There is a movement afoot to rename a well-known Toronto street, Dundas, because this particular Mr. Dundas is known to have worked, back in England, to obstruct the abolishment of slavery. It is one of a multitude of instances we are all seeing of the re-assessing of the appropriateness of names attached to streets, monuments, various buildings and places. Good.
We might also take an evaluating look at the practice of naming things after people in the first place. There is, of course, the potential that the person being honoured in this way might turn out not to be quite as honourable as thought, even as another time might judge one to be honourable. It may even suggest to some that this is how you live on. You become successful and you live on as a street or a shiny building.
Silly? Maybe to you and me, but I wouldn’t discount it. Especially when a long-standing pandemic in this world is a lack of self-worth over against a world of material obsession. Consider the first thing we think of when it is asked what a person’s worth is.
There are thoughtful people who sense that our being is tied to something much bigger than anything our memory could be tied to, that our consciousness is tied to a reality beyond ourselves. More specifically and personally, there are those who live in confidence of a promise that is more reliable than anything we experience as reality: “I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20b).
Each of us has the power that is to be found in its relinquishing–relinquishing power, that is. We live instead by grace, accepting–in contrast to much of the spirit of the world being protested against–that we are a gift to one another, and we live in anticipation, by that grace, of a greater, more enduring community to come.