Post #2 – Not Safe, But Good: Thoughts on Controversial Language in Post #1 and Beyond (let’s get meta)

After a suggestion from a colleague (whom I wildly respect) to make a swearword modification (the insertion of an * in place of a certain “u”) in my first post, I put up a bit of an argument, saying that it would go against the whole point of what I was saying – that sometimes there’s rough stuff in good literature, and that’s okay if it has a point – that’s real life. I get the ethos behind him suggesting the change, in that he wanted to endorse it to other educators, and you never know just who your audience is going to be and what their convictions are, and so I made the change. But I just couldn’t live with it after about a week. So I changed it back.

The point here is, if I’m not censoring that word when in comes up in literature or film with senior high students, why am I censoring it in literature that will be read by adults? Isn’t that backwards? (To be clear, I don’t censor the print word of it in class if it arises, but when reading aloud say “cuss” or “cussing” instead, à la Wes Anderson’s film Fantastic Mr. Fox). What also ate me alive was the fact that censoring that word totally crippled the message of the post itself, in an ontologically self-defeating sense. The post is saying that real life is messy, and unsafe, and that literature is going to sometimes reflect that if it is to meaningfully speak into the fallen human situation. And by censoring, I’d totally contradicted that point. So I changed it back.

This was not meant to be an act of volitional defiance in any way, it's just an issue of logical consistency, for which I have superlative regard.

I had a Christian professor in university (what a treat) who taught me Greek and Latin, and one day when it kind of came up when we were talking etymology, he confidently said, “Oh, you know the word ‘fuck’? It comes from the Latin word ‘pugnare’ which means ‘to fight,’” and then he riffed on that for a bit. The thing that struck me was the bold earthiness with which he addressed the word, no holds barred, which I found to be very winsome and engaging. So often Christians are the most easily offended people, who get huffy over the smallest controversies, which I think is to our detriment, and not really even in line with our worldview, since we have the best answer for why the human condition is the way it is. In other words, we of all people should expect messiness in life. If we can be more real and meet people in the world more where they’re at (in a “not of the world, but in the world” kind of way), maybe Christ would seem more attractive to them, and more pertinently real. For example, if a Christian were to go volunteer at a homeless shelter, they would see very quickly that life is often anarchic and unsafe. Should the Christian refrain from going there to serve the poor because there is swearing and talk of drugs and other unsavory things in that environment? Of course not. If so, they’d be denying the command of Christ to love the poor and disenfranchised of society.

I’m not advocating swearing for the sake of it, or gratuitous profanity for the sake of controversy (who can think of anything more obnoxious than someone whose speech is ubiquitously peppered with vulgarity?). What I am advocating though is a realness, both with ourselves, and with our students. They’ve all heard that word hundreds of times in a variety of places, and Christian education gives us the safe context in which to talk about some very unsafe things. Where better to equip our high school students on this and other big issues? If we don’t do it, it’s fairly unlikely that many others will outside the home. Do parents want to be the only people talking about tough issues with their kids, or is this best done in concert with Christian community as well, which Christian schools function as a part of?

An addition to this point, and the general conversation that was discussed in Post 1, I recently ordered a book entitled The Best Christian Short Stories (ed. Bret Lott) that sets itself up in the intro as a collection of literary fiction. I discovered it after reading a story called “Things We Knew When the House Caught Fire” by David Drury with my English 10 and 11 classes, which was anthologized in The Best American Non-Required Reading 2003, edited by Dave Eggers, who is one of my favourite writers. I discovered later that The Best Christian Short Stories had reached a second edition (as well as a second volume), where the title had been changed to Not Safe, but Good, which is a quote about Aslan in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Aslan is not safe, but he’s good. He’s a lion; he could rip your face clean off. But he would only do it justly and in total righteousness. And we all know who Aslan is.

                                       

 

The point here is that good literature that has meaningful and real things to say to us is probably not going to be safe all the time, but it is going to be good; especially when we can talk about it in the right setting and context, as Christian educators get to. There’s been a lot of conversation around The Hunger Games lately, which I think is pretty entry level in this discussion, if we’re talking about senior-high level students, as I have been. I feel that book, though a bit violent (though not gratuitously so – the descriptions could be a lot gnarlier, based on the premise), is pretty safe in that it doesn’t contain many other unsavory things like sexual content or swearing. I think The Lord of the Flies and 1984 are much darker and more visceral than The Hunger Games, and those books are standard fare in public senior high schools. Again though, Lord of the Flies is still pretty safe in the ways I just mentioned. But if we can concede purposeful violence in what students are reading, can we also concede other adult themes, within non-gratuitous reason, so long as they're purposefully redemptive or educational?