The love that lets us share a name

Most lyrics pass through us. We enjoy them, maybe even love them, but they remain external – beautiful sounds in the air, tied to a season or a drive or a mood. Then, every so often, a line arrives with the force of recognition. It doesn’t merely describe something. It names something you have been living, without quite knowing how to articulate it.

I remember recently hearing the Avett Brothers’ “Murder in the City” closely enough to catch one such line: “Always remember there was nothing worth sharing / Like the love that let us share our name.” Fourteen words, simple and almost plain. And yet they contain something immense: the mystery of inheritance, the weight of belonging, the quiet holiness of family.

It stopped me cold, because it captures what fatherhood has taught me more powerfully than any parenting manual ever could. To share a name is not merely a biological fact or a bureaucratic detail. It is a moral fact. A spiritual one. It is a bond that pulls past and future together, and it reminds us that love is not meant to be experienced in isolation but carried forward across generations.

When I became a father, I thought I understood love. Like most people, I assumed love was primarily a feeling  –  deep, powerful, sometimes overwhelming. I knew it as affection, devotion, and sacrifice. I knew the love of spouse, the love of friends, the love of family. But fatherhood didn’t merely add love to my life. It changed what love is. It made love less like emotion and more like responsibility. Less like something you experience and more like something you are called into.

A child does not simply invite your care; a child demands your formation. Fatherhood is not only about raising someone else. It is about being reshaped yourself.

To share a name with a child is to share far more than genetics. It is to share a story, a lineage, a set of hopes and fears, a moral inheritance. A name is never just a label. It is a thread connecting generations, a reminder that we come from somewhere and belong to something larger than ourselves.

In a culture increasingly defined by fragmentation  –  mobility, isolation, rootlessness  –  that kind of belonging has become quietly countercultural. Modern life trains us to think of freedom as detachment: self-invention without obligation, identity without inheritance, autonomy without ties. We are told, implicitly and explicitly, that the highest good is the self-unbound.

But the love that lets us share a name points in the opposite direction. It suggests that the deepest freedom is found not in endless self-creation but in faithful commitment. In obligation freely embraced. In belonging received as a gift and responsibility.

This is where the religious tradition speaks with particular clarity. In scripture, love is not merely expressive. It is covenantal. It binds. It obligates. It sanctifies. Scripture is full of naming and renaming  –  not as branding exercises, but as moments of calling. Abram becomes Abraham. Jacob becomes Israel. Names mark relationship, purpose, and duty. They locate individuals within a story larger than themselves.

Faith teaches that we inherit not only blessings but responsibilities, that we belong not only to ourselves but to God, to family, to community, to generations past and future, and that love is not simply something we feel but something we do, patiently, repeatedly, imperfectly.

Fatherhood, at its best, becomes one of the most tangible schools of this kind of love. Late at night, when the house is quiet, or in the small rituals of daily care, you begin to realize that love is not mainly what you feel in your heart. Love is what you carry; love is what you hand down; love is what you choose, again and again, when no one is watching. That is what teaches humility. Patience. Perspective. It exposes the smallness of ego and the thinness of ambition. It forces you to confront what actually endures.

That Avett Brothers line captures this with startling clarity: there is nothing worth sharing like the love that lets us share our name. Not success. Not status. Not the curated achievements modern life tells us to chase. What is worth sharing is the love that binds generations. The love that teaches responsibility. The love that makes a home more than a place, and a family more than an arrangement.

I feel this most sharply not in the abstract but in the particular  –  bedtime stories, shared meals, the daily weight of showing up. And yet the particular opens onto something larger, because this is not only personal; it is civic. In an age of loneliness, declining trust, and institutional erosion, the family remains one of the last places where Americans are still formed in the habits of commitment. Family life  –  especially when nourished by religious faith  –  trains people in patience, sacrifice, and moral seriousness. It teaches that life is not simply about self-expression but about stewardship. Fatherhood, in this sense, is not just a private joy. It is a public good.

The evidence is hard to ignore. Decades of research  –  from Robert Putnam’s work on social capital to more recent studies of youth disconnection  –  show how quickly the bonds of community can fray when the institutions of belonging weaken. A society of isolated individuals cannot sustain democratic self-government for long. Democracy requires virtues that do not emerge spontaneously: restraint, patience, empathy, the capacity to disagree without hatred, and the willingness to sacrifice for the common good. Those virtues are learned somewhere, or they are not learned at all.

The family, at its best, is one of the first and most important mediating institutions. It stands between the individual and the state. It teaches obligations before rights. It forms citizens before politics ever begins. Renewing American civil society will ultimately depend less on new federal programs than on strengthening the formative institutions  –  family, faith, and community  –  that teach citizens how to belong, sacrifice, and flourish together.

The renewal we need is not only economic or political. It is relational. It begins in the quiet, unglamorous work of family life  –  of fathers and mothers handing down love, obligation, and faith, one generation at a time. Religious communities reinforce this formation. They provide moral language for commitment, communal support for endurance, and a transcendent horizon that makes sacrifice intelligible. In a world that increasingly reduces everything to transaction or performance, faith insists on something deeper: covenant, duty, love that persists.

To share a name is to share that deeper story. It is to say: you are not alone. You are held. You belong. You are part of something that began before you and, God willing, will continue after you.

In the end, fatherhood has made me see that the most precious inheritance is not material. It is moral and spiritual. It is the transmission of steadiness, of faith, of belonging. It is quiet, enduring love that lets us share a name.

Always remember.

And may we have the wisdom, in an age of loneliness and spectacle, to cherish what is most real: the sacred love that binds generations and turns a shared name into a shared calling.