1st September—the Ecclesiastical New Year  

With the new ecclesiastical year before us (which we celebrated on 1 September), I take this opportunity, to wish you and all yours our Lord’s abundant blessings for the new year ahead.

Typically, any new year is filled with open potentialities; we place last year’s failures behind us and we look forward with a strong sense of excitement, and with a renewed sense of resolve at what lies ahead, together with what we might like to achieve for ourselves in the new year.
Whilst all this is ‘proper and right’, let us also—and indeed, always—allow a preeminent place for God into these hopes and dreams, aspirations and pursuits that we hope to realise in the year ahead. In so doing, we will be in a position to express our gratitude to our loving Lord for any achievements; but—and this is equally important—we will also see any inevitable failures also as opportunities, given to us, and indeed allowed by God, for our growth and for our good, to make us more wise and more humble, and hopefully more loving and compassionate.

In this way, we might also grow ever more cognisant that God is not absent in our lives; accordingly, we might proceed with a sense of fearlessness at the unknown adventure of life which lies ahead of us together with its inescapable challenges!

The first day of the ecclesiastical new year is a day dedicated to prayer for the protection of our environment. Marked by a profound awareness of the environment crisis, His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, throughout his Patriarchal ministry—and before—has consistently drawn attention to the world’s sacredness and to the urgent need for humanity’s profound change in attitude towards creation. Seeing the world from within a sacramental framework—namely a world impregnated with God’s presence and therefore holy—our Ecumenical Patriarch has issued countless declarations wherein the inherent value of all creation has been affirmed and the mistreatment of the planet has been identified as being nothing less than sin.

He has noted, for example, that whereas in the past, humankind as a whole would have had a congruous relationship with the world—something which would have seemed quite straightforward to them—the prevailing modern utilitarian and consumerist mindset, has made living in harmony with the environment increasingly more difficult. In the end, his environmental ethics are marked by a concern to reveal the eternal dimension of the world—to the extent that all creation is a ‘sign of God’, as noted already in the second century by St Irenaeus of Lyons—namely, its binding connection with heaven.

At a lecture at the Oxford Union (November 4, 2015), the Patriarch noted that: “the way we relate to nature and the biodiversity of creation directly reflects the way we relate to God and to our fellow human beings.” Statements of this kind are in line with his deep conviction that humanity’s abuse of the environment is tantamount to sin and as such, possibly even today’s modern heresy. Already in 1997 at a Symposium in Santa Barbara he had openly declared that:

“to commit a crime against the natural world is a sin. For human beings to cause species to become extinct and to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation; for human beings to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests, or destroying its wetlands; for human beings to injure other human being with disease; for human beings to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life, with poisonous substances, these are sins…. It is certainly God’s forgiveness, which we must ask, for causing harm to his own creation.”

In this understanding sin is not only the harm caused by human beings on other human beings but equally importantly the harm human beings cause creation, more specifically humanity’s harm on the animals, on trees, the air, the earth and water to name a few. According to the Ecumenical Patriarch, therefore, one’s relationship with the world, quite simply equally determines their relationship with the heavenly realm. Accordingly, following on from these initiatives, the faithful within Orthodox circles today pray that the earth may be protected from humanity’s harm, whereas in the past they would almost exclusively pray to be “protected from… plague, famine, earthquake, flood, fire…” In a hymn from the Vespers Service of September 1, dedicated to the protection of the environment, the faithful pray (and with this I end this reflection):

Philip Kariatlis
Sub-Dean