My Favorite Dr. Seuss story is “Too Many Daves.” It’s found in perhaps my favorite Dr. Seuss book The Sneetches and Other Stories. I remember when my mom used to read this story aloud to us about a mother and her many sons. Only two hundred and eight words long, we squealed with delight and shook with laughter as she read it. It goes like this:

Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave
Had twenty-three sons and she named them all Dave?
Well, she did. And that
wasn’t a smart thing to do.
You see, when she wants one
and calls out, “Yoo-Hoo!
Come into the house, Dave!”
she doesn’t get one.
All twenty-three Daves of hers
come on the run!

This makes things quite
difficult at the McCaves’
As you can imagine,
with so many Daves.
And often she wishes that,
when they were born,
She had named one of them
Bodkin Van Horn.

And one of them Hoos-Foos.
And one of them Snimm.
And one of them Hot-Shot.
And one Sunny Jim.
And one of them Shadrack.
And one of them Blinkey.
And one of them Stuffy.
And one of them Stinkey.

Another one Putt-Putt.
Another one Moon Face.
Another one Marvin
O’Gravel Balloon Face.
And one of them Ziggy.
And one Soggy Muff.
One Buffalo Bill.
And one Biffalo Buff.

And one of them Sneepy.
And one Weepy Weed.
And one Paris Garters.
And one Harris Tweed.
And one of them
Sir Michael Carmichael Zutt
And one of them
Oliver Boliver Butt

And one of them Zanzibar
Buck-Buck McFate …
But she didn’t do it.
And now it’s too late.

Oh, how we laughed. I remember the names Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate and Biffalo Buff and Oliver Boliver Butt like they were my brother’s names.

One of my great joys as a parent was the naming of our children. Like a foot print or a face, I knew a name suggests the utter uniqueness, singularity, and unrepeatable miracle of each child. As a way of showing this, I wrote lullabies for each of my three children, using their name in each respectively. I hoped one day, if they had children of their own, they could switch out the name and sing to their children. By way of example, the refrain for my youngest son’s lullaby highlights this point about the inestimable value and ineffable preciousness of each child, each person:

You’re a precious treasure.
Your worth cannot be measured
by who you know or what you have,
but by who you are.
You’re a child of love,
brother of all,
blessed by life,
kissed by God,
live well, my son.

My parents died before I had children of my own. One of the carry overs from my parents to me was a detail I learned from my dad after my mom’s death. We were six children and not a family of means. My parents rarely went out without someone or two or three in tow. It was even more rare for my mom and dad to go out for dinner alone. But on the occasional time or two that they did, my dad reminisced how funny it was that once they finally got away from us kids, that they would spend the entire time over a long, leisurely meal going through the line-up of their litter one by one, name by name, and talking together about each child.

What we have the opportunity to do as parents, as grand parents, spouses, siblings, and friends is to evoke and reflect back to each person his or her preciousness, uniqueness, and sacred worth. If this is all I am able to do in my family life, in my friendships, and in my work as a spiritual director, teacher, and community guide, this would be enough: to enable each person to see and know this belovedness is true about him or herself.

In his book Who is Man? Rabbi Abraham Heschel identifies nine modes of being that are essential for unfolding into our full humanity. We might think of these as inherent potentialities or ideal characteristics of each and every human person. Two of these modes of being are Preciousness and Uniqueness. I leave you with one of the many quotes by Rabbi Heschel that have fashioned and formed both my theology and my understanding not only of what it means to be human, but also what it means to be fully alive, to flourish. Heschel writes:

In the eyes of the world, I repeat, I am an average man. But to my heart I am not an average man. To my heart I am of great moment. The challenge I face is how to actualize, how to concretize the quiet eminence of my being.

Beyond all agony and anxiety lies the most important ingredient of self-reflection: the preciousness of my own existence. To my own heart my existence is unique, unprecedented, priceless, exceedingly precious, and I resist the thought of gambling away its meaning (p.35).

Let us support one another in believing in, receiving, and actualizing the quiet eminence of our being. It will be good for both person and planet.

ARTWORK; DJM

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