Season of Creation and the Human Recklessness

This week, at the beginning of the month of September, is the start of Season of Creation which carries-on until the fourth of October, when the season is closed with an extended ecumenical meeting in a ceremonial no less important than the ceremonial of the launching.

This ecclesiastical season has entered the annual ecumenical calendar, due to international ecumenical efforts and reached us in the Middle East, through the Middle East Council of Churches, 3 years ago, through which activities kept expanding until they include all the countries of the region.

In this context, we must mention that the MECC is the engine for the activities of this important ecumenical season, through the concerned departments and through its blessed leaders, as well as through the member churches who never hesitated to provide all basic facilities for ecumenical activities.

In this context as well, we must mention that the quarterly retreat held by the MECC team at the central level, which happened to be on the first day of the Season of Creation, will evolve around environmental concerns from the point of view of the Creator’s creation, which He created for the humankind and where He embraces Him, be it at the level of prayers or at the level of meditation and thinking. The seminars of this retreat will be animated and coordinated by Church ministers who are concerned with environment or have specialized in it.

We must also point out that the conference that was held last month in Cairo by the Association of Theological Institutes in the Middle East (ATIME), affiliated with the MECC, also focused on the environmental issue, in which very rich ideas were presented and which produced promising results for the Church and seminary work in the environmental field in the Middle East.

As for the next stage, specifically on the fourth and fifth of October, the MECC will hold a conference on the environment and climate change at the Holy Spirit-Kaslik and Saint Joseph Universities in Beirut, with high-level international and local scientific participation.

Environmental concern is therefore at the heart of the work of the Council and the Church, which did not skimp on experts and volunteers in this field.

Environmental concern!

Yes, the environment has become the worry of those concerned who are aware of the reality of things and our fate on the environmental, so life, level, while sleep tight, beneficiaries who are not responsible neither for the environment nor for the future of generations that will inherit a damaged and spoiled environment that is not suitable for human life, the opposite of what longed for all attempts that aimed in the past three decades to establish sustainable development policies.

After environmentalists have reached, during the past decades, advanced positions in decision-making in the industrialized world, we find that these same people change their priorities in favor of investment, reducing unemployment, and increasing employment opportunities.

Since the nineties of the last century, it has been clear that there are economic and political powers in the world that are not concerned with the environment, as opposed to those who were desperate to defend it. You find environmental activists carrying various reports, projects, and proposals, with which they roam the offices of political and economic decision-makers, trying to find a way to implement their vision, but they find only a limited response, which may not exceed courtesy or courteousness, and sometimes procrastination.

There are those who deal with the environmental disasters creeping on humanity as if they are a luxury that can be adopted or declined. As for the specialists in this field, and the activists in it, we can call them heroes and fighters, as they work tirelessly and relentlessly, raising their voices loudly, so that whoever hears may hear.

As for environmental legislation, and the institutions concerned with implementing these legislations, their capabilities and powers remain limited in comparison with the power of those who spoil the environment and who control the economic and political decisions.

As for the programs concerned with spreading environmental awareness, whether through school curricula or through awareness campaigns, they are insufficient and their capabilities are limited; there is no room for comparison between their effectiveness and the effectiveness of advertisements that promote what spoils the environment. Therefore, we witness an almost complete lack of environmental awareness in some regions of the world, and this awareness varies from one country to another, or one region to another, or from one social group and another.

The starting point of the Church, and of course the MECC, is to transfer environmental awareness from the purely earthly scientific realm to the divine realm and to tell people that you are responsible for preserving creation, the gift of the Creator, the milieu that God made for your life and development, and for keeping this creation as it is, and preventing harm from it. No Rather, improve it as much as possible. The Church asks society: What have you done with the gift of the Creator? What did you do with the trust that He handed over to you and made it available for you to improve your life on the day you were placed on this earth?

The environmental carelessness, resulting from humanity's recklessness and greed, requires to deal with it mobilizing the faith element in order to support the scientific one. This recklessness in dealing with nature, and the region of the Antiochian Levant has witnessed the systematic destruction of its environment, necessitates putting people before their faith responsibilities, as the scientific-legal responsibility is no longer enough to deter the reckless.

The introduction of the element of faith in the defense of the environment makes harming it amount to the level of sin.

The treatment is commensurate with the disease!