Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of Being insofar as they bring the manifestation to language and maintain it in language through their speech. Martin Heidegger Human beings have this strange compulsion to try to put most everything about their lives into words. And once they do verbalize it to their satisfaction, not only does the phenomenon become real, but they also think they understand it. Equally strange is the tendency of human language to resist our attempts to put things into words.
Language seems to make some things more difficult to verbalize than others.
Feelings, for example, are notoriously difficult to express. But perhaps no area of human experience presents a more formidable challenge to this verbal compulsion of ours than religion. God, transcendent or spiritual experience etc. seems, by its very nature, to be beyond our capacity to express it, to put it into words. And yet from the very beginnings of recorded human communication on the walls of caves, through to our own day in churches, synagogues and everyday conversations, in writing and in oral speech, we doggedly continue to try to bring communication and religion together, to put religious experience into words so that others might share it, and perhaps also to make it real and understandable to ourselves. Some of these attempts, such as those in the Bible, have achieved the level of great art.