When words fail…

Thanks to Val for sending me the link to this post in the Real Live Preacher blog (and its attendant comments, which are just as rich). The piece begins:

"The truth about writing finally becomes clear when you come to understand that words are cheap and easy. YOUR words are cheap and easy. Pain will bring this realization to you.

Words tossed carelessly at pain are an obscenity. What’s needed is a shoulder thrown against the load. What’s wanted is a back to bend and a soul to feel. What’s missing is any real commitment to living. What’s absent is any movement of sinew and muscle. There is no real stuff behind words, nothing to stink, nothing to flex, nothing to stand against even one moment of real pain."

I couldn't help wondering if perhaps the same is true about images, about music, about any of a number of ways we try to communicate and fail. And perhaps no more so than as we seek to be in relationship with transcendence.