Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew officially opened the 7th International Student Literature Conference, which takes place at the Zografeion Lyceum in Constantinople.
The conference is dedicated to Antonis Samarakis under the title “Antonis Samarakis. The Eternal Adolescent”.
The core of Ecumenical Patriarch’ speech was the words of Antonis Samarakis:
” ‘You will not find God in the books. You will find Him if you have eyes on the ground, on the sidewalk where the people are suffering,’ said Antonis Samarakis in an interview. The words of our writer are very close to the spirit of the Gospel, in which a criterion in order to obtain salvation is the help we offer to the strangers, the ones who are hungry and thirsty.
In the same vein with Christ and the Parable of the Rich Fool, Antonis Samarakis says that the problem affecting our time is that “we have come to the point, the only values which are still alive are those of the stock market.”
Morever, “never before there was such a distance in the hearts of one person to another as it is today” is his criticism of modern society, steeped in loneliness, and isolation. This phrase coincides with the position of Orthodoxy towards modern self-centeredness and indifference to the fellow human beings.
The Ecumenical Patriarch also stressed that “in the field of Orthodoxy, the church experiences and the ancestral values of the Greek nation are an inexhaustible source of inspiration and creativity. As the contemporary thinker writes, “as we are reviving the teachings of our tradition, we discover the most universal and honest expression of life and humanity, encapsulated in the term “culture of solidarity”. This is the invaluable offering, the eternal legacy of Orthodoxy for humanity, and the hope for the future.”
