Spiritual climate change...

By Pene Beavan Horton

I have recently tried to read five best-selling books, by highly acclaimed authors, and in each case I was turned off the story because the author used ugly words.  There was no need for them...the stories would have been best sellers without them, so I wonder why these authors felt compelled to sprinkle the pages with what amounts to excrement and blasphemy?

Hold on, you may be thinking, people speak like this, so the authors were just keeping things real.  Which brings me to the next question...why do people use ugly language? It is not sophisticated or clever or kind to spew this type of talk.

I put the best-selling authors back on the laundry bookshelf, unread... the price was too high. I didn't want my mind turned into a dumping ground for ugly talk and blasphemy, authors using Jesus’ name as a swear word, after he died in agony on the cross for us.

By writing this I am certainly not trying to say how good I am and how rotten everyone else is if they use bad language... many people who habitually use this type of talk don't realize that others may find it offensive. Some couldn't care less, but others just don't think about what they are saying. "Oh, 's....', I just stepped in the doggie's poo-poo's...'

We wouldn't plaster our living room walls with excrement, so why paper the walls of our mind with it? For people who spend billions a year on cosmetics and keeping themselves clean and gorgeous on the outside, why this gap between inner and outer cleanliness? Sadly, ugly words even come out of the mouths of small boys and girls, as well as best-selling authors and many in between. 

This is a form of societal pollution we can do something about, starting with ourselves. Don't buy the offending books, don't watch the ugly movies and TV shows, don't use the offensive language, don't be afraid to ask people to refrain from using blasphemous and ugly words in front of you...same with 'dirty' jokes.

This is still a beautiful world we live in... cutting down on this kind of conversational pollution is well within our power and in its own way it can have a major effect on climate change...spiritual climate change, as one by one we do what we can to stop the flow of ugly words.