Living faith …

… Work and Prayer: The Brief Friendship of Thomas Merton and Wendell Berry | Front Porch Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

 In his hermitage, Merton felt he was encountering real life and was therefore capable of giving himself to God more fully. This privileging of the concrete world of disembodied ideas, for both Merton and Berry, is rooted in the incarnation. Because the word has been made flesh “there are no unsacred places.” Berry illustrates this point well in “A Native Hill” from 1969: “A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place.” A path is the incarnation of a people’s idea of the place, while the road is almost pure abstraction whose “tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort.”