I couldn't leave my comments on Desmond Tutu's response to the question Have you ever had doubts about your faith? to just one post. I have another thought, not on the nature of faith as before, but how that faith is expressed and lived.

Simply, faith ought to ever be authentic. Deeply authentic. Sometimes that means we can do nothing but smile fully & joyously laugh at the beauty of it all. And other times it means being uncomfortably raw and broken before both God and our friends. Messy. Like, to the point of "oh shit, did she just say that?!?"


For me, this is one of the reasons I think cussing is not only fine, but a healthy expression of the human experience. For whatever reason we have reserved these words for the extreme. And life, not to mention the tension of faith, often pushes us to that place. The everyday words just won't do, so we go to our reserves and pull out the big guns. Utilizing these words helps us convey the depth of our emotion surrounding the situation, even if they don't result in clarifying our articulation of what is happening.

You can argue that cussing isn't the only way to express ourselves in these places and I agree. But honestly, I have been surprised again and again by the space that cussing seems to allow. How often my use of those words seems to create a spiritual and emotional space within the person I am talking; it is almost like my cussing allows them to be more fully human showing both the heights of their beauty as well as the depths of their ugly. Beauty and ugly that we all have. Beauty and ugly that we all need show from time to time.

So, maybe you should cuss a little bit more


And maybe I should cuss a little less. My issues is that they roll of my tongue so damn well.