Why “Bugger” is a Bad Word

It was a summery day and I was a little Canadian boy at a Private Day School of the English variety. All little boys in our Private Day School wore short pants. Only big boys were allowed to wear trousers. We all wore school jackets with lovely bold stripes, and white shirts and school ties. In high glee I was chasing another boy around a small circular garden and shouting at him something like, “I’ll get you, you little bugger!”

I’m not sure about the first part because it is the word “bugger” that stands out. Suddenly an adult figure looms out of the receding mists of my memory. It is Mr. Steele who grabs me and calls a halt to my joy by informing me that “bugger” is a very bad word. Why at that age a word like “bugger” should be a very bad word was incomprehensible because there were bugs all around us and the word “bugger” was quite obviously about bugs.

My shameful indiscretion was reported to my parents who also seemed to think it was a bad word, but didn’t seem to be able to explain why. I was remanded to the Teacher’s Study for the lecture on why bugger is a bad word. I received a deeply mystifying and completely incomprehensible lecture on why “bugger” is a bad word. Of course buggery is never actually mentioned, just a lot of vague bosh. I have no idea what the explanation might have been. But I did understand that for some inexplicable reason I shouldn’t say “bugger” because adults didn’t like it. I don’t remember feeling even the slightest shame or guilt for using that unmentionable word.

At this distance two things emerge. One, if you are going to tell someone that something is wrong be as clear as you possibly can. Two, the person you may be trying to instruct might not have the experience to understand what you are actually saying unless you spell it out. Why a teacher like Mr. Steele should make such a big deal about a word that had something to do with bugs at that time remained mystifying. The stupid bugger should have laboured harder to understand where a little boy was coming from. But even that insulting remark avoids the real point.

Language is a funny thing and it doesn’t always tell us what we need to know for words are easily manipulated. There was a time when a bishop of Tennessee could with impunity pray, “Give us gay and grateful hearts, O Lord.” He couldn’t do that today. If we don’t know the meaning of the words we use how are we to address very real problems from the viewpoint of Christian morality? Why is “bugger” a bad word? The following entry from the Online Dictionary will help:

Noun 1.
bugger - someone who engages in anal copulation (especially a male who engages in anal copulation with another male)

sodomist, sodomite, sod, degenerate, deviant, deviate, pervert - a person whose behavior deviates from what is acceptable especially in sexual behavior

Verb 1.
bugger - practice anal sex upon
sodomise, sodomize

The problem we have in the Church today is that we forget what words actually mean and we would be horrified if we knew. There is nothing gay about Gay, it is all rather sad and St. Paul speaks about it rather clearly: “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error” (Romans 1:24-27). Paul’s clarity is obviously why Holy Scripture has to be explained away by those who don’t want us to know what a “bugger” is.

This is a picture of a would be June bride who seems glad to be a bugger.

Bishop Paul Moore and the Clergy Retreat

There are three things that stand out in my memory of the first Clergy Retreat I attended in the early seventies as a young priest.

The first was this: the day time events of the retreat were held at wealthy estate in the Diocese of Massachusetts. The host had graciously provided an open bar for the clergy for their refreshment. I was stunned to see several clergy obviously drunk very early in the day.

Second, Bishop Paul Moore came down from New York to lead us in several “retreat” sessions. I remember with startling clarity that he told us that “premarital sex”’ was perfectly alright. According to his daughter Honor Moore, in a recent New Yorker interview, his sense of shame and embarrassment over his own bisexual behavior made him look with compassion on others in similar situations. Living a double life and letting others think that he was wonderful, and having that justified by his daughter as heroic, as making him a great visionary, is part of the problem that the Episcopal Church is having today. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20). While on one level Paul Moore was moved by compassion for the poor, his own flagrant immorality made him a leader in the break down of marriages and families in our society and has grievously contributed to the sorrows of the poor, especially the countless fatherless children of the very poor he thought he was serving.

