Summary of Carry On, Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life - Book Summary (2016)

Part IV. HOLDING ON

Chapter 37. On Profanity

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

—Mark Twain

I receive plenty of mail from concerned readers about my occasional use of profanity. They believe God is offended by it, so they are too. I love my readers, and when they are hurt by my writing, I think hard about that.

Maybe God is up in heaven keeping lists of bad words and tallying how many times we say each one. Maybe those arbitrary four-letter words that are different in every country, culture, and era are the unwholesome, crude talk that the Bible insists we avoid. Maybe.

Or maybe God’s actually referring to the most harmful kind of talk in which people of light can participate: gossip talk and ungrateful talk and racist and sexist and classist talk and sarcasm and snide, dismissive, apathetic remarks and maybe even nasty phrases like more and not my problem and us/them and looking out for number one and the scariest phrase of all, the deserving poor. As if there is any other kind of poor?

Or maybe he’s talking about language intended to exclude people. Religious talk does that sometimes. Religious words can be used to make some people feel in and other people feel out. If they’re used that way, to suggest that some people are “God people” and others aren’t, then I think religious words become profane.

And you know, if four-letter words are used in a way that helps a sister express herself, tell her truth, make her art, relate to other people, get it OUT, then I think Jesus would dig it. I really do. I think Jesus likes REAL, whatever form in which it comes. We’ve each got deep wells of profanity inside us—deep enough to keep us busy bailing our own wells before dipping into anybody else’s.

I heard a radio sermon recently given by the minister of one of the largest churches in the country. He was passionately insisting that Christians should protect themselves from secular music. He used the example of rap and discussed its profanity with disgust. He said that adult Christians should stay away from it at all costs, or it could corrupt them.

It really got to me, that sermon.

Sometimes I listen to gangster rap. Don’t laugh. I like art, any art that is true and raw and real, and sometimes rap fits the bill. Sometimes as I listen to a song, an angry song, about poverty and dead ends and the hopelessness and the violence that are the inevitable results, I think, Jesus would love this song. I don’t think he’d cover his ears and turn up his nose and run away because of the crudeness. I don’t think the coarseness would offend him. As a matter of fact, the people who were a little rough around the edges never offended Jesus. The shiny perfect Pharisees did, though. He called them vipers and white-washed tombs. Poisonous. Perfect and shiny outside, decaying on the inside.

If Jesus were that pastor, I don’t think he’d tell his people to turn off the radio. I think he’d tell them to turn it up and listen, even if it made them uncomfortable. He’d tell them to listen to the stories of people who’ve been oppressed and marginalized and are crying out for someone to hear them and step in. He’d say, “Sounds a lot like the Psalms, doesn’t it?” And instead of allowing his followers to comfort themselves by creating false groups of us/them (they are so bad/we are so good; we must not become contaminated!), I think Jesus might ask them to listen to the despair and anger and to ask themselves, How am I part of this problem? What can I, as a neighbor, do to help level the playing field? Jesus didn’t say: “Love your neighbor, unless he offends you.” I’m not sure that being offended is a luxury that people who’ve been commanded to love each other can enjoy. Otherwise we are in danger of becoming people who were born on third base, peeved that those not issued a ticket into the ballpark refuse to complain sweetly enough.

I just think that if this pastor was so very upset by poverty and the agony it causes, maybe instead of suggesting that his well-off congregation flee from it, he might have suggested that they skip the mall and lunch after church and use the time and money to serve some meals to the poor instead. Maybe they could have gone to meet some of these gangsters. Maybe they could have headed to the prisons or streets, like Jesus did, instead of walking away.

There was a town in Jesus’s day called Samaria. Jews did NOT go to Samaria. Samarians were the “others” back then. Morally questionable, you know. Samaria was the wrong side of the tracks. Jews would add lots of time to their trips just to walk around Samaria. But the gospels are careful to mention that whenever Jesus traveled, he walked right through Samaria.

Always right through it, that Jesus. Rolling deep with his entourage, the twelve disciples. Laaaaiiiid back. With their minds on their manna and their manna on their minds.

Jesus actually met one of his favorite people in Samaria, someone he used as an example of how to love your neighbor—the Good Samaritan. Maybe gangster rap is like Samaria. Maybe “profane” blogs are. Maybe a lot of places we avoid are. Maybe there are people we can learn from in these places.

A minister recently sent me this quote: “The problem with the faith pool these days is that all the noise is coming from the shallow end. I waded into the deep end, and that has made all the difference.”

It’s easy to spend time in the shallow end of faith. It’s not a real commitment. You can just hop in, stand around in tight circles, and people-watch. You can examine your nails, read, reread, and catch up on all the gossip. You can talk and talk and talk and come to a great many conclusions and decisions and still maintain your hairstyle and even avoid smudging your makeup. This is important because you never know when someone will pull out a camera. You can spend an entire comfortable life there, really, just standing around being heard. You never even have to learn to swim in the shallow end. Good times.

I think the reason we don’t hear from the people in the deep end as often is because they’re actually swimming. In the deep end, you have to keep moving. It’s hard to look cool. It’s tiring and scary even, since it’s just you and your head and your heart in the silence of the depths. There’s not much chatting or safety in numbers in the deep end. You have to spend most of your time there alone. And it’s impossible to get any solid footing. You just have to trust that the water will hold you, and you have no other choice but to flail about and gasp for air and get soaking wet, head to toe.

There are these monks called the Benedictines, and they live in monasteries all over the world and follow the Rule, which is a set of ideas about living in community written by St. Benedict a long, long time ago. I study this Rule before handling conflicts in my heart, friendships, home, and art. Here’s one of my favorite parts of Benedict’s Rule:

“Persevere. Bear with great patience each other’s infirmities of body or behavior. And when the thorns of contention arise, daily forgive, and be ready to accept forgiveness.”

If you are someone who considers cursing to be a weakness, please bear with us cursers with great patience, and daily forgive us. If you are someone who considers intolerance for cursing a weakness, please bear with us with great patience and daily forgive us. Persevere. Try to see through to the God in us. Swim in the deep end. As St. Benedictine says, “Listen with the ear of the heart.”