gifts and obscenities

this was originally a letter i wrote to a friend, but it's pretty much what i want to say about this, so i'll keep it.


I'm reading a beautiful book right now called "Free of Charge: Giving and Receiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace." Essentially, it's about gifts. Giving gifts, receiving gifts, gifts from God. It's made me look at a lot of things differently - for instance, I've been thinking about my volunteer house. And of course, L'Abri, because everything kind of makes me think about L'Abri.

One of my favorite memories of L'Abri was when one of the workers told me that I could swear as much as I wanted while I was there. It sounds silly, but I was pretty angry, confused, and lost when I landed in Greatham, and when Esther passed the ketchup and told me that I didn't have to change my vocabulary to be welcome, it was, ridiculously, transformational.

Well, here at my volunteer house we are not allowed to swear. And it drove me crazy at first. I don't like institutions much (this is another story that I've been recently discovering and will share soon) and I don't like institutions that restrict my behavior. (The no-drinking thing is its own kettle of fish that I will also tell in another story).  But I've been thinking about it recently, and I've been particularly thinking about the concept of "being offended," since the official reason that we don't swear at the volunteer house is because it might offend someone. Now this is all well and good, because it's important to respect people and honor their boundaries however we can. But as I've been reading this book about gifts, I've been thinking more about "political correctness" and "offending" people, and I've been wondering if there is something that's missing.

Maybe "not being offended" isn't a right that we are all born with - it's a gift that one person, in love, gives to another. When I choose not to swear around someone more sensitive, I am giving him a gift. It's a love offering from me to him. But when he treats it as a right, then it's annoying as hell. When a parent treats your "best behavior" in the house as a right that  is owed to them, instead of a gift that is freely given out of love, then it's a commodification of what should be a free-will exchange. Similarly, when Esther gave me permission to curse my wee little heart out at L'Abri, she was giving me a gift. She said that it was all right to be me, in all my offensive crudity. Unfortunately, at the time, I took it as a right. But it was a love offering, too.

So how can both sides be a gift? Well, I think that maybe every time we show grace to someone we are giving them a free gift. And sometimes other people give us that gift and we receive it, and sometimes we give the gifts to other people. It's a perpetual momentum of gift giving and accepting.

The illness of our society, I think, is this demand for things. We demand political correctness and compassion and non-offensiveness - all good things! - but the demand itself negates the beauty of what love is. It's a gift, not a right. When we demand it, we're stripping away what makes it so beautiful. How many people doyathink walk around all day enraged at being offended, but never appreciating when someone doesn't offend them? I guess it's a perspective thing. Maybe we should go through the day expecting to give grace to other people (to be givers), and then when other people give grace to us (and we can become receivers) then we can be delighted and receive that love as a gift.

So this is what has been on my heart lately. I hate being so easily offended. I'm going to try and see love as more of a gift and less of an obligation.