It’s also reflective of a young person’s religion or faith in that it’s highly charged with sacramental imagery and with country imagery, because I was in the seminary for so many years in the country.

Berrigan is explaining how the imagery in his early writing (or an early work under discussion) bears the stamp of his formative religious training. “Sacramental imagery” points to a Catholic imagination shaped by liturgy, ritual, and the language of grace made tangible—bread, wine, water, oil—while “country imagery” suggests the rural setting of his years in seminary. The remark implies that style and symbolism are not merely aesthetic choices but records of lived formation: a young person’s faith expresses itself through the metaphors closest at hand. It also hints at later contrast in Berrigan’s life, where the sacramental sensibility persists even as his vocation turns outward into public witness and protest.