service files environm.md

1ST SEPTEMBER

Office of supplication to our God and Saviour Jesus Christ, who loves humankind, for our environment and for the welfare of the whole creation.

INTRODUCTION

The late Patriarch Demetrios I of blessed memory made 1 September a day of special prayer and supplication for the Environment and commissioned the late Monk Gerasimos of the Skete of Little Saint Anne on the Holy Mountain of Athos to compose a special office for it. It is this office that is translated here.

For more than half a century Father Gerasimos, as ‘Hymnwriter of the Great Church’, wrote an imposing number of offices and other hymns for the Church, which makes him one of the most prolific hymnographers in the history of Orthodoxy.

The following translation was originally made at the request of the European Council of Churches in 1992. I have ventured to make two additions to his office. Fr Gerasimos did not provide any verses for the Synaxarion and I have filled this lacuna with the traditional couplet, in both Greek and English. He allowed for two readings from the Gospel at the Liturgy, but only one for the Apostle. Since this is liturgically anomalous, I have tentatively suggested as a second Apostle the reading from the Epistle of James, set for Thursday of Week 32.

In my original translation I added some five dozen footnotes giving references to the many quotations and allusions to Holy Scripture in which the text abounds. I have not added them here, so as not to clutter the text, but I may do so when I move the office to the Geniza. The translations from Holy Scripture are my own. In the Old Testament readings there are a number of differences from the Hebrew and even, in the reading from Isaias taken from the Menaion for 1 September, from the standard text of the Septuagint. I have not attempted to reproduce the acrostic of Canon.

The present Patriarch of Constantinople, His All-Holiness Bartolomew I, has maintained and developed the interest and concern of the Patriarchate for the problems of the environment and this office is now used by a number of Orthodox Churches, either on the 1 September itself or on the first Sunday of September.