Essential unity (Wendell Berry)

   What is the burden of the Bible if not a sense of the mutuality of influence, rising out of an essential unity, among soul and body and community and world?  These are all the works of God, and it is therefore the work of virtue to make or restore harmony among them.  The world is certainly thought of as a place of spiritual trial, but it is also the confluence of soul and body, word and flesh, where thoughts must become deeds, where goodness must be enacted.  This is the great meeting place, the narrow passage where spirit and flesh, word and world, pass into each other. 

   The Bible’s aim, as I read it, is not the freeing of the spirit from the world.  It is the handbook of their interaction.  It says that they cannot be divided; that their mutuality, their unity, is inescapable; that they are not reconciled in division, but in harmony.  What else can be meant by the resurrection of the body?  The body should be filled with light,  perfected in understanding.  And so everywhere there is a sense of consequence, fear and desire, grief and joy.  What is desirable is repeatedly defined in the tensions of the sense of consequence.

--Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace:  The Agrarian Essays

Image source:  Edith London, Tension & Harmony