Language and the Divine

Good morning. You start to realize pretty quickly that when we talk about Source—about the Divine—we’re using a tool that was never designed for the job. Language works by carving up reality into pieces: this and that, subject and object, something over here being described by someone over there. It’s incredibly useful for navigating the world of things, but the moment we try to apply it to what isn’t a thing, it begins to strain under its own structure. Because the Divine, if it is truly what we’re pointing toward, doesn’t sit out there as an object to be observed, defined, or contained. And yet, the moment we speak, we force it into that mold. We objectify what cannot be objectified, and in doing so, we don’t necessarily get it wrong—we just get it reduced.

So the issue isn’t simply that language is weak or insufficient; it’s that it’s built on assumptions that don’t hold up in this territory. It assumes separation. It assumes distance. It assumes there is something to point at. But what happens when what you’re trying to speak about is not separate from you, not distant, not even properly a “thing” at all? You end up talking in circles, leaning on metaphor, stretching meaning, because you’re trying to describe what can only really be encountered.

And that’s where the question turns: what do you do with something you can’t fully know in the way language demands? Maybe the answer is that you stop trying to know it that way. Because we already operate with another kind of knowing all the time. We know people, not as a list of definable traits, but as a lived familiarity, a kind of shared presence. You could never fully explain someone you love, but you know them unmistakably. That kind of knowing doesn’t objectify—it participates.

So maybe that’s the shift. The Divine isn’t something to be pinned down and explained, but something to be entered into, related with, lived alongside—if “alongside” even works as a phrase. Language still has a role, but it becomes more of a gesture than a container, more of a pointer than a definition. And instead of seeing its failure as a problem, you begin to recognize it as a clue—that what you’re dealing with refuses to be reduced to an object because it was never an object to begin with.