There was this absolutely beautiful young woman with hardly anything on (well, everything was just about covered - I’m sure you know what I mean). She was drop-dead gorgeous, coming up our street talking away to her friend. Then just as she drew level she opened her very inviting lips - yes, I was gawping - and exclaimed to her friend, "Feckinheck". The illusion of beauty banished in an instant. A few days ago as I came round a corner in Maryport I heard a strident young voice yell, "That’s no feckin ‘ good" and round they came, two tiny lads aged between 6 and 8 years. ‘Feckin’ and childhood innocence do not go together. Indeed the ‘F’ word reigns, supreme it seems, from T V screen to corner shop, from supermarket car park to mobile phone, to hearth and home. One of my favourite shopkeepers once leaned over the counter to two customers - "Outside, if you’re going to use language like that, not in here". It doesn’t matter all that much I suppose, yet it does. When I was a grubby youth the ‘F’ word meant only one thing and you sniggered it quietly amongst your friends at least half-a-mile away from any adult ears.

How to counterbalance it? I don’t know except that against all the harshness and coarseness that we encounter in our present age, I want to put up another ‘F’ word which is the most glorious in the English language and in Christian history, which Christians have been celebrating at Easter gone. So some stories to celebrate a much bigger ‘F’.

First one recent and very real, you may have followed it on regional T V news. Three young men were larking about. One went into a container to explore and his friend pushed the joking a little by shutting the door on him and shoving a lighted piece of paper through a hole. Then, horror of horrors, the container was full of combustibles and no one could get the door open again. So the friend, this glorious young man, burnt to death inside. The judge passed a sentence of manslaughter and felt it his duty to impose a custodial sentence on the jokey young friend. The parents of the dead boy asked the judge to let the guilty friend go free.

That’s the stuff real human beings are made of, the ‘F’ word at the heart of mankind. That’s real beauty.

Or again, a three year old girl died in a London hospital after mistakenly being given laughing gas instead of oxygen. The report was waiting as the doctor and family emerged from the coroners court sticking a microphone under the father’s nose. Anger? Demands for reparation? Revenge? Instead the father said simply that he had crossed the courtroom, hugged the distressed consultant and said, "I forgive you."

And again, two more young men, Sean and Frankie. Sean, as the young man burnt to death - full of life, intelligent, strong, the only child of a single mother: Frankie, an orphan who had moved from foster home to foster home, on drugs, living the life of petty crime, losing it all. And yes! Sean was going home late one evening and Frankie with some fellow louts, waylaid him, set upon him and kicked him to death. When Frankie was sentenced, the mother was heard to say in court, "I want that young man dead".

About six months later Frankie received his first letter from the mother, asking how he was managing, etc. etc. The letters kept coming and eventually Frankie wrote back. She asked if she could send him parcels of food and things he might need. He was pretty suspicious but afterwards agreed and the parcels came. Then later on she asked if she could visit. Frankie had nothing to lose, he had no other visitors, so she came, very regularly, and so they got to know one another. Frankie grew quite fond of her. Then his release date was coming up, Frankie was definitely of no fixed abode. She quietly said that he could come and stop with her if he wished until he found his way. Which he did and having a base address and being looked after day by day he quite soon found work and started what was for him a brand-new life. No drugs. No crime.

So the months passed. Then one day this small woman told Frankie that if he was willing she would like to adopt rum as her son. Her friends were dumbfounded, but she said to them that the drab young man who killed her son and stood in the dock was most certainly dead. The biggest ‘F word in the world.