So it’s possible that The Green Bible is actually poised between two audiences: one unready for the message, one already tired of it. Meanwhile, the creation, still “subjected to futility,” continues to “wait with eager longing” to be “set free from its bondage to decay.” And we, even at our best, still strive to know what it means to hold this world in stewardship. Creation remains always too large for us, too abstract. What’s real is this furrow of black soil, that crabapple tree: These we can protect insofar as we see them, touch them, and therefore know them. But no general principle, no notion of greenness, can tell us how to care for what occupies our field of vision this moment, what sifts between our outstretched fingers.
Richard Wilbur (and my kitchen chalk board) would agree — or at least, I take this to be a sentiment cut from the same cloth:
And now the quick sun,
Rounding the gable,
Picks out a chair, a vase of flowers,
Which had stood till then in shadow.
It is the light of which
Achilles spoke,
Himself a shadow then, recalling
The splendor of mere being.
As if we were perceived
From a black ship—
A small knot of island folk,
The Light-Dwellers, pouring
A life to the dark sea—
All that we do
Is touched with ocean, yet we remain
On the shore of what we know.