We are strongly incited, in these years, to reflect on the way humankind will – or may not -survive in shaken, if not devastated ecological environments. Survive? The word itself trembles. Things do not collapse only in sudden catastrophes; they evolve through slow, almost imperceptible processes that suddenly reveal their abruptness. We speak of the depletion of agricultural resources, of the disappearance of natural products over millennia. Animals are endangered, forests recede, ice melts, deserts expand, coastlines shift, and entire regions become uninhabitable. The earth itself seems to breathe with difficulty.

Yet these transformations are not only ecological. They reveal something deeper: a parallel erosion of human interiority. The question is not only whether the world can sustain us—but whether we are still capable of sustaining a world.

We say: we have problems. But problems presuppose questions, and questions presuppose a capacity to listen. Today, we rather throw propositions into the air, as if words themselves could solve what they no longer truly address. Difficulties persist, not because solutions are absent, but because the depth of the questions is avoided.

Life unfolds in cycles, yet these cycles are not merely repetitive. They risk becoming monotonous when they are emptied of meaning. The Great Lenten traditions of fasting, restraint, and prayer border on other imposed rhythms: economic pressures, chronic anxieties, social fragmentation, and a diffuse moral fatigue. What once oriented life toward transformation risks becoming another routine among others.

True penitence, true conversion, however, does not belong to routine. It is not a moral decoration. It is closer to a risk, almost a wager – personal and collective. God calls to life, sustains life, and maintains creation in life, even when systems of destruction and eradication seem to dominate the visible order of things. This tension between life and its denial defines our present condition.

The Byzantine Vesperal prayers........

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