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[Back to index of December articles] BEARINGS: By Martin L. Smith Channel surfing is a vice but the bizarre collages that it flashes before our gaze are sometimes curiously effective in revealing the obsessions that grip our 'culture.' The men compulsively blasting away at each other with guns; the surgeons relentlessly plying their scalpels and suction tubes in cosmetic surgery…and the constantly recurring 'ta-da!' scenes in which complacent decorators invite householders back into their homes to see the miraculous results of a makeover. The scenes are absolutely predictable. Hands fly up to the face in amazement and the cry goes up: "Oh…my…God!" Exactly the same happens in the fashion shows that work wondrous transformations on the plain and unfashionable. "Oh…my…God!" the friends exclaim in rapture when the man or woman reemerges smiling winsomely in their unaccustomed glamour. Here the divine name of God is invoked in a new kind of consumerist ritual which steals the primal theme of transfiguration from religion and takes it over for the profane purpose of adoring the surface glamour conferred by cosmetics and clothes. We have added this profanation of the name of God to the other conventional forms embedded in everyday speech. The name of God is the second most common expletive we use when we hit our thumb with a hammer. People use it to intensify bitter scolding - "My God…you are so clumsy! Jesus… when will you ever learn?" It is completely unthinking and all pervasive. I was working with someone the other day and he was getting so exasperated with a problem that he shouted out "Jesus H. Christ!" smacking the desk with his fist. And something clicked inside. I overheard myself saying calmly, "You know, since I worship Jesus Christ, it's really painful to hear you use his name like that." My soul must have been insisting that it isn't healthy to inure oneself to the abuse of the name of Christ, to just let it go, although that is easier. Who wants to risk seeming 'holier than thou?' As it happens, the one I was talking to is of another faith. And far from resenting my response, he took it seriously as an entirely appropriate reaction from someone who actually does revere Jesus. He sincerely apologized. (In my heart, I also asked for God's forgiveness, because I was acutely aware, even as I spoke, of my own usual complicity in the vulgar habit of using his name as a virtual swearword or an inane exclamation of amazement.) Every day we pray in the Lord's Prayer, "Hallowed be your name" and yet hardly anyone of us seems to know what that means. It is as if the very meaning of the word "hallow" now eludes us. It must mean much more than merely refraining from abusing God's name as an expletive, though that is a first step. In this urgent and prophetic prayer Jesus is calling on God to sanctify his name at long last, to restore its holiness and fullness of meaning after we have demeaned it and soiled it. Surely his inspiration was the awesome 36th chapter of the prophecy of Ezekiel. "I will sanctify my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them; and the nations shall know that I am the Lord, says the Lord God, when through you I display my holiness before their eyes." (v. 23) The prophet makes clear that God can only restore the glory of his defiled and abused name through us, by changing us, by manifesting holiness in our lives. So the prophecy continues by making clear that the only way God can re-sanctify his name that we have allowed to become soiled and empty is by transforming us from the inside out. "A new heart I will give you, and new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." (v. 26) In the silly TV shows the participants squeal "Oh… my… God!" in response to surface glitz. But to hallow God's name is to appeal from the heart to the one hidden within it, saying "Oh My God!" to express our love for the only one who can make our hearts over from within. The prophet says that God's name will be hallowed when we have hearts of flesh again. He doesn't say we need a heart of gold. God re-glorifies his name as he restores our lost humanity back to us. He wants us to be human, to have hearts of flesh. The coming of Jesus is not to make us superhuman, but to heal our inhumanity, to turn the stoniness of our hearts into responsiveness, vulnerability, imagination and creativity. When we learn to pray "Hallowed be your name!" we are opening ourselves to that very transformation. Advent needs no other prayer. Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is on the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. [Back to index of December articles]
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