Having finally overcome a nasty habit of using unacceptable speech consisting of every sort of profanity known to man including the Lord’s Name, I can speak without shame and profess that if you use words that you would not say when standing in front of the priest at Mass waiting to receive the precious Body and Blood of Jesus Christ then you need to overhaul your vocabulary.
Using unacceptable words or phrases to express one self in any manner shows a lack of word usage skill and a lack of respect and love for your fellow man - your neighbor. Such behavior needs to be confessed.
The secret to resolving this issue is prayer, adoration, and intense self scrutiny. Also, I found that as I was blessed with His grace to remove from myself intense anger and other emotions, I am calmer and less prone to routinely explode when those around me cross the hidden line.
If I can do it, anyone can, and it is amazing when you realize that you can actually speak without fear of using expletives.
Eddie Mac
Good to hear!
We should say a prayer of reparation every time we hear our Lord’s name taken in vain.
A good sermon in
what it actually means to take the Lord’s name in vain is here.
We are not allowed to use our Lord’s name except with love, to honor His name, to use it with reverence, and to inform people about Him. Using it lightly, as a curse, an exclamation, an outburst of frustration, this we must not do. We must take care, and not sin with the name of God. His name is to be honored and treated in reverence.
It does not matter in regards to whether it is objectively a sin or not that you ‘mean nothing by it’ the very fact that using the name of Christ is something you treat so lightly as meaningless is a great sin. The spiritual force that inspires such use of the name of God is from Hell. It is a temptation. You teach others to do so by your bad example as well. It is the name of God, not your toy. It used to be that no one would take the name of Christ in vain, but then irreligious people made it common. Now people who are beginning to be religious think nothing of a serious sin that is condemned in a Commandment of God.
We should love the name of God and rejoice to hear it, it should put us in a different spirit. We should not think it is something meaningless to be said for our own purposes without regard for Him.
It can be hard to change bad habits.
That is why with something so serious we have to begin immediately and replace them with virtue.
Learning to always think of the name of Christ with love and respect is a great lesson.
The Golden Arrow
May the most holy, most sacred, most adorable, most mysterious and unutterable Name of God be always praised, blessed, loved, adored and glorified, in heaven, on earth and under the earth, by all the creatures of God, and by the Sacred Heart of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the most holy Sacrament of the altar.
The Golden Arrow was revealed by Our Lord Jesus Christ to a Carmelite nun of Tours in 1843 as a reparation for blasphemy. The sin of blasphemy was said to be a ‘poisoned arrow’ more grievous than all other sins. It follows that this prayer would most especially be appropriate after hearing the Holy Name blasphemed, and in reparation for such blasphemy generally.
Jesus said: ‘This Golden Arrow will wound My Heart delightfully, and heal the wounds inflicted by blasphemy.’
