Friday September 29, 2023

Linda Cheatham and Wendell Berry

Loving more

Aaron's powerfully evocative sermon on her family's experience with Monarch butterflies and even more about loving more and surrendering to that which is greater than we are -- sent me searching for the following favorite passage that I copied years ago from Chapter 20 of Wendell Berry's novel Hannah Coulter.

…“a "dream of time [that] seems to come to rest in eternity":

"My mind, I think, has started to become, it is close to being, the room of love where the absent are present, the dead are alive, time is eternal, and all the creatures prosperous. The room of love is the love that holds us all, and it is not ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back. It is Heaven's. Or it is Heaven, and we are in it only by willingness. By whose love... do we love this world and ourselves and one another? Do you think we invented it ourselves? I ask with confidence, for I know you know we didn't."