At the top of the clergy to-do list after Christmas is writing all the thank-you notes to people who been very generous in giving us Christmas presents. That’s obviously a fairly straightforward if time-consuming task. But since coming to this parish I have occasionally found it useful to have my copy of “Debrett’s Correct Form of Address” to hand to make sure that I am correctly addressing our titled and ennobled members of the parish! I’m sure they would forgive me if I didn’t get it right. But I do think that how we address people matters. The way in which we are addressed has a large part to play in how we think about ourselves, and that’s not just true for people with extra titles before their names. Address is one of the constitutive factors in self-identification.
We can probably think of examples of the damage done by dehumanising forms of address. At the most extreme we might recall how the concentration camps of the 20th century addressed inmates by numbers rather than names. Addressing someone as a number, a mere unit of productivity and labour, is the first step towards treating them with depravity and brutality. It robs them of the dignity that our names give us.
On a lesser scale, I think of the experience of my grandmother when she began work as a sales assistant in Dickens and Jones on Regent Street in 1927. In the ladies accessories department where she worked there was already a Miss Miller and so she was informed on her first day that she would be addressed as Miss Millard. Although they no doubt saw this as a practical solution to potential confusion, the underlying message to her was that who you are matters less to us than the functioning of this commercial enterprise. It was dehumanising.
Then at the other end of her life she, like many elderly people, began to need visits from carers into her home and experienced, for the first time in her life, young people whom she did not know addressing her by her first name. Although they didn’t mean to be disrespectful, and perhaps my grandmother ought to have been more conscious of this social trends towards informality, to her it did feel like an indignity – a disrespectful address which somehow represented all these other indignities that she was having to cope with as her physical body deteriorated.
Address matters. It’s irritating to see our names misspelt and, no matter how forgiving we are, it’s just disappointing when people forget our names or get our names wrong. Do please be especially forgiving with the clergy in this regard!
But the reason these things matter so much is that it is in address – in the beginning of an encounter with another person – that our selfhood is continually reconstituted. I become who I am through my encounters with other people and what I am to others has a very great deal to do with what I am to myself.
So we can see that it is of immeasurable importance to the Christian understanding of the human self that we believe that every human being is addressed by God. This is the very foundation of the Christian belief in the unique specialness, even sacredness, of every human life. The Department for Children, Schools and Families has for some time had the slogan “Every Child Matters” but I am pleased that the Diocesan Board for Schools have adapted this to the slogan “Every Child Matters to God”, because the reality is that however well-intentioned a government department may be, there are children in our society who don’t really matter to anyone. They are not addressed in a respectful and loving manner. And that’s why we must be thankful for the fundamental value they have in the sight of God and pray that they may come to understand what profound dignity is bestowed on us by this personal divine address.
The Prophet Samuel was perhaps one such child. For what we might call the “best of reasons”, he was abandoned by his mother at a very young age to live with a strange old priest who had some rather malicious sons. I imagine that his childhood was very sad. But his life takes a very significant turn when, as we heard in our first reading, he is addressed by God. He doesn’t even know who it is that is addressing him. But as time goes by he realises that he is being addressed by the source of all goodness, all truth, all of creation. He is addressed by the Lord. So he realises that he matters to God and that God has significant purposes for his life. And through 1 Samuel we can see how this address – this calling – begins to reconstitute who Samuel believes himself to be. It becomes the foundation of his self-identification.
There are several other people in the Bible who are addressed by God in this kind of way, not least among them is St Paul. The risen Christ’s addressing him by name on the road to Damascus leads to such a fundamental re-identification of himself that it leads to a change of name, from Saul to Paul. But in his letter to the Ephesians he suggests that it is in fact the case that we are all addressed by God in this way. He exhorts the Christians of Ephesus to lead lives “worthy of the calling to which they have been called”. God has addressed each one of us, calling us into the life of patience and humility, love and unity. And this, in turn, seems to be the foundation for Paul’s own elaboration of the specialness of each member of the church. Everyone has some kind of gift. Everyone has a vocation, and the church will only be complete when all of these contributions are joined and knitted together so that all these many members may truly constitute the full stature of what the Church truly is – the body of Christ. Contrast that notion of belonging and participation with the experience of my grandmother’s first job where she is told that in order to fit into the organisation she must conform to it, even to the point of being addressed by name that is not hers.
So the challenge to us as individual Christians is to recognise each person in this world as one addressed by God and accord that value to them ourselves. That’s why we can’t just shrug off the Haitian earthquake as an unfortunate incident to befall a hopeless country about which we can do little. Each of these tragic people we see in the newspapers and on television is someone addressed by God, and perhaps a donation to the appeal to help them would be a token of our recognition of that.
And the challenge to us as a church is to recognise that, within our community, there are no extra points for long service or large financial giving. We all bear the same extraordinary dignity of being addressed and called by God. And the way in which we respond to that is by receiving the gifts that everyone has to bring, new members of the church and old, rich members of the church and poor, those whose correct form of address needs to be looked up in Debrett’s and those who do not. Without everyone’s contribution, we will not grow into the full stature of the Christ who calls us.