The Power of Naming Things

Christian spirituality as diagnosis

In humanity’s origin story, found in Genesis 1-3, God creates Eden to teem with life in the realms of the land, the air, and the water. On day six of creation, God makes a unique kind of land creature—the humans. In the account of Genesis 1, the two humans are described as being created at the same moment, instantaneously. However, in Genesis 2, there is a slight variation of the story. The man and the woman are not created simultaneously. They are created at different times. The man’s experience of having been created before the woman sets him up to come face-to-face with his need. While the animals that God had created to be with the man were good and beautiful, something—someone—was still missing. God speaks, presumably with the man within earshot:

It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. (Gen. 2:18)

Fourteen chapters later in the book of Genesis, we are introduced to the character of Hagar. This Egyptian woman—who is literally named ‘immigrant’—had been offered by Abraham’s wife Sarai to take the role of being a surrogate mother for the child that Sarai herself could not have. Once the child has been conceived, Sarah’s furious resentment escalates to the point that she ‘despises’ (v. 5) Hagar. Jealousy for another person’s blessedness—like the Cain and Abel story in Genesis 4—erupts into abuse and violence. So Hagar flees. On our journey to Shur (likely where Hagar was from), an angel comes to Hagar and delivers a message from the Lord:

Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going? (Gen. 16:8)

Both of these stories reveal, I believe, something exceptional about the way biblical literature describes God’s character—especially for those who are experiencing life that is off, not the way things are meant to be. What do these stories demonstrate? In 1985, a neurologist named Dr. Oliver Sacks wrote a bestselling book entitled The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.¹ Within, the scientist vividly describes in detail some of the oddest and most bizarre neurological disorders he’d ever observed or had been known to the medical community.

One such man, simply known as Mr. P., was a music instructor. This man had the peculiar experience of being unable to recognize certain physical objects for what they were. As the title of the book suggests, he was the man who mistook his wife for a hat. At one point, the music teacher tried to lift his wife’s head, mistaking it for his hat instead. Eventually, the man's condition would be diagnosed. He suffered from visual agnosia, a condition that prevented him from correctly identifying physical objects for their intended purpose or meaning.

Photo by Piron Guillaume on Unsplash

Sacks outlines countless similar oddities in the growing discipline of neurology. One of the themes that emerges from this best-selling book is the awareness that a part of the healing and restoration process for individuals with debilitating brain disorder is the need to name what is going on. Diagnosis paves the way for healing. With the advent of digital communication connecting doctors, scientists, and neurologists globally, a new era of diagnostic insights on people's experiences and possible remedies is likely to emerge. Sacks would emphasize that unless a problem is identified by name, it remains unresolved. Things need to be named to be helped.

Naming reality is powerful. For years, I have experienced a great deal of insecurity and suffering at the hands of other people’s faces. I’ve always been enslaved to people’s countenance. That is, I learned very early on in my life that I could not trust people’s words, so I had to read their faces. I learned to trust in my own capacity to find safety for myself by being able to read what other people were thinking based on what I saw on their faces. I have, more than anyone I know, a keen oversensitivity to facial expressions. This was developed as a way to survive. But it has been a form of enslavement for me in my adult years. I am always at the mercy of how other people look at me. I am only now beginning to recognize that I am my own person and that I don’t have to find my identity in other people’s countenance.

It was not until I read a book a number of years ago by David Schnarch entitled Intimacy and Desire that I came across what is called “borrowed functioning.”² This is when I find myself and the capacity to function in what I borrow from other people—namely, their faces. I borrow my sense of self from what I see other people projecting. 

Having that named for me was one of the more healing experiences I've ever had in my own journey of maturity. When something like this is named, it first makes it clear that I am not the only one who experiences it. And secondly, it provides a pathway of hope that there is a way through it. Many of us have experienced this. For years, we experienced some physical malady that has gone misunderstood until, finally, a doctor is able to diagnose it. Or when a therapist has been able to name that toxic relationship that robbed us of our childhood and rightly labeled it as abuse. Or when a pastor is able to wisely give language to a spiritual experience we have had with God that we never knew what to do with.

Which brings me back to Genesis 2 and Genesis 16. In both instances, something important is going on. In the story of Adam, he knew and even experienced this deep sense that something was missing from the garden of Eden. He knew it. He felt it. He probably looked at his body and realized parts of him were built for things they did not even know what they were for yet. And then God comes along and says the word: “alone.” Adam had likely never heard that word before. What is that, he wondered? What does that mean? God is putting words to Adam’s experience for which he had no vocabulary. 

In Genesis 16, the woman Hagar is on the run when an angel comes to her. The angels words may seem cold and disquieting. “Hagar, slave of Sarah...” Why would an angel need to remind her of this? Perhaps the angel wasn’t reminding her. Perhaps the angel was naming it. And for the first time in her life, a messenger from God was putting a word on Hagar’s life that nobody had ever dared to place on her. Why had she experienced so much pain, sadness, and violence at home? Because she was a slave. And God saw it. Angels, at least the good ones, are divine truth-tellers who are bound to speak what is true. 

The Bible is the most powerful book in the world, among other things, because it names the human condition. We are alienated, sinful, self-centered, disobedient, truth-averted, hateful, loveless, and merciless. This is not judgementalism. This is the power of divine diagnosis. And has a power that, frankly, secularity cannot even come close to. The world can name things. But when God names things, he provides a way to walk forward into his healing hands.

The church, then, is that great diagnostic community where we have learned the language of grace to be able to see and call what God so desperately wants to heal. This is what intimate relationships help us do—name reality.

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Thanks for reading. You can always find me wasting time on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Or check out my podcast with Dr. Nijay Gupta at Slow Theology. If you found this content helpful to your journey, yay! Consider enjoying my most recent book The Gift of Thorns: Jesus, the Flesh, and the War for our Wants, which was released with Zondervan in February of 2024. Within, I explore the topic of human desire from the perspective of Scripture, theology, and experience—with particular interest to how we can be formed into the image of Christ through our desires. In short, it’s about why our cultural mandate to “you do you” is so profoundly unhelpful to the follower of Jesus. You can support my work by reading it! And sharing about your experience. Click on the image below to get yourself a copy.

1. Sacks, Oliver, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1998)

2. David Schnarch, Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (New York, NY: Beaufort Books, 2011), 44ff.