every time she brought forth a child and hoped that carrying and bearing would earn her a love she never received.
Jacob barely enters this part of the narrative. He is out tending flocks, returning at nights to sleep with one woman or the other. To father two sons by Rachel’s servant, Bilhah. Then two more by Leah’s servant, Zilpah. Then two more by Leah. And then, finally, two by Rachel, the woman Jacob loved.
*
When I was 13, I spent a week with friends in Sacramento. Another girl was staying with them also. Her name was Angel. One afternoon, I helped make dinner, trying to make myself useful, trying to make myself worthy of my presence in their home.
“You’re an angel,” one of them told me. “You and Angel should switch names, because she’s pretty and you’re …” The person stopped midsentence, probably realizing what she had been saying. I heard it clearly. She’s pretty and you’re not. In that moment, I hated my name.
*
Jacob’s youngest child is the only one named by his father. Rachel, the younger, beautiful sister dies in childbirth. She names her son Benoni, which means son of my sorrow.
But Jacob names him Benjamin, son of my days, or more specifically, son of my old age—the name that stays with the boy as he grows.
Did the boy ever wonder about his story?
Did he ever wish he could be called by the name his mother had given him?
Did he ever feel like he did not belong within his name?
*
I think everyone, at some point, struggles with their given name, wondering if it fits, wondering how they should fit into it. Such responsibility rests in choosing a name for another human being. A name the recipient is often expected to keep their whole life unless they choose to shed it with some new awareness of self or belief. Regardless of what new name they take on, their given name is one they can never completely forsake.
One of my favorite authors, Frederick Buechner, reflects on his name. He says that if someone mispronounces his name, “I have the feeling that what’s foolish is me.” But then he reaches down to a deeper fear: “If somebody forgets it, I feel that it’s I who am forgotten.” He concludes, “I can’t imagine myself with any other name . . . if my name were different, I would be different.”
Does this mean that the reason we change our names is that we hope to change ourselves? We hope to recreate the image that surrounds us or the image that lies within us. From Jewell and Katarina to Mike and Kay. From Detrah to Nogah to Merryheart and back to Detrah again.
Did these new names change who my parents and grandparents were? Or did they discover that nothing really changed at all, at least not in the way they had hoped?
*
In the biblical narratives, when characters changed their names, they did not choose their new names. Those names were chosen for them, and what makes all the difference is the one who chose their new names.
Jacob finally made the journey back to the land that his father, Isaac, and his father’s father, Abraham, had come to claim as their homeland. He had run away with nothing. He was returning with a dozen sons and a daughter, two wives, servants, and flocks.
But Jacob’s heart held no peace. He feared the impending confrontation with his brother, Esau, who upon hearing of his brother’s return was heading toward them with 400 men. Enough to be an army.
Jacob sent his family and flocks over a river called Jabbok and waited on the other side. The biblical narrative is sparse—all we read is that he wrestled a man until dawn. As daybreak neared, the stranger said, “Let me go, for the dawn is breaking.”
Jacob refused, saying, “I will not let you go unless you give me a blessing.” This Jacob—heel grabber, supplanter, deceiver—who had tricked his brother into giving him his birthright and who had grabbed the family blessing meant for the elder, clung to this stranger and refused to let go.
The stranger asked for Jacob’s name. As soon as he gave it, the stranger told him that Jacob was no longer his name. Instead, he would be called Israel.
Jacob asked for a blessing. He was given a name. Yet he went away from the confrontation limping, and the wound remained for the rest of his life.
*
Shakespeare, the oft-quoted playwright, observes that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. What about a person by any other name? I could have chosen to change my name. Maybe I haven’t because I’m still trying to live up to my name. To live into it somehow.
I like the thought of a name that is beautiful. It reminds me of a promise that God does, indeed, make all thing beautiful in His own time. I like the hope of being a jewel written into a book, belonging somewhere and having a special story.
*
Jacob asked the stranger what his name was. He did not get an answer. Perhaps some names are not meant to be known before their time.
I, too, have questioned, have wrestled with names and angels, with light and shadows. Unanswered questions, eclipsed memories, glimpses of truth wrapped in so much darkness. Often, it feels I come through limping, still seeking the unveiled glory of dawn.
And yet… Whispered images filter throughout so many stories I have read, of men and women of clay waiting for a long-expected revealing, a long-forgotten name. Of creation waiting for redemption. Of a place where we might no more be orphans called unwanted, but stand as sons and daughters, each called by our own name.
Bonita Jewel
Writer & Editor
Bonita has been a freelance writer and editor since 2010. She has completed more than 200 unique projects for authors, bloggers, entrepreneurs, and more. Find her here: www.bonitajewel.com
Photography by Duo Nguyen