Wendell Berry cited in "Tending your small acreage"
05 May 2012
In his book "Home Economics," farmer-poet Wendell Berry writes, " ... it may be that our marriages, kinships, friendships, neighborhoods, and all our forms and acts of homemaking are the rites by which we solemnize and enact our union with the universe. These ways are practical, proper, available to everybody, and they can provide for the safekeeping of the small acreages of the universe that have been entrusted to us."
Although he doesn't mention it in that context, I would include the church, synagogue and mosque in that list of "forms and acts of homemaking." After all, these institutions are a kind of home, too; and in them, I like to think, "we solemnize and enact our union with the universe." Of course, that is the ideal toward which we strive; and, of course, Berry is talking in "ideals" as well.