Name change

I guess I never thought changing my name would be that big of a deal.  It seemed like a normal thing to do when you got married.  My mom had done it, and most (though not all) of the moms I knew had done it.  Besides, when you’re a girl, and you’re young, you pick up things like writing your name with the last name of the boy you like, or maybe Mrs. Boy’s Name, possibly surrounded by a lot of hearts.  I did this.

By the time Jon and I actually started talking about getting married, I didn’t really know anymore.  I chafed at the thought of being called “Mrs.” (Seriously, a title change based solely on relationship status, for women only?)  I got actively grumpy at the thought of being called Mrs. Man’s Name.  And I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with the rest of my name. 

On the one hand, I was fine with who I was as Allie Rosner, I had accomplished a lot as Allie Rosner, and I kind of wanted to stick it to the patriarchy, also.  On the other hand, I wanted to have the same name as my potential future kids.  Jon said he didn’t care what I did, and I yelled at him that he didn’t understand that this was a real crisis of identity.  Jon also didn’t like the way our names sounded hyphenated together, as much as I insisted he was saying it wrong.  He said to go ahead and call the kids Rosner, but I think he was bluffing, and in the end even I was a little too old-fashioned for that. 

In the end we decided that I’d add Bass on the end and he’d add Rosner in the middle, and I would try my best to go by all three names and keep Rosner in the mix.  It seemed like a fair and adequately progressive compromise, and I was happy with it. 

Since then, legally changing our names hasn’t been a hard process for either one of us, but emotionally it’s actually affected me more than I thought. 

We came home from the DMV the other day with promises of new licenses in the mail, and I was happy about getting that done.  But later I started feeling a little sad.  BASS would be in big bold letters at the top of my license now, and Rosner relegated to the middle, where no one cares.  I also had to drop my own middle name, Gail, because I knew if Rosner was my second middle name there was no way anyone would end up using it.   I couldn’t really put my finger on why I felt sad about all that, except that it’s who I’ve been for 30 years, and it’s hard to give that up. 

I started to think that maybe there’s something wrong with me, that what I’m called is so wrapped up with the core of my identity.  Shouldn’t my identity come from somewhere else—from everywhere else?  From my baptism?  From my relationships?  From my accomplishments?  From my vocation?   I’m a pastor, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a writer, a world traveler, a vegetarian, a runner, a cookie baker and milkshake lover, a child of God.  Those things haven’t changed. 

But then again maybe I shouldn’t have ever thought that changing my name wouldn’t be a big deal.  I should have remembered that I preach on stories where changing your name is a really big deal.  Jacob becomes Israel, the one who wrestles with God.  Simon becomes Peter, the rock on which Jesus will build the church.  Saul becomes Paul, a Hebrew name to a Roman one, symbolizing a complete about-face in his life and ministry.  For all these people, their names carry a deep sense of identity. 

Names were powerful back then.  You weren’t even allowed to say the divine name, because that’s how powerful it was.  Changing your name when you get married isn’t that powerful, but it is powerful.  Still. 

And I should have remembered, too, how in fifth grade I decided to go by Allie instead of Alison, and I spent a year fighting for my teacher to agree to call me that.  It was important—if only because it was me deciding on a name for myself.

I should have remembered how when I started college I thought maybe I’d go for a new start and go by Alison again, so at an admitted students weekend I just let people call me Alison and didn’t correct them.  It felt weird in a way that made me sure, inside, that I was still Allie.

It’s not that I regret my decision.  Sometimes I really like introducing myself by my new name, even in scenarios where it sounds overly fancy to go by three names.  I like the reminder that I’m married to Jon.  I like the symbol of a new identity in that way.  I’m gaining something in that, but I’m losing something too, and that is hard. 

One of the hardest parts is in this kind of name-change limbo period.  I didn’t know where to look for my name tag at the district clergy meeting a few weeks ago, under B or R.  When I ordered a sandwich at the Cheese Shop the other day, they asked for my first name and last initial.  It didn’t matter whether I said R or B as long as I retrieved my sandwich when I was called.  But I felt like I really didn’t know.  I have a flight booked for Monday, as Alison Rosner, and I honestly don’t know what my ID is going to say by then, so I can’t even call the airline and change it until I do.   One group I’m part of didn’t get the memo and still listed me in the directory as Rosner, I noticed today; I also played around with some online database for our District Committee on Ministry trying to make it display all three of my names, but when I got an email from the committee chair, there I was on the roster as Bass, Alison.

When I’m called Bass, it’s this strange sensation of being called a name that is very familiar to you, because it belongs to someone you love, but that in any case still isn’t quite yours.  But when I’m called Rosner, that feels wrong too.  In this limbo period, there are times when I’m not sure I know what my name is at all.  Depends who’s asking.  It’s a pretty unsettling feeling to not know what your own name is. 

I know the limbo period will be over soon enough.  I know it’s likely that eventually I’ll stop trying to make sure everyone keeps Rosner in the mix and just go by Allie Bass, because it’s easier.  Right now I do not like that thought.  Because that’s not who I am. 

But maybe I’ll see that I am still all those things I was, that I am still the same person I was, no matter what it says on my driver’s license.  And it won’t seem like such a big deal anymore.  For now it is.

“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare wrote.  A lot, as it turns out. 

Meeting with Mormons

Back in late November, I met some LDS missionaries on my way home from church one evening.  It was already dark, so I didn’t recognize them immediately.  They handed me a card advertising some event, and I tried to hurry away before they could get me to sign up for something, like sponsoring a child in Africa.  But they introduced themselves too quickly, and as I realized who they were, my face lit up.

