This line from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet often brings to mind a dear friend and Mentor of mine who is now in his 90’s.

Over the years, when I visited him, he would often call me Tom, which was the name of a childhood friend of his that he loved. In some way, I reminded him of Tom, and it never bothered me because I knew that he knew who he was talking to.

In most of those earlier occurrences, he would quickly correct himself and tell me a story about Tommy (that is what he called him). He would say “Tommy was a great guy we use to do this, and we use to do that… he was a really great guy!” But as he got older, he stopped correcting himself, and we would just continue on with our conversation. It never once occurred to me that he did not know who I was because, in every other way, it was clear that he knew he was talking to me.

God by any other name…
When I was younger, I often wondered why people called God by different names. This started when I heard someone call God “The Universe.” I later discovered in the Bible, that Abraham had (3) lines of descendants. Those descendants who started the Jewish religion called God “Yahweh”;  those who started Christianity called God…“God”; and those descendants who started the religion of Islam called God “Allah.” From the movies, I discovered that some of the Indigenous peoples on this continent and around the world call God “The Great Spirit.” In Alcoholics Anonymous, God is a “Higher Power.” In my mind, back then, it seemed like they were all talking about the same God and just using different names.

As I got older, I soon learned of the various theological distinctions that led to religious debates, and I heard (and sometimes joined) those debates, fueling the conflict by making claims that the “God” that those other folks were talking about was not the “True” God.

Then, when my youngest daughter was about three years old, we were sitting on our front porch with a view of an intersection that included a one-way street. A car came driving the wrong way on the one-way street at the same time another car was making a left turn on that street… and at the intersection they crashed. This crash was outside of anything she had experienced or understood to this point in her life, so after seeing this, she could only describe what she saw from her three-year-old perspective. She couldn’t tell you what kinds of cars were involved or even that one of the cars was driving the wrong way on a one-way street, but she definitely saw the crash. When she ran into the house to describe what she saw, she did so with the words, sounds and gestures of her three-year-old vocabulary, and the people listening knew she saw something, but were not quite sure what it was.  Now those listeners would have been wrong if they were to dismiss her experience and the description of what she saw because the words, sounds, and gestures of her three-year-old vocabulary were not understandable to them or did not conform to their vocabulary.

While all religions are not the same, throughout history, most have a couple of things in common. First, they were attempts by human beings to describe something that they had seen or experienced that was outside of their understanding; and Second, they did so with the words, sounds, and gestures (or customs) from their cultural vocabulary.

I believe God’s love has been made known, in a variety of ways and through a variety of religions, to every person on the planet regardless of who they are, their time in history, or the circumstances that shape their lives, and that all the religious conflicts, theological division, and debates have distorted that love and left too many people disillusioned or not believing in that love at all.

So, like me with my dear friend now in his 90’s, I do not think Yahweh, Allah, God, The Great Spirit, and Higher Power who is The Creator of the Universe… cares much which name we use when we talk, the one who knows all, knows who we are talking to.