The Deacon's Bench
As someone who has been known to hurl a few of these in my day—working in a newsroom, it’s as much a part of the vocabulary as “rewrite”—I appreciated this posting from Dr. Thomas J. Neal, via New Advent:
I was astounded by the staggering mystery of the origins of human language, and amazed by the thought that this God-breathed universe labored for billions of years to birth human beings that could finally give it a voice to return to its Maker a Godlike language of thanksgiving and praise.
Did that unspeakably immense history conceived in the mind of God unfold only to give birth to the F-bomb?
Our language either reveals or conceals the divine image stamped in the human heart, and when we stand before the ‘dread judgment seat of Christ’ we will be asked to account for the every word. Mine will be a long judgment.
Our bodies were created to glorify God, were transformed in Baptism into Temples of the ineffable Trinity, and our voices are the prime instrument of that Temple. As a friend of ours from Boston said (with a Baahstin accent) after a remarkable conversion back to the faith, ‘I can’t cuss any more, cuz now I know the Holy Spirit’s listening!’
And I’m going to find some soap and wash out my mouth …
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