Friday, September 28, 2007

(F)

As a prelude (or perhaps disclaimer) to future blog posts, a postscript to other (potentially) offensive posts, an excuse for my daily verbal shortcomings, and as a generally entertaining topic of discussion, I offer up this article from the British magazine Third Way:

Here is a mystery: a word that is in every sense common, which yet has retained its power to affront for over 500 years. The dictionaries, which from 1795 until 1965 generally declined to include it, can record its offensiveness but cannot explain it.

Its curious quality is apparent if you substitute for it any of the 32 literal synonyms listed in Roget’s Thesaurus. Tell someone to ‘copulate off’ and you will generate only amusement. Certainly, no one will get the hump.

Some of its impact, of course, is derived from its expressive combination of a short vowel between a fricative ‘f’ and a plosive ‘k’. A less percussive sound might never have achieved its pre-eminence as the most frowned-upon word in the world.

Then again, there are plenty of similar words, from ‘cack’ to ‘pig’, which have little or no such effect. Even sexual terms that are violent in meaning and not just in sound go off (one might say) with less of a bang.

So precise is the phonetic chemistry that Father Ted could say ‘feck’ as much as he liked and somehow never turn the air blue. And other nearly-but-not-quite phrases such as ‘hacked off’ or ‘muck up’ seem only innocent or (if the euphemism is detected) a bit limp.

The F word has become, in the proper sense of the term, a fetish: a construct in which we have chosen to invest some mystical energy. It isn’t the sound per se that delivers the charge, but the fact that our culture has declared it unspeakable. Its capacity to shock lies in our will to be shocked.

And not only the sound: the very combination of letters is similarly taboo. We can cope with the ellipses ‘f...’ and ‘f—’ on the page, though they represent unequivocally exactly the same word as the letters ‘fuck’. Yet even printed thus, without context or feeling, it has the power to provoke us.

Even an anagram can excite us, as French Connection UK famously found with its knowing acronym. Even an initial makes TFI Friday look cool.

Such status does this modern tetragrammaton enjoy that it has established an all but exclusive right to the term ‘four-letter word’, though most of the vocabulary we use every day is four letters long – including some of our best Anglo-Saxon, such as ‘life’, ‘love’ and ‘hope’.

Not that the F word is Anglo-Saxon at all. It was probably imported from Germany or Holland, from a loose group of words suggesting ‘to strike’ or ‘to thrust’. No use of it is recorded before 1475 – maybe because it was considered too rude in the Middle Ages to write down. No one knows why it should have been singled out for this special dishonour. Shakespeare toys with it in several plays, but never as boldly as the C word in Hamlet III.ii.

D H Lawrence attempted to reclaim it in 1928 as a good, earthy, impolite word for a good, earthy, impolite act, with limited success; but the edge it retained has since been dulled by over-use. Its residual force is exploited to diminishing effect by would-be rebels and comics and scriptwriters looking for a short cut to verité.

In a postmodern culture, such a monolithic taboo is anyway hard to sustain. In different circles, the F word has very different values. For many, it is hardly more than a mild intensifier, though little boys still consider it daring. Billy Connolly uses it merely as sonic punctuation.

For some, it remains an ‘obscenity’, a source of more outrage than the arms trade or Third World debt. But small transgressions were always a useful distraction from bigger ones. One wonders, to be honest, whether God gives a fig.


(Huw Spanner, "The F Word" Third Way Magazine, November 2000)

My view on cussing is, in brief, as follows. 1. Cussing is a cultural issue rather than an ethical issue 2. Cussing is entirely appropriate under the right circumstances and to make certain points that would otherwise be less readily made without the use of said cuss words 3. As noted in the final paragraph of Mr. Spanner's essay, it is a reflection of more serious theological and ethical misdirection that Christian culture takes cussing seriously, in that by focusing on something as superficial as "foul language," focus can be taken off of more difficult and problematic (yet certainly more pressing) ethical issues.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

God and Earth

In response to both some of the discussion that occurred over the Iceland post and in regard to my endless preoccupation with the geographical place where I currently reside (and its stark contrast to the place where I am from), I re-picked up one of my favorite essay collections, Wendell Berry's What are People For?. This short volume has much to say that is helpful about how we ought to live in relationship to the earth as well as the concept of having a sense-of-place (a love for and connection to the place/environment/land where one is from). With that in mind, here are a few nice Berry quotes:

The subject of Christianity and ecology is endlessly, perhaps infinitely, fascinating. . . . (It) is politically fascinating to those of us who are devoted both to biblical tradition and to the the defense of the earth, because we are always hankering for the support of the churches, which seems to us to belong, properly and logically, to our cause. This latter fascination, though not the most difficult and fearful, is certainly the most frustrating, for the fact simply is that the churches, which claim to honor God as the "maker of heaven and earth," have lately shown little inclination to honor the earth or to protect it from those who would dishonor it. (95)

Like any other public institution so organized, the organized church is dependent on "the economy"; it cannot survive apart from those economic practices that its truth forbids and that its vocation is to correct. If it comes to a choice between the extermination of a building fund, the organized church will elect--indeed, has already elected--to save the building fund. The irony is compounded and made harder to bear by the fact that the building fund can be preserved by crude applications of money, but the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field can be preserved only by true religion, by the practice of a proper love and respect for them as the creatures of God. No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to "spiritual" subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences. (96)

