OPENING UP THE SAINTS IN THE GODLY PLAY CURRICULUM (II)

Editor’s Note: This article is the second half of a two-part series. You can read the first part of this article here.

The Names of the Saints 

We know that skin color and physical features are the site of prejudice and oppression. We should also remember that names and language are sites of the same. 

My earliest introduction to this was when my family returned to American after serving with a church in Tokyo; I was in third grade. At recess, in my tiny Christian school in Northern Colorado, one boy said to the group, “How do Japanese people name their kids? They throw a pebble into a trashcan and see what sound it makes!” The other kids laughed, chiming in with words like “ping” and “plink.” I was enraged, and angrily shouted that (first) these were not anything like Japanese names, and second, they were really stupid (a classic third-grade argumentative strategy). I was also confused, realizing much later that my classmates couldn’t tell the sounds or types of sounds of East Asian languages apart, and that they encountered these gloriously different sounds as “weird.” 

Another example along the same lines: I had a colleague, a first-generation Mexican-American, with this story: When she was born and the nurse asked for the birth certificate name, her father said, “Isabella.” Her parents discovered later that the name written on her birth certificate was — mysteriously! — Elizabeth. This happened in the 1990s here in Boston. 

And finally, those of us with names like Emily, Laura, Alexander, or Carl might ask ourselves: How many times have we had to correct people’s pronunciations of our names? How many times have new acquaintances, teachers, or colleagues heard our names and said, “Oh that’s so lovely — what does ‘Jane’ mean?” or “Can I call you something else?”  

This brings us to the names of the saints in the Godly Play curriculum. You’ll notice that all, except Columba, are Anglo or Anglicized names. (“Columba” is Latin.) Two of these are not Anglicized but are originally Anglo (Margaret and Julian). This leaves us with nine people with Anglicized names. 

Anglicizing names of Christian figures for English speaking Christians has a long and complicated past. For the Episcopal Church it is of course rooted in the history of the English church, and the Godly Play Foundation has (apparently uncritically) absorbed this tradition.  

We can see some of its earliest roots in the translation of the New Testament. Take Matthew’s Gospel for example: in 1:2 we hear that one of Jesus’ ancestors was Jacob. In 10:2 we hear that he has called a disciple named James. In fact, these two have almost the same name — Jacob is  Ἰακώβ and James is Ἰάκωβος. (The difference exists in French and Italian translations, too, but is less distant: Jacob and Jacques, Giacobbe and Giacomo.) New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine has, in various lectures, described this translation choice as part of the anti-Jewishness embedded in Christian culture, and we can see in it too the desire to bring Biblical figures “closer” to “us” (“we” being a point that keeps shifting as power shifts) at the expense of certain points of language and culture.  

Another factor at play is the ancient use of Latin as the official or dominant language established by the Roman Empire. The power of this dominant culture means that we can remember Saint Columba by his Latin name, but might forget that (a) it’s only half of his name—“colm” means “dove,” and “kille” and “cille” mean “church”, and (b) both then and now it is used in Irish (Colm Cille) and Scots (Columbkille). And the name “Augustine” is an Anglicized version of a Latin name, Augustinus, used by a family that supposedly spoke only Latin at home. However, since they were (it seems) ethnically Berber; they perhaps had another language hidden behind this, now obscured by the Latin-turned-English. 

So, we know there are a variety of forces and angles within the Latinizing and Anglicizing of names. But these Anglicizing habits become warped and violent when they are allied with racism and colonialism. In the American Episcopal Church, we find a striking example of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism (a cornerstone in certain types of white supremacy), in the sixth chapter of William Reed Huntington’s 1870 book, The Church-idea: An Essay Towards Unity: “Notwithstanding our [America’s] strange mingling of bloods, there is one race that contrives to keep, and for obvious reasons always will keep the ascendency — the Anglo-Saxon.” He continues, “It is not easy to overstate the importance of this fact that we are an English-speaking people. By this weapon of language alone Anglo-Saxon ideas will be able to hold America against all comers.”  

Even more recently, we see these forces at work in the innumerable Native children who were taken from their families and prevented from learning their own language, or to movements past and present to make English the only official American language. 

Into the Godly Play Foundation’s suite of Anglo names, I propose we bring the beautiful variety of sounds these saints seem actually to have possessed :  

Thomas Aquinas: Tommaso d’Aquino (Italian) 
Valentine: Valentinus (Latin) 
Patrick: Pádraig (modern Irish); Patricius (Latin) 
Catherine of Siena: Caterina di Benincasa (Italian) 
Columba (Latin): Colm Cille (Irish) and Columbkille (Scots)  
Elizabeth of Portugal: Isabel (Aragonese, Portuguese) and Elisabet (Catalan) 
Augustine of Hippo: Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis (Latin) 
Mother Teresa: Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu (Albanian) 
Teresa of Avila: Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada (Spanish) 
Nicholas: Nikolaos (Greek) 

I’ve adapted the lessons for my classrooms to include the original name for the saint (as far as we know) in the lesson. For example: “in his own day, Saint Valentine was called Valentinus,” or “her name was Caterina di Benincasa, and she was born in Siena.” This adaptation is unnecessary for the lesson on Thomas Aquinas, as the Godly Play materials already include, “When little Tommaso D’Aquino was born . . .” The official lesson on Mother Teresa mentions her given name, but Anglicizes “Anjezë” into “Agnes”; instead I include her full Albanian name. 

If the saint’s name didn’t change throughout their life (as Mother Teresa’s did), and if the teacher can pronounce the name confidently and fairly well, I encourage them to use that name for the entirety of the lesson.  

My Hope and Challenge to the Godly Play Foundation 

The Godly Play curriculum has been put together with great care, and has been maintained by the time and effort of many who care deeply for the spiritual lives of children. So these critiques are offered not because I doubt that the Godly Play Foundation cares, but I doubt they care enough to move quickly on this or other questions of representation. It is not worth waiting for them to care and act, when action can be taken now by teachers and ministers. 

My hope is that the Godly Play Foundation will make similar or superior changes to their curriculum, and that they will leverage their considerable influence to expand representations of Jesus, the Holy Family, and the saints.