The Power of "Be"

A year and a few months before will.i.am. and the Black Eyed Peas brought consciousness of the verb “to be” into popular culture through the ever bumpin song “Imma be” I was sitting in a sketchily lit prayer house  getting what I didn’t realize was the first in a set of discoveries regarding the complexity and life changing properties of this verb.  But before going into all that, a brief explanation of the auxiliary, copula and main verb functions of “to be”. 

It took me a while to get this so let me make sure you’re all trackin with me:

Be, being, been, am, is, were, was, are… these are all just different conjugations of the verb “be”.

Auxiliary: Auxiliary verbs are helping verbs.  For example “The house is being cleaned”.  The verb “be” is just helping the verb “clean”.  It doesn’t have any meaning of its own. 

Copula: Similarly, copula verbs don’t really have any meaning.  They just give tense.  “Imma be brilliant” is an example of “be” being used as a copula.  You could say “Imma brilliant” and people would still understand what you were saying .  The extra “be” is just inserted for grammatical reasons, not to change the meaning of the sentence.  “Be” is used as a copula A LOT in English.  For example, “I am a girl”, “I am angry”, “She is a teacher”, “They are stupid” etc…

Main: The verb “to be” is rarely used as a main verb in English.  The only place it is used as a main verb is in sentences like “I am.” People rarely say this unless they are will.i.am. which is what makes him so cool.  In these utterances the verb “to be” has actual meaning, as it denotes existence.

Okay… so back to the prayer house.  Me and my friends Franck and Zachariah were praying and stuff (yup, that’s what ya do in a prayer house).  And then my friend Franck started talking about bees.  He talked about the way bees fly from flower to flower without meaning to pollinate.  How they accomplish pollination just by doing what bees do, gathering nectar and pollen for the sake of making honey.    In a similar way, he said that I was gonna be used by God, not through me trying really hard to do stuff, but just through me beeing.   That is, through being I would achieve God’s purposes; not through being smart or being efficient, just through being. 

It was deep stuff that kind of took me off guard, because I didn’t even begin to know what it means to be.  Like I said earlier, in English, “to be” is rarely used as a main verb.  It is most often used as a copula.  When you use “to be” as a copula it puts the person in a category.  “She is a girl.”  You are putting her in the category “girl”.  These categories are extremely helpful for us as human beings.  And these categories are also a lot of the way that we find our worth or our identity.  We find our identity and our worth in being a student, or being smart or being pretty.  But Franck was talking about finding worth and identity in just being.

It wasn't till about a year later when I was sitting in my linguistics class actually learning all about the verb "be" that it hit me and I suddenly understood why it would make so much sense for God to want his people to "be".  When Moses meets God in the form of the burning bush, God sends him off on a mission.  Moses wants to know, "Who should I say sent me?  Who are you?"  God says "I AM WHO I AM.  Tell them I AM has sent you".  So when God is asked who he is, he didn't say, "I am the Creator, or I am really powerful".  He just said, "I AM".  God is and was so confident in his being that he felt no need to orient himself according to labels, according to category.  He simply was.  He simply be.

And I, I am created in his image.  We all are actually.  What that means is that we were modeled after him.  If he defines himself by his being, then it makes sense for us to do the same.  Not that God never explained in more detail who he was, and not that we are constrained from talking about the social categories we fit into.  But something like by demonstrating how it is done, God has shown us what it means to be.  To find worth in being, because we are who we were created to be.

So imma be.

- Lydia