10/17/2021 - What's in a Name?

 During service this past Friday, it was rhetorically asked, "What's in a name?" I took it literally at first as I tried to remember what Elizabeth stood for and where on earth the name Arinda came from. But when Rabbi Shankman went on to say something along the lines of, "A good name is the most revered," it made me understand that it is not the literal interpretation of a name, but the character of who possesses the name. If our given names were based on their literal meaning, then how can a parent name a child without knowing their innate character? 

My parents thought they were going to have a boy, so they prematurely named me David. When I was born, they were surprised and scrambled for a female name. So they quickly chose "Elizabeth" simply because it translated easily to Portuguese. So, there's technically not a literal meaning to my name as it was chosen on a whim. And similarly with my middle name, Arinda. My mom thought my paternal grandmother's given name was pretty and that's all there was to it. 

I started to understand what Rabbi Shankman said. In fact, it was pretty ironic that she was referring to a name as someone's legacy/character and I mistakingly took it literally. Kinda made me laugh.

Way back in Sunday school, we began preparing for the sacrament of Confirmation and our most important assignment was to choose our Confirmation name (our saint name). We were instructed to choose a saint that we would model ourselves after and take them as our Confirmation name. Similar to Rabbi Shankman's question of, "What's in a name?" our Confirmation name was the name we would mold our character to.

It wasn't until the morning of class that I realized I hadn't chosen a name. I grabbed a book about saints from our family bookshelves and quickly opened it, chose the first saint I saw, and read a quick summary to present in class. I chose Saint Maria Goretti and at the time, it was just a name to me and it took me until very recently to understand why she was canonized in Catholicism. 

In 1902, at the age of 12, she was attacked by her neighbor who left her with fatal injuries. On her deathbed at the hospital, she expressed forgiveness to her attacker who did not seek her forgiveness. And thus, through her voluntary forgiveness, she became the patron saint of forgiveness and mercy. 

After Friday's service, I was dumbfounded by this coincidence as the concept of forgiveness has been on my mind nonstop since the month of Elul. After rereading her story, I found some parallels and contradictions to my recently evolving interpretation of forgiveness. 

The first 3 years of the attacker's imprisonment, he showed no remorse and no repentance until he was visited by a bishop who prayed for him. Touched by the bishop's kindness, the attacker began repenting and when released from prison, begged Maria's mother for forgiveness, which she granted. He later became a lay brother at a local monastery 

A few things stuck out to me- Her unrequested forgiveness, her mother's mercy, and the attacker's repentance. While the concept of all 3, forgiveness, mercy, and repentance, is something I've been diving deeper into and are actions I wish to practice, her story, while tragic and lenient, didn't really make sense to me. It was beyond kind and gracious of her to forgive him when he did not seek it. But the forgiveness, through his initial lack of remorse, went unreceived and she passed before he sought it.

Going back to previous entries on forgiveness, I began to wonder what she was forgiving him for, his attack or her murder? She had not passed yet, and by some miracle, could have survived in a perfect world, so how could she forgive him for her murder if she was not dead yet? While it is optional to grant forgiveness in severe situations in Judaism, I wonder if she felt obligated to forgive him because Catholicism teaches to do so. My intention is not to invalidate the sincerity of her forgiveness, but it makes me wonder if the attacker was truly forgiven if he did not accept while she was living.

When the attacker was released, he begged Maria's mother for forgiveness to which she granted. Was he seeking forgiveness for the pain he inflicted on the family or apologizing for the murder? But as mentioned in earlier entries, one cannot truly be forgiven by proxy because the only one that can grant forgiveness is the victim. The apology was not the mother's to give for one cannot forgive an offense committed against another. That circles back to what Maria was forgiving him for and if the forgiveness was still valid after she passed. 

I do believe his repentance was genuine as it is indicated that he devoted the rest of his praying to her and working at a monastery. While his crime was the most severe and offensive, he spent the rest of his life trying to atone for it.

With this, I wonder if Maria is truly the saint of mercy if she is not the one that showed him mercy, but forgiveness. Her mother is the one that granted him mercy from a life sentence by pleading with the court. But I guess my biggest question is if Maria's forgiveness can still be received by him since she died before he accepted it. And was she forgiving him for his attack or her murder for she had not passed at that moment? Who knows, she could have lived, so how could she forgive a crime that had not yet happened?

The concept of forgiveness is the same across most religions, with the act of forgiveness being different among them. Perhaps I don't quite agree with the representation of forgiveness and mercy from her story, but I believe that Maria likely was not forgiving him, but showing him mercy because she knew that he would have to seek forgiveness from God, not her, to be truly forgiven. He took away a life and body that was not his, but her own and God's. I believe that one of the greatest offenses is interfering and/or intercepting gifts and decisions of God.

I believe in coincidence and divine intervention and while the choice of a saint is a Catholic practice, I think unknowingly choosing that saint was not a coincidence, but divine intervention. Sure, it took some 10 years later to see that, but I find forgiveness to be a very complex practice that I would be happy to spend a lifetime studying and practicing. I don't think I accidentally choose Saint Maria Goretti because she is a saint, but I think I was guided to her to embody, among many other things, forgiveness, mercy, and repentance. While I am not Catholic, her story is not exclusively Catholic as it is, unfortunately, a part of history.

So what's in my Catholic name? A Jewish concept.