The following post on ‘good prayers using bad language’ came out of a situation where I had just written a letter to the mother of an old mate of mine. He and his entire family (including the mum) are from solid Aussie-Battler stock and—as the saying goes—’Don’t put up with bullshit and take no prisoners’. You could walk into their home any time of day or night and the air would be hazed blue and purple with a small number of R-rated adjectives that are always used in conversation in order to give moral support to exclamation marks just to so that everyone gets the point. On the richter scale of colourful-language-families, they would be about 9.
Anyway, here I was about to post this letter to her in which I had expressed my concern and good wishes ’cause she had just had half her lungs cut out due to cancer, and then I thought I might include some written prayers with the letter. I printed out the prayers, folded up the sheet of paper, put it in the envelope and then thought, ‘You’ve got to be joking! Talk about putting distance between a hurting woman and God! If she’s going to be allowed to speak in her dialect to God, they need colour.’ Someone once put it well when they said, ‘Pray as you can, not as you cannot.’
Good Prayers in Bad Language
