Sermon: Words of cursing - or blessing?

Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing.  My brethren, these things ought not so to be.

St James iii. 10

One evening a couple of years ago I was sitting up in bed in my bijou but perfectly-formed parsonage in Grimsby, having banked up my baxi 16" Raised Economiser with best Nottinghamshire coal for the night, listening to the shrieks of drunk people out in the street and the roar of the boy-racers with noisy exhausts rattling the floorboards (ah, happy days!), reading Lady Chatterley's Lover.  At the point where we happen upon this scene, Fr Sudron is quite a few chapters in.  Connie and Mellors are having a rather spicy conversation.  Suddenly a word appeared that I had not expected to see in print.  And I confess that, broad-minded as I am, I let out a yelp.  Great as my taste for the outrageous is, I am not going to tell you what it was.

    Unlike those who made the book the subject of an obscenity trial, however, I opened my mind to what D. H. Lawrence, through Mr Mellors, was trying to say.  This gamekeeper was an intelligent and articulate man who had grown weary of the platitudes of the bourgeoisie, deciding to return to a simpler, one might say (in the strictest sense) ruder, life.  Here, in the woods of Clifford Chatterley's house, Mellors lives by his wits and instincts in a close dependence on the natural world, very far detached from the cultural niceties and oppressive protocol on which he has turned his back.

    It is through this rough, plain-speaking man that miserable Connie Chatterley begins to find a sense of wholeness within-and this is principally what I, and a number of literary critics, would argue the book is about.  What makes it sensational, still, are the words that D. H. Lawrence puts in Oliver Mellors's mouth and which shock Lady Chatterley's ears.  But to my great surprise, a surprise almost as great as Connie's, Lawrence helped me to see beauty in what is commonly held to be foul, as words that we take for cursing become part of the blessing in which Mellors expresses his love.

    More and more I question why we continue to give the words we call expletives the cachet of being so scandalous.  Scandinavians, apparently, find our view of a handful of words related to perfectly natural bodily functions and parts utterly bizarre.  One wonders if it says more about the English unease about our bodies and what we do with them than about anything else.  After all, as Oscar Wilde says through the mouth of Dorian Gray, ‘we are in the native land of the hypocrite.'

    It would be fair enough to complain about cursing if we didn't do so much of it in seemingly polite ways.  One hears plenty of people with nice manners being every bit as rude as those who are less eloquent-they simply use different words: but their utterances are no less poisonous than those they criticise.  Increasingly I am offended by the words that describe the most grotesque elements of human life.  I make no apology to those of a sensitive disposition who do not like to hear them for naming a handful:  famine; poverty; oppression; discrimination; greed; arrogance; selfishness; injustice.  These are the things Jesus condemns.  But nobody gasps.  How shameful we are.

    On another evening in Grimsby I was going to the pub to meet some friends who are undertakers.  Unusually I was meeting them after the Wednesday evening vestry hour, so I marched into the Yarborough Hôtel in clericals.  They were sitting with a group of people I'd never met, who fell silent and looked hostile as soon as they saw the collar.  Clark, the senior funeral director at J. W. Emberson made an affectionately rude remark about me and I told him not to talk such nonsense, or words to that effect.  Laughter ensued from the strangers.  ‘Oo, you're not supposed to say things like that: you're a vicar.'  This time the laughter came from the undertakers.  ‘This one does,' said Denise.  ‘Nonsense,' I said. And the ice was broken.

    Humanly speaking we had an understanding.  We spoke the same language.  It wasn't for effect, nor was it to offend; it was natural.  It was the lingua franca of that time, in that place among those people.  The turns the conversation took thereafter were fascinating.  These people, like so many to whom one ministers, were full of curiosity about God and his Church, but scarcely ever had the chance to talk about it because they thought that people inside and outside the Church (if it be possible to draw such a line) spoke different languages.  A single expletive changed cursing into blessing.

    All too often it strikes me that our polite disapproval of what we call swearing has much in common with the worst excesses of political correctness.  It fools itself that you can deal with the underlying problem by changing the words you use to describe it.  More often than not this simply exchanges one form of prejudice for another.

    Christ taught us that the heart is the place whence our real wickedness springs.  The words we use, be they fair or foul, are one of our greatest blessings in conveying to each other what our hearts intend.  Having worked in a place where, for a very large number of people, fruitier forms of expression are the norm, one begins to feel that what proceeds out of the mouth is only blessing or cursing as far as the heart intends one or the other.  Seemingly fair words are every bit as capable of harm as allegedly foul ones.

    I often wonder how much St Peter was as rough and ready as the Grimbarian fishermen I used to meet.  It wouldn't surprise me in the least given the delight Our Lord took in the company of folk the polite people tended to avoid.  Because Jesus honoured the fact that out of their mouths, however low their earthly estate, blessings were capable of proceeding, in my experience in greater number than cursing.  In the case of a rough-hewn northern fisherman, the chiefest was to be the first mouth to confess Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God.

    There are plenty who seek sanctuary within these walls, who trip over their words and apologise for swearing.  I'm afraid I tell them off-for apologising.  The words they use are rarely calculated to offend.  They express the depths they are struggling to articulate.  They voice the terror of the battlefield, the fear of poverty, the strain of betrayal.  But they can also be comic, expressions of the hilarious unlikelihood of life's twists and turns.  And like Oliver Mellors and Connie Chatterley they can express the intensity of need and the profundity of love.  These are the people the Church is called to serve.  We're not interested in the cursing; only the blessing.  And it seems to me that we must do it with whatever words the time, the place and the person require.  Because the love of Christ, I suggest, simply doesn't have time to wait for Ps and Qs.