This is a reaction that not everyone might understand, but the truth is, I had always wanted to meet some Mormon missionaries!  Or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or really whoever was going door to door.  I wanted to learn more about them and what they were doing and talk some theology, even if we disagreed.  This is actually not uncommon among seminary-educated people, I’ve discovered.  I do know a few Mormons, but we’d never really gotten into the specifics of what we respectively believed, and this seemed like a great opportunity.  We arranged to meet in a nearby park the next day around lunch.  I was excited.

That night my mom told me about her own one experience with LDS missionaries: they had come to church once with another member of the congregation who had been meeting with them.  If he went to their church, they would go to his, and they did.  The way Mom described it, they sent their ringers, the most car-salesman-y guys in the ward, who shook everyone’s hands after worship and tried to convert them over coffee cake.

But that’s not who I met.  Instead I met two young, friendly guys who confessed to being nervous at talking to a pastor.  (Actually, three now, because one got replaced by another along the line.)  They were nice.  They offered to help fix the water fountain at church the day it broke and flooded the hallway.  They clearly believe in their mission, enough to spend whole days outside in 12 degree weather.  And yes, they tried to convert me.

We’ve met four times total since November.  There are four sessions, if you will, and they give you a pamphlet and describe an aspect of their theology in each one.  Last week was “The Plan of Salvation,” for example.  Today was “The Gospel of Jesus Christ.”  These meetings have been an opportunity to learn about the LDS faith, but also to reflect on evangelism—their version of which is almost completely foreign to me.

One thing I admire about Elders G and F is that they know their tradition.  They can tell you what they believe.  How many mainline Christians can do that?  Sometimes people talk about your “elevator pitch.”  If someone asked you about your faith on an elevator, what would you say in that fifteen seconds or so?  I don’t have an elevator pitch.  Even with an M. Div., even as someone whose job it is to talk about this stuff, I’m not really sure how I would lay it all out for someone who needed the info quick.  But they know their content, and I like that.

I also don’t like it at the same time.  Earlier this week I was doing my homework, reading the Gospel of Jesus Christ pamphlet they had given me in advance.  I was doing this a little out of guilt, because at our first meeting they gave me a Book of Mormon, and then at each meeting after that they brightly asked if I had been reading it and praying to receive the truth, and I said no.  But I figured a pamphlet I could handle.  It had a picture of Very White Jesus on the front and referred to God as Heavenly Father a lot, which I take it is standard LDS nomenclature.  But even besides those things, the pamphlet rubbed me the wrong way.

It wasn’t about content, really.  In fact, with some small tweaks, it could have been written by any evangelical Christian tradition.  That was one of my main questions in our discussion today—what, really, is the difference between the Gospel as you understand it and the Gospel as I already understand it?  What does following Jesus mean in your tradition that it doesn’t mean in mine?  (Besides the obvious things, like not drinking coffee.)  As far as I could tell, the answer was not that much.

My objection was more about form.  As I was reading I realized this: I am inherently suspicious of any faith that can be summarized in a pamphlet. 

That goes for other forms of Christianity, too.  Show me a pamphlet with three steps to salvation, the last one of course consisting of some drawing of a cross forming a bridge over hell, and I’m pretty much out.  To me, faith is so much more than that.  It’s wrestling with God and struggling with tradition and trying to make sense of experience in community.  It’s learning and praying and doubting and coming to new understandings.  It’s trying out what it means to love Jesus and finding there’s something you’re drawn to about that and then trying to figure out from there how all the puzzle pieces fall into place, if they even do.

That’s the kind of faith we even see in the Bible, with people who follow and fight and question and lament and fall away and fall back, and with authors who disagree with each other, each trying to figure out who God is and what it means to be God’s people.  The whole thing is a struggle and a conversation.  The day I realized that is the day I fell in love with the Bible.

And here was that faith I vaguely recognized reduced to some bold points across six pages with a vocab section in the back.

I got a little preachy about this at our meeting today.  I testified a little.

I mean, I get it, you know?  You can’t lead with the complicated and messy stuff.  You can’t ring someone’s doorbell and say, “Hey, there are a lot of different ways of understanding the Atonement, and I’m not really sure which one I think is right; here’s where I’m at today.”  You have to give people something to go on.  The conversation can develop from there.

I figured there had to be more than this.  These missionaries had to present their case, they had to give the “right” answers to my questions, even if they sometimes seemed parroted.  That was their job.  But surely underneath it all was a living, dynamic faith that I could recognize and appreciate, even if it was not the same as my own.

So I asked: “Tell me something you struggle with in your faith.”

They looked at me like they did not get that question a lot.  After a minute one of them said, “There isn’t anything, for me.”  To be fair, he grew up in an orphanage in Eastern Europe until being adopted by a Mormon family from Utah just a few years ago.  I got the impression that being adopted into that family was when life stopped being hard, and he was ready to accept it all because it had given him that.  Still, he looked like he didn’t even really appreciate the question.

The other one seemed more sympathetic to the question.  “I’m sure there are people who do doubt sometimes,” he said, “but I can’t think of anything.”

But if it were me, I could think of so many things.  And I’m not ashamed of that.

I walked away kind of disappointed.  I had really wanted there to be more than that.

I’m not trying to make sweeping generalizations about Mormonism here.  They are two guys, young, trained to know the answers.  I’m sure there are Mormons out there with a more nuanced faith (in fact, I’d love to hear from them.)  I’m sure a conversation with many evangelical Christians would have gone similarly.  I’m sure when I was 22 my faith was a little less nuanced too—in fact, my elevator pitch has probably deteriorated steadily since then.  Not that I was brave enough to go around and share it with random strangers, even then.

So I’m not trying to generalize.  I’m just trying to say I’m reminded how important it is to me that faith never be wrapped in too neat a package.

But how do you evangelize that?