Hearing Your Name in Another Language
Updated: Sep 2
“The sheep hear his voice,
and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.”John 10:3
Someone says your name, but the sound is slightly different. The stress falls in another place. One vowel is softer, or longer, than the way you have always known it.
For a second you almost do not recognise it as yours. Then you do.
Your name has crossed a border. It has been shaped by another mouth, another history of sound. It still points to you, yet it arrives changed.
Jesus was called by more than one name. Yeshua to those at home. Jesus in the language of others. The form shifted according to who was speaking. The person remained the same. When he rose from the dead, Mary knew him not first by sight, but when he said her name. One word was enough.
Those who live between languages learn this early. Your name is not a frozen object. It can be held in more than one way and still belong to you. Sometimes the new pronunciation feels like a small loss. Sometimes it feels like an unexpected widening. You are still yourself. Only now you have been addressed from another side.
You do not need to correct every voice. You do not need to insist on only one version.
This is close to the life of the Church. At baptism a name is spoken, and that name is placed inside a larger Name: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In the Mass we are called again, not as a crowd without faces, but as people known by Christ. The voice may come in a language we did not first learn. The music of the words may be unfamiliar. The call is still the same. He does not lose us when the sound changes.
The name that reaches you in a different music is still calling the same person.
And you can answer it.