Even the Dicks
On nominative destiny, guardian angels, and the power in a name
You ever meet someone and think, yeah, that’s a Dick alright?
His name was Richard, but you know what I mean.
People have a way of growing into their names, as if the word were a quiet instruction the life eventually obeys. Some names are just labels. Others behave more like prophecies, half joke and half omen, and the life spends years catching up.
(My sincere apologies to every Karen out there. It’s not your fault.)
Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe it’s just our brains looking for patterns.
Still, names matter.
In an age that finds meaning in nothing, it only makes sense that our baby names eventually arrived at Malibu Barbie, Saga Blade, X Æ A-Xii, and a real human child named Techno Mechanicus. And yes, I looked them up. Those are all real names.
You can give your kid something he’ll be picked on for the rest of his life, or maybe, just maybe, you can point him toward something before he is old enough to know where he is going.
Naming was one of man’s first God-given tasks. Adam looked out over creation and named what he saw. The animals didn’t belong to him outright. But he had been given a real place in the order of creation. A little authority and a lot of responsibility.
And today happens to be the Feast of the Guardian Angels. The Church tells us not to go around naming our guardian angels. Whatever names they have belong to God’s order, not ours. Every time an angel shows up in Scripture, the first words out of his mouth are "Do not be afraid," and somehow we flesh-and-blood creatures think we get to look him in the eye and call him Joe.
They are not ours to name.
Children are different. They are not our possessions either, but for a little while God entrusts them to us. And one of the first things we do is give them a name.
There is power in a name.
There are curses.
But there are blessings too.
This is the sixth child I’ve gotten to name.
My wife and I joke sometimes that we burned through too many of our favorite names as middle names on the earlier kids, so every time another baby comes along the list gets shorter and the negotiations get harder.
Eventually you are standing there looking at another tiny human being thinking, Well. What do we call this one?
Some of these nights in the NICU, I can’t pray. Not really. The words don’t come.
So I just breathe the Name.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, on the way in.
Have mercy on me, a sinner, on the way out.
Some nights it’s only:
Jesus.
It’s the Name above every name.
I can’t explain it but it holds when I can’t. There is POWER in the name of Jesus.
Somewhere in those nights, being away from him while he sleeps, I started looking more closely at the name we had already given him.
Ezra
עֶזְרָא
Hebrew. Help.
It’s closely related to Azariah, “The Lord has helped.”
Ezra the scribe returned with the exiles and helped restore Israel to the Law. He helped bring a people home and reminded them who they were and whose they were.
Then there is his middle name.
Faustino
The Spanish form of the Latin Faustinus, from faustus: favored, fortunate.
It belongs to the same family of names as Faustina, which for us inevitably brings St. Faustina Kowalska and Divine Mercy to mind. If you know me, that was no accident or surprise. It is also carried by St. Faustinus, the ancient martyr of Brescia.
Put them together and this is what I hear:
The Lord has helped. He is favored.
We wrote that name on a piece of paper months ago. We didn’t know it would become our prayer and answer to that prayer.
Yes, we want results.
We want the oxygen off.
We want the monitors gone.
We want the doctors to walk in and tell us to pack his things.
We want our son home.
We want normal.
But perhaps the answer for today isn’t “He’s home.”
Not yet.
The answer for today is:
The Lord has helped.
He is alive.
He is baptized.
He is loved.
He has been carried by thousands of prayers from people we know and people we will probably never meet.
Through all of this, mercy has kept showing up.
That little boy is favored.
For today, that is enough.
⸻
P.S.
Homework, if you want it.
Look up your name. Not the baby-book version. The real one. Find the language it came from and the saints who carried it before you.
Then do the same for your kids.
And ask one question:
What would it look like to live a little closer to that name this week?
Not perfectly. Just one step.
If your name means “God is gracious,” find someone who hasn’t earned your grace and give it anyway.
If it means “warrior,” pick one fight worth having and drop the ones that aren’t.
Richard, by the way, means “brave ruler.”
So there’s hope for all of us.
Even the Dicks.
