Prayerful Profanity

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We have always had a complicated relationship with profanity. Consider early cartoons. A character would drop an anvil on his or her foot, and a text bubble appears overhead: “#**!!&#!” The message is clear, the character is swearing, but you, gentle reader, must be protected from the actual words. “Oh, my gosh and golly!” or even “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!”  

This semantic pussyfooting stems from the fact that not all profanity is the same. In fact, I would assert that it is a rather large genre of human expression. Unfortunately, we have all been exposed to what I think of as “casual profanity” f* this and f*in'  that, or that SOB and those SOBs did this or that. Long ago a dear friend suggested that “casual profanity” stemmed either from linguistic laziness when one lacked the intellectual drive to consider a more specific bon mote, or worse, was an indication that one’s vocabulary was itself insufficient to the task of expressing elegant negativity. I have come to agree.  

Additionally, there is “affiliative profanity.” This type of profanity draws upon the same lexicon, but employs it to express affiliation, belonging to an admired group. It is most common among young adolescents and their older brothers and sisters attempting to demonstrate the current version of what was once defined as “cool” or “in” or, to reach back even further, “hip.” It is also quite common among performing artists attempting to market their own version of “cool-in-hip” to a market increasing dominated by the aforementioned youngsters.  And it spirals from performer to audience and back again. Sort of a linguistic carousel. 

But, I would like to propose a third major category of profanity, and this one strays a bit beyond the more common varieties: “prayerful profanity.” Just play along with me for a minute. Say you are approaching a sharp bend in a rural two-lane highway and as you round the bend - whoa! there is a huge truck passing another car and coming straight at you! It swerves back into its own lane seconds before hitting you head on! Or perhaps you are crossing a busy intersection, and your friend grabs your arm, jerking you back just in time to keep you from being pancaked by a city bus. The exhortations that escape you in those situations, moments when you truly believe you just cheated death, may indeed be those drawn from the vocabulary of both casual and affiliative profanity. However they may also include phrases from what I call “prayerful profanity,” or what others might call “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” 

Consider this; in those life-or-death situations we are doing anything but “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” We have never been more intensely prayerful, never more truly hopeful that we are not taking the Lord’s name in vain, but rather are seriously seeking some kind of immediate divine intervention. I’m not really sure where I am going with this, maybe just re-emphasizing the old saw that there are no atheists in foxholes. But maybe it goes a bit further, maybe I am suggesting that those “spontaneous spiritual exhortations” are not really profane, but instead possibly sacred. I read Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and The Profane when a young undergraduate and while my recollections have no doubt faded over the years, I don’t think he would object to my asserting that there is far more than just a seeming oxymoron in the notion of “prayerful profanity.” Perhaps such prayerful profanity is actually a window to spirituality, a moment of insight that can be further explored as an avenue to the sacred. To steal a concept from theoretical physics, maybe prayerful profanity is a kind of “wormhole” between the sacred and the profane. Something we might want to consider after our roadside near death experience - once our heart rate returns to something approaching normal. 

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