Language Muddled

Here is another overflow release from writing this week's sermon about Babel and Pentecost.  I want to take a minute and think about the true nature of our estrangement from one another and from our Creator.  I thought about taking this into the pulpit, but given the way I preach I don't really think I could keep all of this straight in verbal form, no matter how well I got it refined on paper.  Have you ever considered that we never truly understand everything about another person? Language gives us a window into what that person is thinking.  If you have enough time with a spouse you can learn a lot from observation, to the point where you almost know what they're thinking through non-verbal cues, thus that phenomenon where couples almost read each other's mind.  You can know almost everything about your children, having known them their whole lives, but at some point there is going to be a divergence between you.  You're going to think about something differently, your separate experiences are going to put some distance between  you, and you will have a miscommunication.
No amount of conversation or shared experience makes us immune from not understanding another person.  This is the fundamental reality that the story of Babel is meant to convey to us, we are inherently separated.  This is the fundamental miracle of Pentecost: we are brought together in one Spirit.  But Pentecost was not the end of human misunderstandings, oh so far from it.  Pentecost was such a powerful, and yet inexplicable phenomenon that the followers of the Jesus way lost it almost immediately and have had to engage in seemingly endless "discussions," about what it means to be the church ever since then. (I lift up prayers for my brothers and sisters in the United Methodist Church as they do this work in their general conference this week).
So many of our conflicts and tragedies are rooted in the simple fact that our language has been confused.  I wonder how and why God was so worried about that pile of bricks that He had to do this to us.
But then I think about how almost everything true and beautiful that we do is rooted in our need to understand and to be understood.  We create art to express to others those truths within ourselves that we want and need to put out there.  We explore and engage in science so that we can share knowledge and find the "truth" of how things work. We reach out for relationships with others, willingly dealing with the fact that we might be confused or misunderstood and even hurt by those relationships, because our need to relate goes that deep.
The story of Babel itself, reaching way back into our mythological, primordial understanding of the world, reveals to us that people have always wondered why on earth it is so hard for us to understand one another.  The struggle for understanding is one of those things that makes us human. The Scriptures of the Hebrews and the New Testament of the Christian church unabashedly tell us of this struggle.  They do so in many and varied forms from personal accounts to epic poems.  Most of the time these texts, contrary to popular impressions, are not so much telling us what we ought to do, as they are describing how we are and asking the question: Is this really how you want it?
Pentecost shows us a glimpse of something possible, a unity and an undoing of the isolation and estrangement to which we cling. I do believe we cling to it.  We resist truly being in conversation with others, because it is difficult, because it makes us uncomfortable, because... Babel.
Did God do this to us, or do we do it to ourselves?  The story blames God, I think, "not so fast." These stories are NEVER as simple as they seem, precisely because they are myths, which contrary to our modern prejudice, are actually much more true and universally applicable than the simple facts of history.
I'm trying to keep my eye on that knuckleball, if you understand what I'm saying.