November 12, 2026
There are a couple of lines in “A Gathering Prayer” by George Appleton that strike a special chord in my heart:
“Take me down to the spring of my life
and tell me my nature and my name.”
When Annette and Jim Cliffier, the founders of Journey into Wholeness, introduced me to this prayer in the 1980s, I found those lines curious yet appealing. I wasn’t sure why.
“Take me down to the spring of my life” asks God to lead us toward our source—the spring from which our life flows. We ask to go beneath the surface, to the origin of our being: our soul. God answers by drawing us away from the surface of our lives—our ego, personality, and exterior concerns—and down to the spring of our life, our source: our holy origin. God is the One who takes us to this sacred wellspring within.
There, we begin to see more of what God created in us. We recognize that being and come to understand that it is the bedrock of our identity: our true nature. We then have the chance to reembody those essence qualities from which we had become disconnected when we left our soul child. When we do embody them, we are astonished and blessed that our soul expresses them. These qualities of essence are found in no other person’s being as they are in ours.
Then comes the next line of the prayer: “And tell me my nature and my name.”
Don’t we already have a name? Why would God give us another one? At first, I wondered why this request was part of the prayer. Eventually, it began to make sense to me.
Our true nature is far more than our outward identity. It includes the magnificent qualities of our soul—qualities of essence we may have forgotten but that, now remembered, we can now embody again.
When we journey down to the spring of our life, and embody such soul qualities, we begin to recognize another “me”: another presence, another identity. It is a sense of coming home. This is our true nature—the being underneath the personality and false self. Its desires are one and the same with our soul’s purpose. Its qualities define us more aptly than any of our personality traits. This identity is deeper and more real than the person who is called by our given name.
This may sound “woo-woo” to some of us. But when we recognize that our truest identity is our soul, we may sense that it is not truly captured by our given name. It is as if our soul has a name—a name more fitting than the one we were given at our physical birth. Our soul yearns to be known by that name:
Several major spiritual traditions, including Christianity monasticism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and others, practice bestowing a new name upon enlightenment, ordination, renunciation, or spiritual progression. The new name symbolizes a death to one’s ego or former life and the birth of a new spiritual identity.
We can receive our holy name as a blessing from God through our continuing journeys to the spring of our life.
These matters are not table talk or parlor games, nor are they things to be taken lightly. They are truths our hearts know. These are our private musings and our conversations with God. We hold them in the interior life, where such intimate matters belong, for the most part, between ourselves and God alone.
Spiritual Practice
Listen for the impressions that come to you when you pray these two lines from George Appleton’s “A Gathering Prayer”:
“Take me down to the spring of my life
And tell me my nature and my name.”
Inquiry
Why might having yet another name sound “woo woo” to us?
Prayer
Dear God,
Every day, “take me down to the spring of my life and tell me my nature and my name.”
Amen
