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I am an Armenian Orthodox believer and theologian. The Orthodox faith is a sacramental faith. When Orthodox Christians perform the great rite of the blessing of the water by ocean beach or riverbank, they behave, as the Armenian liturgy says, like the holy apostles who became "cleansers of the whole world." While God might have driven Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Paradise, God still ensured that the living waters issuing from the garden continued to irrigate the whole earth and cleanse its polluted streams and lakes. When we bless water, we acknowledge God's grace and desire to cleanse the world and make it paradise.

Water is the blood of creation. Our own bodies are 80 percent water. Water is also the element of baptism. Saint Thomas Aquinas said: "Because water is transparent, it can receive light; and so it is fitting that it should be used in baptism, inasmuch as it is the sacrament of faith." By cleansing the water we make it clear again. By expelling the demonic pollutants we ready it for greater service to God. We tend not only the garden that we call nature but also the garden that is ourselves, insofar as we are constituted of water and are born anew by it.

We ought not to draw a line that neatly marks off nature from human kind. This is a modern heresy that we have inherited from the Enlightenment. Contrary to environmentalists' accusations of anthropocentrism, Christians believe that human beings are especially responsible for tending the creation. This is no less a responsibility than the duty to care for our own bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit. God has given human beings this responsibility as an emblem of his own great love for all of creation. The fourth-century church father Saint Ephrem the Syrian says in his Hymns on Paradise:

The fool, who is unwilling to realize
his honorable state,
prefers to become just an animal,
rather than a man,
so that, without incurring judgment,
he may serve naught but his lusts.
But had there been sown in animals
just a little
of the sense of discernment,
then long ago would the wild asses
have lamented
and wept at their not
having been human.

Saint Ephrem does not condone an ecologically destructive anthropocentrism. He does not say that human beings are masters over creation with the right to use it solely for their own selfish purposes or comfort. Rather, he reminds us that everything comes from God, and that without God's constant nurture, nothing would be and nothing could grow. "It is not the gardeners with their planting and watering who count," writes Saint Paul, "but God who makes it grow." Indeed, we are not only "fellow workers" in God's great garden; we ourselves are God's garden (1 Cor. 3:7-9, reb). This is the ground of our humility as mere creatures among all other creatures loved by God.

Our Christian living ought to reflect an "oikic" ethos. The Greek word oikos means a dwelling or a place to live. The words economy and ecology come from this same Greek word. The oikumene, the whole creation, is the church's ethical concern. Our incarnational faith inspires a vision of humankind's relationship to creation that is sacramental, ecological, and ethical. In its elevation of bread and wine, the liturgy of the Eucharist makes this connection clear.

The Armenian writer Teotig tells a story about the genocide of the Armenians during World War I. Father Ashod Avedian was a priest of a village near the city of Erzeroum in eastern Turkey. During the deportations, 4,000 Armenian men of that village were separated from their families and driven on a forced march into desolate re gions. On their march to death, when food supplies had given out, Father Ashod instructed the men to pray in unison, "Lord have mercy," then led them in taking the "cursed" soil and swallowing it as communion. The ancient Armenian catechism called the Teaching of Saint Gregory says that "this dry earth is our habitation, and all assistance and nourishment for our lives [comes] from it and grows on it, and food for our growth, like milk from a mother, comes to us from it."

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