I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever. Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
Interpretation
The quote conveys the essence of prayer as a vulnerable act of seeking guidance amidst uncertainty.
Wendell Berry's quote poetically illustrates the profound experience of prayer, portraying it as a delicate and somewhat fearful endeavor. Just like a man navigating a dark forest, prayer embodies the human struggle to find direction and assurance in times of fear and the unknown. This metaphor highlights both the insecurities and the intimate connection one seeks through prayer, emphasizing the emotional landscape of hope and apprehension that accompanies spiritual reflection.
In practice
During a gathering on the meaning of faith, one could share this quote to illustrate the depth of prayer.
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.
This moment in which you experience stillness is every moment. Don't let the mind seduce you into the past or future. Stay in the moment, and dare to consider that you can be free now.
If we can keep at least a bit of the mind clear about temporality, we can mange complicated, even difficult, times with grace.
Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.
There are more fools than wise men, and even in a wise man there is more folly than wisdom.
Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
I sleep seven hours. If I go to bed at two, I wake up at nine. If I go to bed at midnight, I wake up at seven. I don't wake up before - the house can fall apart, but I sleep for seven hours.
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