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.
A charity which knows only how to give money is not yet Christian love. You will be free of guilt only when you also give your time, your energy, and your resourcefulness to help end such abuses for good, and when you allow nothing that lies hidden in the storehouse of your Christian religion to remain unused against the cancer that is destroying the vitality of our society in such alarming ways.
Don't cry for a man who's left you--the next one may fall for your smile.
It was my destiny to love and say goodbye.
It was roses, roses, all the way,_x000D_ _x000D_ With myrtle mixed in my path like mad.
Who love too much, hate in the like extreme.
Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.
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