http://www.djournal.com/pages/story.asp?ID=273124&pub=1&div=Opinion
EDITORIAL: Ancient wisdom
5/10/2008 6:31:48 AM
Daily Journal
The May 12 issue of Time magazine lists its version of the world's
100 most influential people. The list is controversial, as are all
such lists, because of who's included and who's not.
One of the people included is there because from his very old and
enduring religious tradition comes a carefully enunciated view of the
spiritual and Christian responsibility for the steward****p of the
Earth - what's popularly known as the Green Movement.
The person in Time's list with those views is Bartholomew, the
E***enical Patriarch of Constantinople, the man who occupies what's
called the "First Throne" among the leaders of 250 million Orthodox
Christians worldwide.
Constantinople - today's Istanbul - was the epicenter of Christianity
in the ancient world and early church, paralleling and rivaling Rome
as the preeminent source of spiritual and often worldly authority
held by the church.
The tem****al and tangible authority has disappeared, but the
spiritual light ****nes.
It is noteworthy that the "pastorate" Bartholomew holds is almost
2,000 years old. Orthodox history says that the Apostle Andrew, the
first-called by Jesus, was the founder of the flock.
The patriarch's views are firmly planted in both the Hebrew
scriptures and the New Testament, both viewing responsibility for
sustaining the created order as encoded in us as created beings.
A pastoral letter Bartholomew wrote in 2006 presents eloquently what
we are supposed to know and how we must interact with the whole universe:
"Our merciful God who loves mankind created the world to be beautiful
and functional, sufficient to meet all human needs. He granted to man
.... the enjoyment of everything in the world that is necessary for
life. God instilled in every beneficial relation****p between man and
creation feelings of joy and pleasure. Furthermore, he imbued man
with a sense of longing when in genuine need, and a sense of satiety
to protect against abuse by excess."
People, the patriarch wrote, are "equipped by God with an instinctual
awareness of the proper measure of things, of the difference between
what is necessary and beneficial and what is excessive and harmful.
Endowed as well with free will, man has the ability to act on his
instinctual understanding of the boundaries of these two conditions,
so that he can either set new boundaries of self-deprivation for
purposes of spiritual exercise, or can set them aside altogether
through willful acts of self-aggrandizement."
"In the latter case, we are dealing either with covetousness, which
the Apostle Paul characterizes as idolatry, or with a hostile
loathing of the God-given gifts of life and the things of this world."
That self-aggrandizing attitude, he writes, causes people to "act
toward (their) surrounding environment in rapacious and destructive
ways, as a ruler rather than (stewards), disrupting the natural
harmony and balance that are from God. Nature in turn has reacted to
man's abuse in unbalanced ways, inflicting upon humanity a series of
natural catastrophes."
The patriarch's tenor is prophetic in the tradition of the Hebrew
scriptures - directly challenging acts of ego which, he says, cause
"insolent and arrogant subjugation of natural forces and their use
for the killing or subjection of our fellow human beings rather than
for the preservation of life and freedom, or for the satisfaction of
excessive pleasures, without care of the consequences of overuse."
Some contem****ary religious thought claims that Bartholomew's views
are newly understood. They are not newly understood, they are newly
claimed by some who long misunderstood, or rejected, what the
Judeo-Christian faith stream has said from the beginning.
Appeared originally in the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal,
5/10/2008, section B , page 4
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