It's Just a Name, Right?
By Brother Thomas Throughout my childhood, in the back of my parents’ cedar-lined closet and resting on the floor, was a shoebox. Inside were photos that, for a variety of reasons, had yet to make it into the sleeves of an album and to be labeled accordingly. And among this loose stack of images was a single Polaroid of a dark-haired man standing among a small crowd, all in their mid-twenties. It is from this man that I was given my name at birth, and we have only a single photo of him; there aren’t more because soon after this gathering, he was struck by a car while driving home from a parish event. I didn’t find this photo, or become aware of it, until late in my childhood. Until then, I would often wonder how my name, John Wesley, came about. Walking past our town’s Methodist church each Sunday, I often fantasized that perhaps I carried the namesake of that Anglican cleric and Reformer. Or maybe, having a father who taught English Literature and being a product of the Gothic South, ...