The incarnate Word is with us, is still speaking, is present always, yet leaves no sign but everything that is.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that the divine or meaningful presence is always around us, yet it manifests subtly through the world itself.
Wendell Berry's quote reflects the idea that profound truths and divine presence are constantly present in our lives, though they are not always visible or directly indicated. Instead of overt signs, we can find meaning and connection through our surroundings and experiences, reminding us to be mindful of the subtleties in life that illustrate deeper truths.
In practice
In a speech about mindfulness, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of noticing the beauty in everyday life.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
I couldn't remember when I'd stopped willing to be trans and started wanting to be trans. If there were a difference, I'd forgotten it.
Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.
Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.
The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.
But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!
Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate; debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be foregone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most.
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