My friends' second son has driven them nuts almost since birth. He's been a strange child all along, extremely bright and exquisitely handsome, but there's something wrong that you can't put a finger on. It is like, and is unlike, willfulness or lack of commonsense; it is like, and is unlike, attention deficit disorder; it is like, and is unlike, a very mild form of autism. Finally, after years of frustration, they got a diagnosis that truly fits. The kid has something called Asperger's Syndrome.

Naming it doesn't make it better; the kid is still definitely a handful. It doesn't obliterate the child's identity; he's still very much himself, with his own purely-one-of-a-kind personal flavour, and unlike any other child with Asperger's Syndrome. Giving it a name doesn't mean we can control it any better, although it's easier to control our own responses when we know what we're dealing with. Why should naming a problem be such a big deal? A name's just a word, after all, and words aren't real the way rocks are real. Or so we think.

We're often skittish about "labelling" and with good reason. It would be easy to reduce my friends' child to Asperger's Syndrome Person, wholly ignoring his very real personhood. It happens to the disabled, it happens to victims of all sorts, it happens to members of "out" groups, and it's treating a "thou" like an "it"--turning a rounded and complex soul into a stick-figure to paste a label to. Also, too often, people react to the label with fear or revulsion: "Mentally ill? Aieeee!". It's also easy to psychopathologize--to use psychiatric terms to tear another's character to shreds. There's naming to learn the truth, and there's naming to reduce the other person to a level that leaves our egos purring.

And yet we fight for diagnosis and feel a great rush of relief when we come to that bit of knowledge, even if the news is poor. At least we know what we're up against.... My friends can do some research, talk to experts, find out what others have done with similarly afflicted kids, try new strategies. It's a start toward better ways of coping. The kid himself can sort out what's the disorder and learn to manage it better. His school can know that he's a kid with a problem, not a young hellion. It does matter immensely.

True naming is unlike judging. We pass judgment on others to inflate our own egos--to prove how much better we are than the other person. And so often we judge either without having anywhere near enough information, or ignoring half the information we have. We pick the lice from someone else's scalp, conveniently forgetting to check our own heads for nits of the same species. That's not naming.

We name to understand. Naming is powerful stuff: it tells you what to expect, how you should think about handling yourself. If I only know my neighbour is acting oddly, I may be frightened or suspicious. If I know my neighbour has a mental illness or is half-crazy with grief or loneliness or stress, my own attitude shifts--hopefully more torwards compassion than fear.

We name names because the truth does set us free. Labelling and judging are not truth; indeed, they are deeply dishonest, because they pick out a few characteristics and ignore much of the reality. Instead, true naming fetches up the deep truth about things, or the best truth we can manage, at least, and liberates us to get on with dealing with whatever-it-is.

I think this may be part of the importance of confession in Christianity: not to dig at ourselves, tearing our own hide and thrashing about in guilt and misery, but properly naming what we know we need to do something about, because truly naming the problem is the first step in either changing it or accepting it if that's what we have to do. Denial--refusing to name a problem--leads us straight into the bramblebushes.

I had to wrestle this one to the mat again this week, because life (or God or whatever) handed me some new information that let me take a fresh look a the big source of Evil in my life. For the first time, I could pin the tail to this particular donkey with some assurance that it was the right tail, a tail that seems to fit the donkey in question with considerable precision. I could, for the first time, properly understand much of what had left me muddled and confused before. I could name it. Of course, this is amateur diagnosis, and I could be wrong: I keep that in mind. But it's funny how naming the problem--even tentatively --can make such a big difference in the way you think and feel....

It says something that one of the four gospels starts out "In the beginning was the Word." It's not insignificant that our ceremony for naming babies is also one of the two great sacraments, and that other cultures and religions have equivalent rites. It's not surprising that creation stories involve giving names to animals and plants, that it's insulting to get another person's name wrong. Names *matter*.

It matters that we see and name things honestly, accurately--not to blame but to discern and understand, not to control or put down, but to know for ourselves how to act and think. But at the same time, I have to remember that there are some things I will never be able to name: there are some mysteries that will stay that way, including the immeasurably big one at the very centre of things. "God" may be our word for Whoever that is, but I don't for a moment think it's Whoever's name, because there are no words big enough in any human language.