Naming My Home

When I was thinking about a name for my sanctuary, my mind went, of all places, to Roots, the movie— the scene where the baby is held up in the air and the whole community rejoices in the name given to him. Naming has always mattered to me that way. In the Bible, names carried meaning, and I've wondered before whether the name itself helped define the person into who they became.

So I went looking, the way you look for a name that's supposed to hold a whole person, or in this case, a whole season.

I discarded Selah first — twice, really. I couldn't pronounce it with any confidence, and I didn't know what it meant. So I moved on. I leaned toward Wu Wei for a while, because I'd done the research and it felt closer to where I was living right now. But it didn't sound exactly right. Then I tried Spaciousness, and even spiritualized it — God's Spaciousness — but something still wasn't settling.

I wanted one name. Just one word, the way Claude, Gemini, Verizon, Apple are one word. Jesus, Father, Spirit were already taken, obviously. I thought about my middle name. Discarded that too.

And I came back to Selah. This time I asked my trusty editor to do the research on what it actually means, so I could stop guessing and finally know.

Selah shows up 71 times in the Hebrew Bible, almost entirely inside the Psalms. Nobody agrees, even now, on exactly what it means — that's part of its mystery. The leading theories: a musical notation telling the singers or instruments to pause, an instruction to lift up voices in an interlude, or simply a marker meaning stop and weigh what was just said. What struck me most is where it sits — almost never at the very end of a psalm, but in the middle, right after something true has been sung, right before the next movement begins. Not a conclusion. A held-open space, on purpose, so what was just said has somewhere to land before anything else gets added on top of it.

That's exactly what I was looking for, without knowing the word for it yet. Not a launch. Not a performance. Just a place to stop, mid-song, and let things land.

Selah. My spacious sanctuary.