It seems that at the beginning of every semester, and particularly the first semester of freshman year, everyone is scurrying around to meet everyone they can. It’s a great time to meet people — and probably the time you will meet the most people — but the intensity of those first few weeks seems to drop off drastically. With time, we stop meeting new people, and the people that we met once in the first week, we either forget their names, or pretend we have forgotten them. In short, we get comfortable.
And sure, comfort can be a good thing. We pray for comfort sometimes, but being comfortable is not the summum bonum. “We are not made for comfort,” Pope Benedict XVI says. “We are made for greatness.”
And so, I invite everyone reading this to examine how comfortable you are, socially, intellectually, in every sense. But especially in this area of meeting people, of knowing people.
Everyone has a name; it is their call; it is a stamp of their humanity and therefore a sign and acknowledgement of their dignity as children of God. To call someone by their name is to remind them of their humanity. It raises up those who see themselves as less than human and humbles those who see themselves as more than human.
Those who don’t hear their names for a long time face a great temptation to forget that they are human. The beggar who is addressed as “the beggar” and hasn’t been called by his real name in years, is in danger of forgetting that he too is a human, worthy of walking the streets and greeting all who pass by with a smile, worthy of love, of recognition.
And the king who has no child to call him “Dad,” no wife to call him “my dear husband” and no companion to call him “my friend,” may forget that he too is subordinate to someone, he may forget that his obedience belongs to God, and he is responsible for the lives of others, not deserving of them.
All that is to say: names are important; and learning people’s names is important.
It may seem like a one-way gift, in which you give the “beggar” the recognition he most desperately needs; you challenge the arrogance of someone who needs to be checked. You bless them with something.
But, done for the right reasons, it takes on a different tone. It blesses you back. And it does so because it’s part of a charity or caritas that goes beyond the limits of how we commonly use the word.
One can do a charitable act, like giving money to charity, or refraining from saying something that could be hurtful to someone, out of charity. All these do use the word charity correctly, but the Christian imperative to have charity or act in charity goes beyond that. It’s not supposed to be transactional, it’s supposed to be unifying.
To have charity is to be able to fall in love with something outside of yourself. Something or someone beyond. It’s not necessarily romantic — but it is the stuff of the soul —it’s about human connection — meeting eye to eye.
The call to charity is a call to go beyond the expectations of propriety and to not only know, but encounter another person — that other — your neighbor.
Our life can be full of encounters if we choose to wonder at the people around us.
Aristotle said that the beginning of philosophy is wonder. The beginning of charity, which is love, is wonder for people. And like philosophy, it starts with how we call things — what their names are and what they mean to us.
So make an effort to learn names. If there’s someone you see every day, meet them. Learn their name. If someone always holds the door for you, learn their name so you can say: “Thank you, (and then their name).” Or at the very least, smile.