The third was that “Ben” Arnold, our Suffragan Bishop announced his divorce. That was a matter of personal grief to me who knew Ben as a compassionate man with a genuine concern for others.

The Clergy Retreat left me in shock. Even though my seminary experience gave strong indications that alcohol abuse and sexual immorality were problems within the seminary that I attended, it had never occurred to me that the seminaries were a mirror of the church and of my diocese, as I was about to experience it.

Prior to attending seminary my experience of the church as a layperson in that same diocese was of a vital, if somewhat liberal, parish church. The 1928 Book of Common Prayer was formative in my personal spirituality. I remember with delight Sung Morning Prayer and the congregation singing the Benedicite, omnia opera Domini. Some years before, on the “Canterbury Trail”, I had visited Canterbury Cathedral and was overwhelmed by a tremendous sense of coming home, coming home not necessarily to the Episcopal Church, but to the Anglican Communion and its long and sometimes troubled centuries of history. That sense has never quite left me but it stands with sharp and painful contrast with that early Clergy Retreat and the recent divulgences of Paul Moore’s daughter that her father had all the while been living a actively bisexusal double life, that if known and addressed would have had him defrocked in other parts of the country. These revelations make a certain perverse sense out of the nature of that Diocese of Massachusetts Clergy Retreat.

I have to ask the question: at what point do we say that we have had enough; that with the prophets and saints of old that we actually regard a sin as sin, instead of being willing to allow the sinners themselves to sweep it under the edge of the carpet saying, “Now, now, that’s alright”? Does God cast a blind eye to these things? “These things you have done, and I have been silent; you thought that I was one like yourself. But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you. Mark this, then, you who forget God, lest I tear you apart, and there be none to deliver!” (Psalm 50:21-22).

God is tearing the Anglican Communion apart as a direct result of the flagrant immorality of The Episcopal Church which is still sweeping its sins under the edge of the carpet, saying “Now, now, that’s alright.” No, it isn’t alright, God is not at one with the callous immorality of The Episcopal Church. He never has been.

No Quarter!

"Breathe through the heats of our desire thy coolness and thy balm; Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire; speak through the earthquake wind and fire, O still small voice of calm." - John Greenleaf Whittier

One wouldn’t off hand think of a Quaker poet knowing about “the heats of our desire,” but why not? Our image of Quakers is obviously neither historical nor accurate. Where did we think the name “Quaker” came from if not from some similarity with even fleshly earthquakes.

In a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, OSB, 23/4/51, C. S. Lewis says with apparent amazement “I’ve had enough of it on the opposite flank lately, having fallen among – a new type to me – bigoted and proselyting Quakers!” So much for the image of Quakers.

What Lewis says next is prophetic fifty-five years later, “I really think that in our days it is the ‘undogmatic’ & ‘liberal’ people who call themselves Christians that are most arrogant and intolerant. I expect justice & courtesy from many Atheists and, much more, from your people [Dom Bede was Roman Catholic]: From Modernists, I have come to take bitterness and rancour as a matter of course.”

Why should we have a sense of outrage at our modern liberals just because they continue the same behavior. Our faithless ‘progressives’ behave like they have no faith and we are surprised? One should remember that it was the liberal Sadducean priesthood that pursued the Christ until he was crucified. Merely beholding the man scourged was not enough. If they are true to type we should expect no less from them in the Episcopal Church today. Liberals are no strangers to blood lust, and that surfaces quickly if they are crossed or thwarted. Who, or what, drives such people? Our battle is not against flesh and blood, yet the roaring lion seeking someone to devour always seeks incarnation in those who can do the most damage.

Southern Civil War commanders understood the immediate challenges even if they misunderstood the larger issues. The enemies were “the violators of our hearths and homes” . Today they seek to destroy the very life and meaning of families. Stonewall Jackson was effective because he knew both that he had to fight, and he knew how to fight. “General Lee, if it please God, we will kill them all.” While you may not be comfortable with Jackson’s political conclusions at least recognize that you are in a battle with an enemy that will show you no quarter and act appropriately.