From Reading Wendell Berry During Sermon Prep.

“The whole creation exists only by participating in the life of God, sharing in His being, breathing His breath.  “The world,” Gerard Manley Hopkins said, “is charged with the grandeur of God.”  Such thoughts seem strange to us now, and what has estranged us from them is our economy.  The industrial economy could not have been derived from such thoughts any more than it could have been derived from the Golden Rule.

If we believed that the existence of the world is rooted in mystery and in sanctity, then we would have a different economy.  It would still be an economy of use, necessarily, but it would e an economy also of return.  The economy would have to accommodate the need to be worthy of the gifts we receive and use, and this would involve a return of propitiation, praise, gratitude, responsibility, good use, good care, and a proper regard for the unborn.  What is most conspicuously absent form the industrial economy and industrial culture is this idea of return.  Industrial humans relate themselves to the world and its creatures by fairly direct acts of violence.  Mostly we take without asking, use without respect or gratitude and give nothing in return.  Our economy’s most voluminous product is waste–valuable materials irrecoverably misplaced, or randomly discharged as poisons.

to perceive the world and our life in it as gifts originating in sanctity is to see our human economy as a continuing moral crisis.  Our life of need and work forces us inescapably to use in time things belonging to eternity, and to assign finite values to things already recognized as infinitely valuable.  This is a fearful predicament. It calls for prudence, humility, good work, propriety of scale. It calls for the complex responsibility of care taking and giving back that we mean by “stewardship.”

Wendell Berry in The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land, ed. by Norman Wirzba