**Practical Implications**

What might this kind of theology mean in practice? Essentially, I believe it highlights two things: It highlights the poetics of reading—that is, that re-reading is central to remaking a tradition's meaning—and the poetics of landscape—that is, that seeing this ordinary and damaged world with new eyes of appreciation can inspire care, preservation, and where necessary, restoration.

First, let us think about the poetics of reading. If Christian anti-environmentalism has painted itself into a corner of inaction, this is largely the result of readings that assume a reader who is uninvolved not only in the ongoing creation of the world but in the creation of theological meaning itself, that is otherwise fixed and already given. And there are at least three fixed meanings associated with the creation that remain dogma and sugges<sup>t</sup> no significant ongoing role for human agency in the creation. I am thinking of three specific problems: (1) The Creation is read as a one-time event that brought all matter into existence out of nothing by the hand of God who alone possesses the power of novelty; (2) the fall is an unfortunate, even catastrophic, event that has cast us out into a world of matter that is itself fallen and a reminder of our absence from the presence of God, heaven, and our true spiritual nature; and (3) our only obligation to this temporary physical world is to use it for our self-interest. These readings of the Bible have been central to climate skepticism, but they aren't necessary. In the same way that Christ's atonement allows a reconsideration of the meaning of the past, ecotheologians and Pope Francis himself have shown that embracing the freedom and responsibility to reread the Bible and the Creation story is consistent with faithfulness and can lead readers to a new level of understanding of human responsibilities. It would be a mistake, in other words, to always be reading to protect an endangered originary meaning when the goal should be to find contemporary application and relevance. The latter is not inconsistent with tradition but may, in fact, hold the key to its continuing vitality.

What if Christian skeptics questioned the inevitable conclusion or accepted implications of a creation *ex nihilo*? Lucretius and his atomist predecessors o ffered an understanding of the origins of matter that turned out to fit more comfortably with the story of evolution than did Christianity. And because it o ffered an understanding of a world subject to chance, it also more readily understood the reason for evil and su ffering in the world. As some ecotheologians, such as Catherine Keller and others have argued, perhaps the biblical account leaves more room for pre-existing chaotic matter than was assumed.<sup>15</sup> And perhaps this matters because it stresses the re-creativity of human agents who participate in and even partner with Creation to remake the world. A creation *ex materia* feels like a suggestion of a story of nature that does not begin at some radical starting point but is always *in media res*. While the biblical account of Creation is famously ambiguous, an *ex materia* understanding of creation is at least more consistent with lived experience of the natural world. While a creation out of nothing preserves the space and power of the divine as the source of all novelty, novelty in the physical world and in culture nevertheless always depends on a re-organization of what comes before. Christians might imagine, then, that even the originary, Adamic language born of awe in the Garden was not new even if its grammar was. The question of the historical status of Adam and Eve doesn't have to be swept aside in order to understand them as always also potent mythological symbols of living human beings that begin not at the beginning of time but here and now. Each believing reader stands like these precursors in the present facing the future, always in the wake of collective and individual histories that haunt the present. Ritual, performance, poetry, and music, as Eliade (1971) has so eloquently argued in *The Myth of the Eternal Return*, return us again and again to the Adamic moment of Creation, or we might say to the "second Adam" or Noah who always begins again. The ritualistic returns to creation in the arts and in religious practice are ways of suggesting that there is no return to an absolute beginning but instead highlight the perpetual responsibility to reimagine origins so as to refashion moral possibility. This performance of acting as if I were at the beginning of time does not erase the vestiges of the past but is instead a way of imagining what vestiges I am tasting when I taste the world, when I strive to see it with naked and newborn eyes and how I might rearrange those elements through acts of creation into a new world.

In this way, Christians might consider Adam and Eve as caught in a kind of dramatic irony wherein they cannot ye<sup>t</sup> see that the newness around them is a function of a kind of grace-induced forgetting. The old memories have simply gone away. The newness of the world, then, is uncanny, providing echoes of something only vaguely intuited but hinted to have come before. In re-reading the Creation, readers do not go back to the Garden, but they do *imagine* going back. This is a vital distinction. If readers fail to take responsibility for the imaginative leap that they make in going back to those originary roles of Adam and Eve, they also shield themselves from the roles they play and the damage they do in the contemporary garden of this earth. This shielding is precisely what motivates Carolyn Merchant's warning about the dangerous potential of the Eden myth.<sup>16</sup> However, what Merchant doesn't adequately account for is the power of the imagination to remake the meaning of such myths. After all, theologians of a Fortunate Fall and artists like Walcott and Aronofsky, as just two examples, are using the myth of the Creation and the fall more ethically and creatively not to justify further exploitation, degradation or mere instrumental use, but rather to inspire new grounds for hope and awe in the wake of catastrophe.

Which brings me to the second practical implication of a postcolonial ecotheology, that of the value of experiencing wonder in this present moment and landscape. Since none of us can go back to a world untouched by human impact, it is tempting to deny that such an impact exists or to wish for transcendence as a form of escape from such conditions. What is needed, however, is a sobered hope. Similar to the spirituality of the second half of life articulated by Richard Rohr, hope in the Anthropocene is a more mature desire for transcendence that is not rebellion, rejection, or denial of what came before but a return that includes but transforms the meaning of the past.<sup>17</sup> The facts of the Anthropocene can lead to toxic nostalgia, just as they can lead to hardened denial. Since neither is practical or adequate to inspire a di fferent future other than that predestined by the conditions of

<sup>15</sup> See (Keller 2003).

