There are words that do more than describe. They tremble under the weight of what they carry. Words like holy, grace, spirit, or God. These are not merely signs pointing to ideas, but vessels, worn smooth by centuries of touch and trembling, cracked by misuse, occasionally patched by poetry, and still, somehow, full of longing.
To speak of the sacred is to enter a charged field. Religious language does not behave like ordinary speech. It evokes, summons, gestures. It hints rather than explains. It walks with bare feet on ground presumed holy. And yet, we speak it. We must. Even if imperfectly, even if only in fragments.
But the trouble begins when we forget the tentativeness of such speech. When metaphors become metaphysics. When symbols become slogans. When a word like salvation is used not to invite, but to divide. Or when God becomes less the Infinite and more a password for belonging to the right club.
We humans are meaning-makers, and religion has long been our most ambitious attempt at naming what lies beyond naming. But sacred words have a curious fragility. Use them too lightly, and they lose their shine. Use them too rigidly, and they become blunt instruments. Sacred speech, at its best, hovers, never fully grasped, never entirely domesticated.
I think often of Moses before the burning bush. He wants a name, a handle, a certainty. What he receives is a verb. I am who I am. Or perhaps, I will be who I will be. The sacred, it seems, is not a fixed noun, but a dynamic presence. A becoming. A mystery that resists capture, even in the holiest of syllables.
Still, we try. And perhaps rightly so. For to give up on religious language is to risk surrendering our deepest intuitions about the meaning of existence to the marketplace of clichés and slogans. If we cannot speak of the sacred, we will forget how to recognise it. If we do not try to name the divine, we may cease to expect it at all.
Yet, this naming must come with humility. The mystics understood this. Meister Eckhart once said, “God is no more this than that.” Simone Weil preferred to speak of decreation rather than possession. The holiest among us are often those who, having spoken, fall silent, who know that the words they use are gestures, not definitions.
The peril of religious language lies not in its use, but in its misuse. When it becomes territorial. When it becomes formulaic. When it is wielded to silence rather than invite. One sees this in public discourse all too often, faith turned into a slogan, doctrine brandished like a weapon, the sacred flattened into certainty.
And yet, there remains a power in these words. When spoken with care, they re-enchant the world. They help us see trees as more than lumber, bodies as more than biology, time as more than minutes ticking. They open space for reverence, awe, and repentance. They remind us that we are not the authors of our own breath.
I do not think we should abandon religious language. I think we should recover it, not in triumph, but in trust. Not as a private code, but as a shared invitation. Not as proof, but as poetry. To say blessed, mercy, shalom, amen, namaste, or be still is to reach for a language deeper than transaction, one that honours both the speaker and the mystery to which they speak.
This week, revisit a sacred word that has grown thin from overuse or painful from misuse. Do not discard it. Sit with it. Write it on a scrap of paper and carry it in your pocket. Ask it what it wants to say now, in this season of your life. Use it sparingly, tenderly, like a candle in the dark, not to prove a point, but to light the way.
