I used to think people who changed their own names were really weird. It was just too far outside of normal for me. But now I’ve done it, which seems about par for the course for my life. I start out being critical of something, and then later embrace it. No matter how weird it seems.
Whenever I meet someone new these days I introduce myself as Sri, which is not my given name. My given name is Jennie. And while I still answer to the name Jennie, and still like that name, I introduce myself as Sri, it sounds like Shree, like Sri Lanka.
I received the name Sri (actually Sri Devi) at the Sivananda Ashram Yoga Retreat in the Bahamas. I lived there for four winter seasons, about 19 months over the course of four years. It’s my spiritual name. Sri Devi is another name for the Divine Mother in the form of Lakshmi.
Lakshmi is the one Self depicted in the form of a beautiful woman sitting on a lotus. In one hand she holds a lotus which is a symbol of beauty and wisdom, and her other hand is pouring out gold coins which signifies the great fortune she can bestow. Lakshmi (aka Sri Devi) is receptive to divine knowledge. Her vehicle is the regal elephant. She is one of the most beloved goddesses of the Hindu pantheon because she is the goddess of fortune and abundance and also of the home. She is the consort of Lord Vishnu, who is the sustainer of the universe.
Like all the gods and goddesses, Lakshmi has many names. Sri Devi is one of them.
In the translation of Srimad Bhagavatam (an ancient Vedic scripture) that I read, whenever Lakshmi approached her husband, Lord Vishnu, she was called “Sri, the goddess of fortune”. It made me feel like Sri was the pet name for Lakshmi that was given to her by her husband. There is something about that notion that is moving to me.
It must be because I like being called affectionate, pet names by my husband. And when I got the name Sri Devi, I didn’t have a husband. Didn’t know if I ever would again.
My first husband, Wachen, gave me so many affectionate nicknames. He was a veritable fountain of them. And in his Portuguese-Kimbundu-English mashup of language he was always calling me something interesting.
The first nickname I remember him calling me was “Mayda”. I don’t know if that’s how you spell it, but that’s how it sounded. He also called his best friend, Kagiso, Mayda. I remember one day Kagiso heard Wachen calling me Mayda, and he said, “oh, so you’re Mayda now too…” Kagiso seemed surprised and maybe even a little sad to know he shared what felt like such an important designation from Wachen. I felt like that instant shared with me how important being Wachen’s Mayda was to the lucky designee.
These are the other nicknames I can remember Wachen calling me:
Sisterandwife
Queen
Vanilla
Strawberry
Sarah
Saraya
I’m sure there were more. I know I wrote them down somewhere so I wouldn’t forget them. Now they’re not so much on the top of my mind.
He told me that Saraya meant mermaid. Early in the summer before he was killed my mom had visited for my college graduation and at a department store she had bought me three new tops for the summer. One of them was a shiny blue tank top. When I wore it with a sarong wrapped around as a skirt he thought I looked like a mermaid.
But the nickname that has meant the most to me was Sarah. He would always say the name the Portuguese way, so it sounded like Sah-rah. “How you doing, Sah-rah? What you want to do with your boy tonight, Sah-rah?” Sah-rah, Sah-rah.
“Why are you calling me Sah-rah?” I asked him. What does that mean?
“Sah-rah, like from the bible”, he said. Wachen had been raised by a religious mother, she was a Jehovah’s Witness, and church was a really big deal to her. Wachen had been steeped in the bible and religion as a child, which he had thoroughly rejected by the time I met him. But his knowledge of the bible was still greater than mine.
I had taken a course called “The Bible as Literature” in my senior year, that last year of college when I lived with Wachen in Boulder, Colorado. I pulled my copy of the Bible from that course off the shelf and reminded myself of who Sarah from the Bible is.
She was the wife of Abraham. She was barren and they tried for years to have a child and couldn’t. Eventually Abraham got their maid pregnant, and the maid gave birth to Ishmael. That must have been so hard for Sarah. She really wanted to be a mother, and she wanted to give Abraham a son, and how she must have felt like a failure. And how painful to have to watch her husband conceive with another woman who was able to give him the son he so wanted.
But…when Sarah was 90 years old, a miracle occurred. She got pregnant. And she gave birth to Isaac who became the father to twelve sons who became the twelve tribes of Israel. After a lifetime of being deprived of the blessing of a child, she became the mother to nations.
I have wanted to be a mother since I was four years old. I wanted to have children with Wachen. We never exactly tried to get pregnant as we were so young and supposedly at the beginning of our life together, nor did we exactly try to prevent it. After Wachen was killed my period was late and I was so hopeful that I might be pregnant. I remember crying in the bathroom at my mother’s house the evening I found the blood in my underwear. My chances of having a child with Wachen gone forever. It was another loss, amongst so many others.
And then another 18 years would go by before I would have a child of my own. And all through that time, as I watched the years tick away, and the chances of having a baby grow smaller and more unlikely, I always heard Wachen’s voice calling me…
“Sah-rah, Sah-rah”
He called me Sarah. Why did he do that? Did he know? Was his soul somehow intuiting something about me and that was how he was conveying it? Did he mean to give me hope? Because he did. He gave me hope that lasted for 18 years. Whenever I felt the lack of a child on my breast, I remembered that Sarah became a mother when she was 90. It’s not too late.
I think our souls do have this type of information available. We can know and feel in ways that don’t make sense to our ordinary senses. For me, looking back, I understand my intuition that I would not know Wachen when we were old. I could never picture Wachen as an old man. I would try to see it in my mind’s eye, me and him sitting on a porch, talking to our grown children, his hair grown out in long dreads. I could never see that from the inside of my heart. And now I know that the things I can clearly see from the inside of my heart have come to manifest. So even though it was so early in my life that I didn’t have the proof I have now, I somehow knew then that he would not get old, just like he knew I would be an older mother.
Getting back to Sri. The name Sri lifts me up. I’ve had this name during the best time of my life. Sri is divine. I am lifted into that divine consciousness by this name. I like Jennie too, but Jennie went through a lot of things that I want to leave behind. So I will continue introducing myself to new people as Sri, and loving the sound of Jennie on the lips of people who know me that way. The names we are called can shape our lives, and my names are holding me in an embrace between the safety of where I come from and the open light of divine love I am walking into. It’s a nice place to be.