Aging & Wisdom Quote by Daniel Berrigan

The line reads like an artist’s commentary, but it’s really a quiet confession: Berrigan is admitting that his imagination was trained by formation, not just by taste. “Highly charged” does double duty. It suggests aesthetic intensity, yes, but also moral voltage - the way sacramental language can make the ordinary world feel electrically meaningful. He isn’t describing mere decoration (a cross here, a chalice there); he’s describing a sensibility in which symbols are not metaphors but instruments, meant to alter the viewer’s conscience.

His comparison to “a young person’s religion or faith” is telling. Youthful belief is often totalizing, hungry for images that can hold more feeling than words. Berrigan frames sacramental imagery as the native visual grammar of that stage: not nuanced doctrine, but vivid, bodily signs. Bread, wine, water, fields, seasons - things you can touch. That’s where “country imagery” matters. Seminary “in the country” isn’t pastoral wallpaper; it’s a training in rhythms of growth, labor, and mortality, where theology and weather share the same calendar. The subtext is that faith, early on, is learned through landscape as much as liturgy.

Context sharpens it. Berrigan became famous for political resistance grounded in Catholic sacramental thinking: bodies count, rituals bind communities, violence profanes. By tracing his imagery back to rural seminary years, he’s also defending a fusion that critics often separate - spirituality and politics, art and activism. The intent is to normalize that fusion: of course his work looks sacramental; he was formed inside a world where symbols were meant to be lived.