The industrial nations are now divided, almost entirely, into a professional or executive class that has not the least intention of working in truth, beauty, and righteousness, as God's servants, or to the benefit of their fellow men, and an underclass that has no choice in the matter. Truth, beauty, and righteousness now have, and can have, nothing to do with the economic life of most people. This alone, I think, is sufficient to account for the orientation of most churches to religious feeling, increasingly feckless, as opposed to religious thought or religious behavior. . . . "There is . . . a price to be paid," Philip Sherrard says, "for fabricating around us a society which is as artificial and as mechanized as our own, and this is that we can exist in it only on condition that we adapt ourselves to it. This is our punishment." We all, obviously, are to some extent guilty of this damnable adaptation. We are all undergoing this punishment. But as Philip Sherrard well knows, it is a punishment that we can set our hearts against, an adaptation that we can try with all our might to undo. We can ally ourselves with those things that are worthy: light, air, water, earth; plants and animals; human families and communities; the traditions of decent life, good work, and responsible thought; the religious traditions; the essential stories and songs. (101-102)

There is more I had intended to include, but if I do so the end result will likely be that nobody will actually read any of it. But the above selections, taken from the essay God and Country, more or less summarizes the way I have thought about the intersection between my faith and the land, as well as hints at my hopes for my family's future lifestyle. The photo, by the way, was taken from the home where I was fortunate enough to grow up. It is probably superfluous to say that it was not difficult to cultivate a love for that place.

Friday, September 21, 2007

Maybe we'll move to Iceland

For one, nobody would think Haaken's name was odd (not only is Haaken a common name there, but hey, it's hard to be shocking in a country where people are really named Björk Guðmundsdóttir). For two, theirs is the only language to use a rune in their alphabet (the thorn, Þ). For three, they spawned Sigur Rós. And fourthly (the actual inspiration for this post), the Icelandic government is actually dealing sensibly with global warming and oil shortages. I also hear the climbing is good, and the summers tend to be cooler than Missouri's . . .

Addendum: a few more things in favor of Iceland: plentiful fresh(ish) cod, turf houses, president Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson (ahhh . . . just rolls off the tongue), active volcanoes, and churches that appear as if they were built to transport you to heaven themselves . . . what's not to like?

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Two Videos for Thought


Modern World (courtesy of Montreal band Wolf Parade, from their album Apologies to the Queen Mary)


I always thought this was one of the more inspiring scenes of modern history . . . and now available with a bit of editing and some good music (Boards of Canada, I think)

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The Crucified God

I picked up Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God this morning, and read this in the introduction: "Jesus died crying out to God, 'My God, why hast thou forsaken me?' All Christian theology and all Christian life is basically an answer to the question which Jesus asked as he died. The atheism of protests and of metaphysical rebellions against God are also answers to this question. Either Jesus who was abandoned by God is the end of all theology or he is the beginning of a specifically Christian, and therefore critical and liberating, theology and life. The more the 'cross of reality' is taken seriously, the more the crucified Christ becomes the general criterion of theology." In the context my existential attempts at some sort of personally satisfying theodicy, this concept of a God who suffers with us is a fascinating and potentially helpful one. While I am not so pretentious as to think it likely I will end up wading through Moltmann's entire book, and am fully aware that in the odd chance that I do find the fortitude to do so I am far from equipped to understand the wider theological context that Moltmann wrote from, I hope that even a cursory reading of and meditation on this subject will be helpful in my struggling attempts to understand and reconcile God with the reality of life on earth.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

And you call on God, and God is dead.*

Deus Absconditus. God, unknowable by the human mind. Annie Dillard wrote the following in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: "In the Koran, Allah asks, 'The heaven and earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?' It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? . . . Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator's, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears around the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey?" The trajectory of my life of late has kept these questions at the fore of my mind. On July 30th a good friend of mind was killed in Northern Iraq. Wrestling with Jason's death, the meaning of his life, and the impact all of this has on those who loved him has exacerbated my thoughts about God's relationship (or lack thereof) to human experience. Jason grew up with the same faith that I did, and went on to reject it for many of the reasons I continue to wrestle with it. I think I always assumed (i.e., had hope) that at some point Jason would come to some sense of peace with God, that his present crisis would be resolved in the future. But now there is no future for Jason. He will not go on to figure things out, to at the very least come to some sort of tenuous ceasefire with God in the battle of assigning responsibility for pain and suffering. Instead he died at age 29, fighting a meaningless war in a (seemingly) meaningless universe. Is God really in charge of all of this? These are the sorts of questions that I know would get me prematurely sent to hell in a handbasket by many in the evangelical Christian world, and yet I cannot help but think that God, assuming he does exist and care, would want me to think these thoughts, to wrestle with this reality. It is difficult to go to church these days, and today the sermon was from the book of Ecclesiastes. For the living know that they will die; But the dead know nothing, And they have no more reward, For the memory of them is forgotten . . . While church did nothing to dispel the dark cloud around me (rather, I sulked around morosely all afternoon, listened to melancholy music, laying on the couch thinking dark thoughts, and wishing I were drinking), it did remind me that perhaps the current shallowness of my belief in God is not perhaps so heretical as some would make it out to be. Dillard continues in Pilgrim: "'God is subtle,' Einstein said, 'but not malicious.' Again, Einstein said that 'nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning.' It could be that God has not absconded but spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God 'set bars and doors' and said, 'Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.' But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?"
*Bonnie "Prince" Billy: "Love Comes to Me" (from The Letting Go)