The Autumn has come. A succession of glorious sixty-year old sugar maples leads along a path that I, being alive still, am privileged to walk. I am thankful again for another Autumn. The crisp in the air is making me think of hooded sweatshirts and piles of crunchy leaves. Those leaves, yet to fall, are being made gold, ruddy, scarlet, and orange on their branches by a long forgotten painter of the Renaissance tradition. God does it every year.
Leaves turning random colors is not random at all when one thinks of the world as art and the painter as an artist. In fact, their many months of glorious green are no accident either. Green is a deliberate choice. It is an artist's choice. And I cannot help but feel an overwhelming melancholy pitted in the depth of my soul when I hear the acceptable wisdom of the modern world that the reason for greenness in leaves is chlorophyll. That is not a reason. What, then, if we must persist, is the reason for the greenness in the chlorophyll? An artist, when asked, "Why did you paint the queen's hat red?" does not answer "The reason it is red is because of the pigment in the paint." No, the artist answers "Because red indicates her passion, her desire, and the strength of her royal blood."
The Autumn colors remind us that leaves could have been any other color, even colors that God never invented. We could have been shamefully accustomed to the Springtime emergence of purple leaves and purple landscapes. We very well could have been taking for granted the purpleness of the grass we mow every summer. Those who think of themselves as environmentally conscious might have been speaking of "Going Purple" these days. The fact that we live in a green world and not a purple one is not a matter of chance but of choice. It certainly can't be explained with invented nouns like chlorophyll. That chlorophyll exists is just as phenomenal as leaves existing. But chlorophyll cannot explain the greenness of leaves. It only begs the question - why green?
We can ask questions like that to poets and theologians, but scientists ought not be asked such questions lest they inform us of strange new nouns that appear to be explanations for things. But why can't scientists be poets? I always thought that scientists would make the best sort of poets, and poets the most illustrative scientists. A scientist who explains greenness by saying that green is God's favorite color ought to be heard. That at least is a reason. That at least gives meaning to leaves. And it need not preclude him from the business of discovering things like chlorophyll. It would, I suspect, keep his mind from being pitted with melancholy and save him from resorting to non-explanations for things he finds hard to explain. Science books, then, would be like poetry, and learning about the world would be what it ought to be: the discovery of God.
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