Job titles are only temporary

I’ve been thinking about titles. I have a title now. I saw it on the back of the church bulletin this week: “Custodial Assistant.” It’s just under the person with the title “Custodian,” which is under the person who is the “Facility Manager.”

It seems to me that people didn’t have as many titles when I was a child. There was the boss and the employees—that’s it. The proliferation of inventive titles is a relatively new thing, I believe. I don’t know why they felt a need to change the way things were. Maybe some psychologist figured out that if you give a person a title he will work harder or behave better. Years ago one of my kids came home from school and told me he was “Student of the Week.” I couldn’t have been prouder. Then I found out that every kid in the class got to be “Student of the Week” during one week of the school year.

In the summertime I noticed that all the kids got trophies at the end of baseball season. I was told it was good for their self-esteem and that competition may be harmful. I have a lot of trophies in my attic now. I’ll bet if my kids had gotten only one trophy each, it would be in their apartments right now and not in my attic.

It was an eye-opener to learn about some of the titles of the administrators at a California university’s Chancellor’s Diversity Office (an office title we didn’t have in the 1970s): Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Equity, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Faculty Equity Advisor, Graduate Diversity Coordinator, Staff Diversity Liaison, Undergraduate Student Diversity Liaison, Graduate Student Diversity Liaison, Chief Diversity Officer, Director of Development for Diversity Initiatives, to name a few.

My first husband has a title on our mutual tombstone: “Dr.” I am a little embarrassed about that, and I must say that I pushed back against it a bit but was overruled by my brother-in-law. My attitude was that it was best not to be too proud of academic degrees under the circumstances—of flesh returning to dust and all. I still wonder why it is that people who have doctorates get to have a prefix to their names while, say, engineers do not.

I have a title with this news organization: “Senior Writer” (I just checked the masthead in the magazine). I don’t object to that particular honorific because I am a senior (at least at some movie theaters and train stations), and I do write. So the designation has some plausible correspondence to reality. But I won’t be putting it on my headstone. Besides, the granite slab is crammed with my husband’s friends’ names, for some reason, so there’s no room for emendations.

What I don’t like is title inflation. I remember when I first heard housewives described as “Domestic Engineers”—I could never take people’s job titles seriously after that. In stark contrast is Jesus’ underwhelming title for Himself: “Son of Man.” That was His preferred moniker. There’s not a divine allusion in the phrase; the emphasis is directed emphatically to His commonality with humans. Now and then He felt compelled to admit that He was also a king, as when Pilate asked him point blank: “Are you the King of the Jews?” Even then He answered it obliquely: “You have said so.”

Which reminds me that all present titles are a temporary arrangement. Gov. Pilate and King Herod and Tiberius Caesar, where are they now? For the first will be last and the last will be first, as Scripture says. And God shows no partiality to the man with gold rings and fine apparel over the poor man with filthy clothes (James 2:2-9).

The wise man will hold out for a better name and a better title in a better world to come. “To the one who conquers I will give … him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it” (Revelation 2:17).

What will that secret name of yours be: “Faithful to the End”? “One Who Overcame a Stronghold”? “Humble Servant”? Your name is being chiseled as we speak.