Language is a tremendous feature of our human being and allows us to interpret things, especially as words create a word picture of what we see. A reporter once asked two men at the construction site where a church was being built what each did for a living. The first man replied: “I’m a bricklayer.” The second said: “I’m building a cathedral!” How we interpret and name an experience largely determines its meaning to us. Philip Rieff writes that we live our lives under a certain “symbolic hedge” within a language and set of concepts by which we interpret our experience. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we can understand our experience within a language and set of concepts that have us believe that things are very meaningful or that they are quite shallow and not very meaningful at all. Experience is rich or shallow, depending upon the language within which we interpret it. For example, we see the language of soul, among other places, in some of our great myths and fairy tales, many of them centuries old. Their seeming simplicity masks a disarming depth. To offer just one example, take the story of Cinderella: The first thing to notice is that the name Cinderella is not an actual name but a composite of two words: Cinder, meaning ashes, and Puella, meaning young girl. This is not a simple fairy tale about a lonely, beaten-down young girl. It’s a myth that highlights a universal, paradoxical, paschal dynamic that we experience in our lives, where, before you are ready to wear the glass slipper, be the belle of the ball, marry the prince, and live happily ever after, you must first spend some prerequisite time sitting in the ashes, suffering humiliation, and being purified by that time in the dust. Thus, there are two ways of understanding ourselves: we can have a job or we can have a vocation; we can be lost or we can be spending our 40 days in the desert; we can be bitterly frustrated or we can be pondering with Mary; or we can be slaving away for a pay check or we can be building a cathedral. Meaning depends a lot on language.