An ecological central metaphor would encourage the same kind of humility in regard to our religious belief systems. From this point of view human experience is so wide and deep that none of our belief systems can capture it in its entirety. Similarly, none of our theologies can give a complete picture of divinity or a complete set of practices for relating to it. This will make it possible for people to hold multiple, mutually contradictory models of God in their hearts--male, female, loving, judgmental, indifferent, honest, devious, open, mysterious--and relate to whichever best fits their circumstances. In its conception of the vastness of the divine, the new view will resemble pantheism, but in the multiple models that it will apply to daily life it will resemble polytheism.
This will be a very liberating way to look at life. Rather than shoehorning our experiences into the particular set of concepts our dogma gives us (and explaining away whatever doesn't fit), we will be able to hold our experiences intact and search for the concepts that best explain them. Moreover, we will be able to drop the restrictive notion that one set of beliefs has to explain everything. Our religious thinking, like our ecological thinking, is just not advanced enough to allow that kind of unification. Any grand theory we could build at this point would have to do violence to the data.
It will also be a frightening way to look at life, for it will admit that we do not know with certainty what is going to happen to us, or even what is happening to us. We are doing the best we can to apply our experience, the revelations that have been given to us, and the collected wisdom of humanity--but that is not the same as saying we know what is going on. The new metaphor will encourage us to be open about our ignorance, and it will allow us to lay on the table the fears that we now hide away.