Of prayer and place, with Wendell Berry and Richard Rohr

Something seems to work between the two...

- "By interworking of chance and choice, I have happened to live nearly all of my life in a place I don't remember not knowing. Most of my forebears for the last two hundred years could have said the same thing. I was born to a people who knew this place intimately, and I grew up knowing it intimately. For a long time the intimacy was not very conscious, but I certainly did not grow up here thinking of the place as 'subject matter, I have never thought of it that way. I have not lived here, or worked with my neighbors or family, or listened to the storytellers and the remembers, in order to be a writer." - Wendell Berry, Imagination in Place, 1

- "To be contemplative, we have to have a slight distance from the world - we have to allow time for withdrawal from business as usual, for mediation, for prayer in what Jesus calls 'our private room.' However, in order for this not to become escapism, we have to remain quite close to the world at the same time, loving it, feeling its pains and its joys as our pains and our joys. So the fulcrum must be somehow be in the real world [sic]. True contemplation, all the great masters say, is really quite down to earth and practical, and does not require life in a monastery." - Richard Rohr, A Lever and Place to Stand, 1ff.