When humankind felt they had done all there was to do on earth and wanted to come closer to God than they ever had before, it was decided that they would build a miracle, a tower so high and mighty, it would reach into heaven and they would come to know God, and thus be able to form themselves like him and eventually, be like him.

God saw this with great disquiet and came down to the city where the tower was to be built. And he saw the people work busily on the endless spiralling tower and he became afraid of what their unity could do and he confused their languages so that they could no longer communicate on the particulars of building the tower and he scattered them all over the world.

That, according to the bible, is how the great tower of Babylon never came to be and how the different languages of this world did come to be.

You gain some, you lose some, as they say. Language is a beautiful thing, something that enables us to express our thoughts, feelings, prayers, hopes, despairs, loves and longings. Testing out our feelings by writing them, saying them out loud, turning them over in our heads. It’s a device for crafting relationships, friendships, it creates understanding for cultures and tribes that live differently but still know the same things, the same struggles and heartaches, joys and fears as we do – maybe in other terms, in other words, but still, essentially, the same.

The beauty of communicating no matter the language, of being understood by another living being, of being heard and not only that but: listened to.

That in itself is a kind of miracle, a tower of Babylon, don’t you think?