About My Name
January 9, 2006: 6:21 PM

Let me tell you a little something about my life at this point: At any given point in time, it's entirely possible for someone to bring up, generally in a social setting, something quite embarassing from my past. There are a lot of options as far as this is concerned.

Nothing that would make me break down and cry or anything, no, just some genuinely funny but still embarassing things that have happened in my life, that seem to come up in every conversation whenever I meet somebody in public.

There is one in particular that I feel that I should share with you, my anthropomorphized audience, at this time: The story of my name. My full name.

Just by virtue of coming here, you know that my name is Phil Renaud. As per my birth certificate, my full name is actually Philip Joseph Renaud.

Let me explain to you one of the single most embarassing points of my entire life. The part of my name that you don't know about. Yet.

In the Catholic church, every person goes through a number of sacrements throughout his or her life. One of them, generally at the age of 13, is the Confirmation, whereas the person in question acknowledges by his or her own free will that he or she is a member of the Catholic church and accepts its teachings, since free choice has little to do with being baptised in the church.

I'm not overly Catholic, or Christian, or Religious even. I'm certainly not opposed to any of those, however. I'd say I'm far more agnostic than anything else, whether theistic or atheistic. It's really a blog for another day. The point here is that I was raised catholic, went to a french-canadian catholic grade school, where our entire class was set to be confirmed.

A major part of the confirmation process is the choosing of a new name, typically that of a saint of some sort of holy figure as far as the church is concerned. For myself, I chose the name Jude, the Patron Saint of Lost Causes and Impossible Situations.

The choosing of the name is pretty important. In all Catholic documents from the point of confirmation onward, the chosen Confirmation name is added in. Therefore, my name was going to be Philip Joseph Jude Renaud, which has a pretty nice ring to it, I think. We all had to make albes (hung over the shoulder) with the new name displayed in bold letters upon it. Mine was beautiful; "Jude" in big white letters on a red albe.

It was a friday in June, about three weeks before classes ended and my grade school days would be behind me. We had to get through the day of classes, and then we would all head to the church with our families and go through with the confirmation.

In the morning, we had science class. I remember that we dissected something (pigs maybe? I can't quite remember), and then later on in the day, we were in that same sweltering hot classroom, practising our choir numbers for the ceremony in the evening.

I passed out. Hard. Maybe from the heat, maybe from the fermaldyhide we had used in the science class earlier. Long story short, my vision was lost and I was unconscious for a cool 20 minutes. It was something like a seizure, they said. I had to be rushed to the hospital downtown in an ambulance, and I had to stay overnight for tests and such. My health is generally pretty good, but I guess it just slipped that day in 8th grade.

Anyway, I missed my confirmation, and didn't actually get released until late on Saturday night, a full 24 hours after the ceremony took place. My grandparents got a hold of the Priest, who agreed to let me be confirmed after a regular mass on Sunday, the day after I was released, with other kids who were homeschooled or for one reason or another missed their confirmations.

There was one problem.

I had forgotten my albe in the now-locked school. The one that said "Jude" on it. Oh fuck.

So, realizing this Sunday morning about 20 minutes before mass, I did all that could be expected: I panicked. Eventually, I calmed down enough to call a friend of mine and see if I could use his albe, even though it wasn't the name I wanted, anything would do at this point.

Or so I thought.

Because when I picked it up and looked at it, I was in for a bit of a surprise: the name he picked to be confirmed with was Philip.

I can tell you how it went down from this point on, but it's a gap that you can probably fill in on your own.

Long story short, my name as far as any Catholic record shows is officially Philip Joseph Philip Renaud.

I trust that you can refrain from mocking me if you ever meet me in public, but if not, I can take it.


Phil-Joe-Phil.

Just doesn't quite have the ring to it that I had hoped. Oh, well.

Thanks for the comments: Christian Montoya.

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