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 small boy around a small circular
garden and shouting at him something like, “I’ll get you, you little
bugger!”
Suddenly
an adult figure looms out of the receding mists of my memory. It is Mr. Steele who grabs me by the scruff
of my neck 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.
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 what buggery is, is never actually
mentioned, just a lot of vague bosh. I
have no idea what the explanation might have been. 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. 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)
In I Corinthians 6:9 the NIV
translates the word as “homosexual offenders.”
The NKJV is characteristically more blunt and uses the word “sodomites.”
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.
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