<sup>16</sup> See (Merchant 2003).

<sup>17</sup> See (Rohr 2011).

history, I am suggesting that intentional re-creations of original myths remind that the imagination is the locus of creative, agential freedom to choose a new future.

Consider, for example, the difference between imagining a present landscape as a static space that is predicted either by God's past creativity or humanity's past depravity as opposed to seeing it as a manifestation of an ongoing creation where God and heaven are immanent, and the future is open. The latter, which we already saw was central to postcolonial poetics, emphasizes human creative capacity and accountability as co-participants in the Creation. This reverses the negative connotations of the Fall—a physical world that is a perpetual reminder of human sinfulness and exile from God's presence—and transforms it into moral opportunity, as a story not ye<sup>t</sup> written by humanity's future choices. The ethical implications of a Fortunate Fall are not unlike those of Epicureanism; a Fortunate Fall suggests that, instead of denying the flesh, deeper joy will be found in the modest managemen<sup>t</sup> of a pursuit of pleasure, in light of physical and temporal limits. The postcolonial poetics I have described anticipated the criticism of White (1967), and agrees that returning to the inherent value of physical life is vital for Christians to find a way out of the legacies of prior catastrophe.

A Fortunate Fall requires learning to see and accept both the beauty and wonder but also the shame and darkness of ecology. Exotic natural beauty distracts with its marvels and makes the love of nature seem, well, natural, but the true test of that love is how well humans cope with and accept the facts of biological existence—ordinary and dying bodies in ordinary and changing landscapes of home. The mundane and present landscape is a litmus test for one's ability to tolerate mystery and to accept one's mortal createdness. As William Jordan (Jordan 2003) has written, creation is a source of anxiety because it is "troubled, destructive, and shameful" (p. 40). Only in frozen frames of aesthetic beauty does nature seem relentlessly friendly. But Jordan argues that religion must come to terms with the fact that there is "a contradiction inherent in creation" (p. 41). The contradiction includes such facts of nature that new life comes from violence, beauty and ugliness are interdependent, and chaos is inseparable from the order of the Creation. Jordan implies that religion struggles to come to terms with nature because nature is a sign of mortality's injustices of evil and suffering. To confront the complexities of climate change, in sum, Christians need stronger and better theodicies. They need, in other words, stronger grounds for bringing God closer to the messiness of the Creation and made more relevant to human and imperfect responses to it.

Walcott offers some concluding wisdom. Despite a life he often described as weighed down by his own sins and by the sins of history, the immanence of God's glory was central to Walcott's oeuvre. He argued against the tendency to assume that some better world lay across the earth or across the threshold of death and instead brought our focus back to the sights of ordinary light touching upon the familiarity of things and transmuting them into poetic vision. As Walcott (1997) notes in his remarkable poem, *The Bounty*: "Between the vision of the Tourist Board and the true/Paradise lies the desert where Isaiah's elations/force a rose from the sand" (p. 2). Echoing Leopold's famous call for building roads of receptivity into the still unlovely human mind, Walcott describes an abundant world that only requires the poetic eyes to see it. What blinds the human eye is either worldly hierarchies of beauty that predetermine what is valuable and what isn't or the false religion of believing that paradise is unavailable here and now. What causes the desert to blossom as the rose is a transformation of consciousness, not the act of engineering a garden in the desert or the anticipation of divine intervention that would take us away from this fallen world. Novelty emerges from the capacity and willingness to see the inherent and always available beauty of the earthly desert of this planet, however, compromised by prior human error.

If Walcott's postcolonial poetics is a theology, it is decidedly a theology of a creation *ex materia* and not *ex nihilo*, which I am arguing for not so much as a point of doctrine but as an imaginative and poetic practice. It points to a power that respects the contours of a prior reality ye<sup>t</sup> expresses true freedom as it works within the restraints of being. If we are to take this as a theologically serious idea, it suggests that the atonement is more than a redress of the Fall but the very engine of the Creation itself, since it takes up the unorganized pre-existent material of before and shapes it into a hopeful vision of what is

perpetually ye<sup>t</sup> to come. Artistic creativity is a reminder that human beings participate in their own, potentially atoning and redemptive, way in the ongoing creation of the world. A postcolonial theology for the Anthropocene embraces aesthetic appreciation, the gifts and pleasures of embodiment, and the potency of human agency. This need not inspire indifference in the face of physical suffering. Instead, it could inspire a spirit of reverence for beauty, and a responsiveness to the degradations that have imperiled that beauty.

Walcott wrestled with and decried the environmental degradations of his native island of St. Lucia all of his life, and ye<sup>t</sup> he never felt he was adequate to or able to exhaust its beauty:

ye<sup>t</sup> there are the days when every street corner rounds itself into a sunlit surprise, a painting or a phrase, canoes drawn up by the market, the harbour's blue, the barracks. So much to do still, all of it praise.
