The Woman Who Named God

K.J. Ramsey knows suffering. Since childhood, she’s lived with a debilitating autoimmune disease. As the author, poet and therapist says on her website, “I can’t remember what it’s like to live a day without pain.” After a case of Covid ran amok in her compromised immune system, she now has seven diseases and health complications. Despite being a mere thirty-something as I write, she’s taking ivig treatments and may need them till the day she dies.

K.J. also knows how beautiful and horrible the body of Christ on earth – the church – can be. She’s endured abuse from church leaders and members, yet she still follows Jesus.

I recently heard a podcast interview with K.J. about her latest book, The Book of Common Courage. She describes how fear can be a strength and an invitation to practice courage. The admonition to “fear not” that appears 365 times in the Bible isn’t a command against feeling fear, she says, because that would require us to become inhuman; and in certain forms, fear can protect us and lead us to appreciation and awe. K.J. believes it’s the invitation of fear that’s critical – what it asks us to move towards. In every case, no matter the source or kind of fear, the invitation is to draw closer to God. From this perspective, “fear not” isn’t a command to repress our feelings but a call to walk through fear with and towards God.

The Book of Common Courage is a collection of prayers, poems and blessings that unpack Psalm 23, where David tells how a Good Shepherd accompanies him even in “the valley of the shadow of death.” K.J. notes a powerful privilege given to us in that we – human beings – “get to name God.” I was walking while listening, and that statement stopped me in my actual tracks. Jeff McCord, one of the interviewers, interjects that this notion shouldn’t scare us. “Just consider how many names there are for God in the Bible,” he says. “Everybody’s been doing it – for a really long time!”

We get to name God. What a mind-blowing sentence! The job isn’t reserved for prophets, priests and dead authors. It didn’t end when the Council of Nicaea agreed on the 66 books we call the Bible. This project is ongoing. As He and we are eternal, the naming of God will never end. The notion of creatures naming their creator sounds unspeakably audacious. At the same time, if God not only permits us but also wants us to name Him and relishes such a personal and creative act, then we begin to see something remarkable about God’s nature and His heart. We see how a perfectly humble man who described himself only once, and briefly at that in the gospels: “I am gentle and lowly in heart” – who cared enough about a backwater wedding feast to transform water into wine so that the celebration wouldn’t be cut short – who wept at the tomb of his friend Lazarus – could also be the Word that sparked the universe into being and holds all things together in Himself. We see how the universal God and the personal God are one.

There’s no right or wrong process for naming a story, whether it’s a movie, a novel or the story of your own life. By determining a working title at the beginning, you can sometimes find the containment and direction a story needs to take shape and find its bearings. More often, writers find titling first to be preemptive and distracting from the core job of storytelling. This is the usual order of operations when it comes to naming brands: strategy > narrative > name.

Some novelists won’t even sketch out a plot until they’ve named characters, places and artifacts. The name of a hero, their home or even (but rarely) entire languages can come first. Such was the arduous process J.R.R. Tolkien followed before Middle Earth sprang from his imagination.

As a philologist, Tolkien believed language holds the keys to culture and mythology. He created early versions of not one but two Elvish languages while suffering from “trench fever” (i.e., ptsd), during World War I. Imagine him in an overpopulated field hospital, in stained fatigues, reclining on a cot with a notebook. His writing hand shakes, but his forehead is untroubled as he conjugates verbs and composes syntax. That work took place decades before Frodo Baggins wriggled out of Tolkien’s pen, shouldered a pack, shut the door of Bag End behind him and followed Bilbo’s footsteps. Language came before the Great Rings were forged, before Elves, Dwarves and Men were born, before the Valar sang the world into being. First the words, then a world to house them, then characters to speak and sing and engrave them on enchanted doors and lost swords. Last came the gold-foiled titles that glisten on our shelves.

As a quiet boy spending long hours reading in my room, I’d come across gorgeous names, consult the pronunciation guide and say them out loud. Their music sounded strange and wild, hinting at some unsayable truth about each character or thing. Names like Knickabrick, Nirnaeth Arnoediad, Galadriel, Colum Cille, Vercingetorix, Myrddin Emrys, Lleu Llaw Gyffes. As a 43-year-old man, I make up silly characters with ridiculous accents for my kids. There’s Engelbert Thistlethwaite, the eccentric Oxford don and collector of PhDs. His bifocals often run afoul of his flared nostrils, and his resting face is the bucktoothed grimace you make when the milk’s gone sour. Across the pond in a shadowy Appalachian cove, there’s Cletus MacTasm, a rawhide exclamation of a man and a brewer of moonshine. Since early childhood, Cletus has been stuck in a state of permanent elation, bewilderment and subsequent yelling on account of being weaned on white lightning.

Naming isn’t always fun and games, of course. To soberly name a thing is to honor it and understand what to make of it, whether you’re naming a child who’s the light of your life, a hard truth hiding in plain sight or a sickness that’s eating you alive.

In 2016, I was in the midst of depression and wrote an essay called “Reclaiming Power.” I was wrestling with how to name my own suffering and was coming to see I could never find perspective until I named each problem. Names, I wrote, are talismans. They carry a power that’s uncovered when written, unleashed when spoken. This is why ancient heroes rarely revealed their true names. To publish the hero’s name was to gain power over them.

By acknowledging I wasn’t merely feeling blue or going through a rough patch but in full-blown depression, I began a slow recovery. I named despair, that bleakest of feelings, and saw it for what it was: the inevitable result of extreme self absorption, of a heart that was broken and humiliated but not yet humble. As Ian Cron says, despair is a very grave sin, for it presumes to know how the story will end.

But my depression was not entirely self-inflicted. Abuse was also part of my story.

Naming was the first documented work. In the creation story of Genesis, God commissions Adam to name every creature. I love this part – emphasis mine: “And from the ground yhwh God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.”

If God is omniscient, then of course he knows what Adam would call each creature. But he chooses to hang back, watch from the sidelines and admire the man at work. I picture God crouching quietly under the branches of a willow, eyes glued to the scene before him, waiting with bated breath to hear each new name.

The first namer was a man, but who first named God? Not Adam, as far as we know. Not Noah, Abraham or any other patriarch. The first person to name God was not an eminent ruler with enough sheep to carpet Canaan, nor were they even Hebrew. No. The first person who named God was a woman, a foreigner and an outcast: Hagar.

If you’ve read the book of Genesis, you might remember that though Abraham and Sarah were eventually known for their devotion to God, they weren’t exactly model citizens for much of their lives. They possessed great wealth and little faith. In fact, Abraham was often a timid pushover and Sarah could be a cynical shrew.