It is with great pleasure that we have been informed of the conference being organized by the Korean National Council of Churches on the relationship of human beings toward the natural environment, and gladly respond to the gracious invitation that we extend a brief message on that significant occasion.

We humans must appreciate our relationship with the rest of creation as a seamless garment. When we open the eyes of our heart, we are able to discern the beauty of the world, namely that: “God saw everything that He made and, behold, it was altogether good and beautiful.” (Genesis 1.31)

This cosmic beauty is important not simply for aesthetic or preservationist reasons. The cosmic outreach of this relationship is proclaimed and defined immediately before the consecratory epiclesis (or invocation of the Holy Spirit): “Thine own from Thine own, we offer to Thee, in all things and for all things.” Beyond human beings, our Eucharistic offering includes the animals and plants, the trees and rivers, the mountains and oceans. The entire world is, as St. Maximos Confessor states in the 7th century, a “cosmic liturgy.” The human person, then, stands as a mediator, at the crossroads of the universe, called to receive the created world as a gift from God and, in return, to offer it back to God in thanksgiving for the life of the world.

As Orthodox Christians, we are committed ecologists. For, we believe that the roots of the environmental crisis are not primarily economic or political or technological, but profoundly and essentially religious and spiritual. This is because it is a crisis about and within the human heart. And what is required of us, at the threshold of the third millennium, is that we repent of ways in which we looked upon creation in the past, which implied an abusive, domineering attitude toward the natural world. Our task is to recall that we are not isolated from either God or the rest of creation. This is precisely what it means to be created “in the image and likeness of God.” (Genesis 1.26)

We wish you every success in your presentations and deliberations on this crucial topic of our generation.

Fervent supplicant to the Lord

+ Bartholomew