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.
Wouldn't it be a beautiful world if just 10 percent of the people who believe in the power of love would compete with one another to see who could do the most good for the most people?
The sweetest honey Is loathsome in his own deliciousness, And in the taste confounds the appetite: Therefore love moderately— long love doth so.
You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.
Thus you may understand that love alone is the true seed of every merit in you, and of all acts for which you must atone.
We must learn to love, learn to be kind, and this from the earliest youth; if education or chance give us no opportunity to practice these feelings, our soul becomes dry and unsuited even to understanding the tender inventions of loving people.
The love of a Sage for his fellows likewise finds expression amongst mankind. Were he not told sop, he would not know that he loved his fellows. But whether he knows it or whether he does not know it, whether he hears it or whether he does not hear it, his love for his is without end, and mankind cease not to repose therein.
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