I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that love is the fundamental force behind the creation and sustenance of the world.
Wendell Berry's quote highlights the essential role that love plays in the existence and continuity of the world. It suggests that love is not only the creative power behind our universe but also the glue that holds it together, and that redemption, both of individuals and society, is only possible through love. This perspective encourages us to recognize the transformative and redemptive qualities of love in overcoming challenges and fostering connection.
In practice
In a speech about forgiveness, I quoted Berry to emphasize the need for love to heal relationships.
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.
Yet I was ready for love and joy. I wanted to let go of my pain. I wanted to pursue life instead of holding fast to fantasies of death.
I loved her for so long. Our past trails behind us like a comet's tail, the future stretched out before us like the universe. Things happen. People get lost and love breaks.
Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
However gross a man may be, the minute he expresses a strong and genuine affection, some inner secretion alters his features, animates his gestures, and colors his voice. The stupidest man will often, under the stress of passion, achieve heights of eloquence, in thought if not in language, and seem to move in some luminous sphere. Goriot's voice and gesture had at this moment the power of communication that characterizes the great actor. Are not our finer feelings the poems of the human will?
A certain something, he felt, had managed to work its way in through a tiny opening and was trying to fill a blank space inside him. The void was not one that she had made. It had always been there inside him. She had merely managed to shine a special light on it.
When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.
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