Blog 12.Quiet Down Sister

One thing I appreciate about this whole being alive thing is situations invariably pop-up where I get to re-evaluate dormant beliefs, the ones I thought I left behind.

Of all the baggage we have, religious teaching is, perhaps, the heaviest one we carry around. Imprinted when young, it stalks our experience like shadows, evading the sentinels of even the most alert observers. To be fair, they once provided the guidelines for achieving the all-important post-death, eternal bliss. However, trouble arises when we don’t question how they shade our present. And if we’re not careful we can get caught up in the losing game of tallying the venial indiscretions of ourselves and others. When that happens it clouds the big picture and one's (read: my) perspective. I’ve fought to rewire this impulse my entire life.

Take swearing. Akin to a capital crime when young, I muttered curse words under my breath to reduce their perceived severity. God judges intention not volume young idiot! That being said a well placed 'shit' or 'fuck' felt so cathartic. Yet no matter my level of primal satisfaction, it was tempered by the imagined disapproving gaze from the authority figures–God, parents, and teachers–burning into the back of my head. Basically, I believed, in line with the shackles of the time, that kids who swore were bad kids.

Case in point. I recently had the good fortune, privilege actually, to ski with my long-time friends and their kids. I ate a lot of snow following them over expert terrain, but that’s another story. On the chair lifts and over meals they would insert various expletives into the conversation. First response (and the flat-out wrong one) was this is bad, kids shouldn’t swear.

For a minute, I completely missed what mattered. Then I came to my senses. Who cares? You’re not the language sheriff. Here are two kind, polite, and engaged kids who are genuinely fun to be around, who by the way, also helped the younger ones to trust the skills and try harder terrain. They demonstrated levels of patience and awareness beyond themselves, rare for those in teenagedom. Swear on boys. You get the big things right.

So quiet down Sister Loretta. You no longer have a say.