Swear Words
People sometimes apologize for cussing in front of a priest. I started noticing this decades ago when I was freshly ordained. But neither then nor subsequently have I felt offended. Usually I feel awkward. Their apology, I think, ought to be directed to someone higher than myself. But then the penny drops. Inescapably I sort of represent Someone Higher, and guiltily I feel it as a defect that I don’t sense the wrongness of cussing.
But hey, I am no stranger to it. An old memory: Back in the previous century we were loading up our piano in Santa Fe; instead of going to New York with us, it was going to stay with a friend during our seminary years. A piano has a lot of weight, and the corner of it that I was responsible for slipped, and I said “Oh sh*t.” The friend who was taking the piano (we were in his driveway) said to me: “We don’t have any sh*t here.”
I wasn’t even in New York yet, and already my vocabulary was being corrected. Thanks to him, there’s less sh*t in it now.
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An old priest of the Orthodox persuasion had been on the faculty of my college. It was music class, and I hardly know how we got to the subject, but one day he said this: It is remarkable how people use the word “Jesus” when they curse. You hit your thumb with a hammer and you yell it out, this word, this Name of the Son of God.
He taught us to take seriously the words we ejaculate in times of pain. What is more natural, in fact, than to cry out the name of the savior of the world when something awful and greatly painful has fallen on you? From that day I started listening with new attention to the cuss words of atheists.
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It is a short distance from cursing God to swearing with God’s Name, and a still shorter distance from that to calling upon God.
Near the end of “Godspell,” Jesus cries from the cross: “Oh God, I’m bleeding.” In context it is clear that Jesus is crying out to God, yet the words could be said by anyone. Your knife slips and cuts into your hand, and you cry out, “God, I’m bleeding!” It hurts and it’s frightening. In the moment of your cry the word “God” is a cuss-word, it gives emphasis; it’s a way of saying this bleeding is really bad. But close upon it comes the second meaning, when “God” turns into what the grammarians call a vocative: the naming of the person you’re speaking to. “God, my hand is bleeding—help me!”
Most people are not capable of living without this kind of spontaneous cursing. But what we can work on is changing such near-spontaneous outbursts into cries to God that spring from the midst of life. The way of godliness is not to suppress unwanted things but rather to transform them into prayer.
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Out & About: Sunday, October 26, at 10:20 a.m. I will teach on Book III of Augustine’s Confessions. The class is in the Great Hall of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas. (If you missed the first class, I am told a video will be posted on the cathedral’s F-book page.)
At 5 p.m. on November 9 at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, the Good Books & Good Talk seminar meets to T. S. Eliot’s hit play, “Murder in the Cathedral.” Anyone who reads the play is welcome to the conversation, which runs to 6:30. The seminar meets on the 2nd floor of Garrett Hall; from about 4:45 there will be someone at the door to let you in.