Small, fragile lights in the dark

In the past few months I've been doing a lot of reading on the implications of the Industrial Revolution - particularly as it relates to agriculture. In the Industrial Revolution we began to mechanize processes in order to increase efficiency and production. The result being a greater quantity of lower quality products. That, of course, is a drastic oversimplification, but it is a sufficient base for all that follows, ha ha.
These readings and thoughts have surfaced for me a lot of really interesting insights and parallels with the way we go about church and ministry. The result has been some major shifts in my philosophy of ministry and ecclesiology. I've been working on writing out all my thoughts in a comprehensible way, but I thought I'd share a little bit of what has influenced some of my thinking along the way...

The following are some excerpts from Wendell Berry's collection of essays, "Another Turn of the Crank."

The world of efficiency ignores both earthly and divine love, because by definition it must reduce experience to computation, particularity to abstraction, and mystery to a small comprehensibility...

Yet love obstinately answers that no loved one is standardized. A body, love insists, is neither a spirit nor a machine; it is not a picture, a diagram, a chart, a graph, an anatomy; it is not an explanation; it is not a law. It is precisely and uniquely what it is. It belongs to the world of love, which is a world of living creatures, natural orders and cycles, many small, fragile lights in the dark...

Of his experience witnessing his brother recovering from a stroke in the hospital:

It was impossible then not to see that the breathing of a machine, like all machine work, is unvarying, an oblivious regularity, whereas the breathing of a creature is ever changing, exquisitely responsive to events both inside and outside the body, to thoughts and emotions. A machine makes breaths as a machine makes buttons, all the same, but every breath of a creature is itself a creature, like no other, inestimably precious...

Any man's death diminishes me...The world of love does not admit the interchangeability of parts.