God Quote by Wendell Berry — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product. This is only a way of saying that by ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity.”

“Charity even for one person does not make sense except in terms of an effort to love all Creation in response to the Creator's love for it.”

“I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a "hypaethral book," such as Thoreau talked about - a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread.”

“Good human work honors God's work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit. (pg. 312, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)”

“A man who is moved towards doing one thing or another purely by the consciousness of God's will and the desire to please Him, never prefers one activity to another, even if one is great and lofty, and another petty and insignificant; but he has his will equally disposed towards either, so long as they are pleasing to God. So whether he does something lofty and great or petty and insignificant, he remains equally calm and content; for he has but one intention and one aim, to the exclusion of all else — to please God always and in all he does, whether in life or in death, as the Apostle says: 'Wherefore we labour, that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted of him' (II Cor. v. 9).”

“Earthly contemplation means to the Christian, we have said, this above all: that behind all that we directly encounter the Face of the incarnate Logos becomes visible... Contemplation does not ignore the "historical Gethsemane," does not ignore the mystery of evil, guilt and its bloody atonement. The happiness of contemplation is a true happiness, indeed the supreme happiness; but it is founded upon sorrow.”

“Pannenberg thematizes the latter as “prolepsis”: although the New Creation still lies in our future, or more correctly in the “future of our future,” the Easter event is already and normatively a manifestation in our time and history of what is the not-yet still-future eschatological-apocalyptic destiny for all the world.”

“I am praying that the Church will be united under the Lordship of Jesus Christ around the seat of truth so that we can arise to oppose the activities of Satan on the Earth.”