Much of our making sense of the world and of other people, and of ourselves, often depends on labels. When it comes to people, labels can be helpful, but they should never really be trusted.
Danish philosopher, Christian, and contrarian, Søren Kierkegaard, supposedly once said, “When you label me, you negate me.” I came across this quote in a Brian Zahnd book called Beauty Will Save the World. Apparently, it is unclear just where or when Kierkegaard said this, but some attributions of the quote have him saying something similar, something like, “Put me in a system you negate me. I am not a symbol.”
It would seem, to me, to be a Christian practice to consistently avoid labelling people. Unfortunately, the history of religion, including that of Christianity, has majored, not minored, in labeling.
“Christian / Non-Christian”
“Believer / Non-believer”
“Sinner / Saint”
“Saved / Unsaved”
Sub-categories have been added. There are Presbyterians, Anglicans, Catholics, Baptists, Mennonites, etc. etc.
I sometimes picture a conversation with Jesus in which a person speaks to Jesus according to labels. Does God see you as a Presbyterian? Or as a Christian?
The fact that labels negate people is demonstrated by the reality that we often act as if we have other people all figured out. Think about it. You so very often act as if you know just what motivates friends and others in your life. This is the case even though you do not have yourself figured out. Might it be that other people think they have your figured out?
I read a book over the holidays that invites a consideration of labels from a medical perspective, particularly in terms of mental health. The book, by Rachel Aviv, is called Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us. It gives accounts of five people who navigate the world of mental health diagnoses and treatment. Aviv keenly observes how mental health diagnoses can become like stories that we put over our lives to make sense of ourselves and of the world.
In speaking of children, Aviv says, “Experts tell children that they are behaving in a recognizable way that has a label. The children then make adjustments, conscious and unconscious, to the way they’ve been classified. Over time, a willed pattern of behaviour becomes increasingly involuntary and ingrained.”
Aviv presents a recognition about such labels; “There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which.”
I’ve also been reading Gabor and Daniel Maté’s recent book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Healing and Illness in a Toxic Culture. The heart of the book is an argument that illness cannot truly be understood apart from social and societal dimensions and causes. It too, speaks appreciatively, but cautiously, about labels around mental health.
Labels are created, at times as a form of social control or as a means of maintaining a social hierarchy. The book uses the example of race, quoting writer Ta-Nahesi Coates who points out that “race is a child of racism, not the father.” In physiological and genetic terms, race does not exist. It has been made up from mediated observation, for reasons of fear, power and politics.
I think of all of this in terms of faith. Most Christian and Jewish interpreters of scripture would assert that scripture maintains that we are known by God. If this is true, as we can see in the Psalms and the Gospels. Early in the David narrative, Samuel reminds us that while people look at the outside appearance (the label), God looks at the heart (the person, their identity in God). We are known beyond and in spite of any labels that we have taken up for ourselves or that have been placed upon us by others.
I go back to the imagined conversation with Jesus. If I were to tell Jesus that I am a pastor or a Christian, or a believer, I picture that I might receive a response, not of words, but of a kind of loving, playful smile. There is, in this, an awareness that it is a hope and statement of faith to believe that I am known by God. If I am known by God then I am known in a way beyond any labels. God has no need of them. One of the most pastoral things that I can feel and pray for you is that you would have the faith to know that you are known by God, and loved.
Think of any person who truly knows you in life. The labels placed upon you, or the ones that you have acquired or achieved, do not really help this loving and true kind of knowing. Sometimes they actually get in the way.
It remains an eschatological promise. That is, it won’t be fully realized until the fullness of time, but, one of the most famous chapters in the Bible says, “One day I will know fully, even as I am fully known.”
Hopeful Christian faith calls us to live in the light of the renewal of all things. Our lives are to reflect the hoped for promise. We do not know fully now, but we do know that labels so often hurt and negate.
May we aim to live our lives in such a way to see people, instead of labels.