‘Godly grief.’ That’s a phrase to memorize, post on Instagram or tattoo on your leg! These two words of St. Paul brilliantly captures the spiritual growing pains that all Christians feel as they mature into the love of God. What are the occasions for this grief? For Paul it was division in his church family.…
‘Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?’ –Mk 4:40 Some people and some priests truly are disciplinarians, some are thinkers, some are all heart. A friend of ours from Yerevan told us that when she lived there, she and her friends knew all the priests and their personalities, and would pick where…
‘Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart.’-Je 15:16 Jeremiah, the prophet whose feast we commemorate this week in the Armenian Church and whose words I began with, recommends we consume the books of the Bible again and again. ‘Your words…
Indeed all that glitters is not gold, and where did this gold medal come from anyway? Well it was not from the original Greek Olympics, whose first place prize which was not a gold medal but a laurel wreath. These crowns of flowers are splendidly beautiful today, but they are gone tomorrow—a wise reminder that…
We are a mystery to ourselves. Neither science nor Google can deal with mysteries, but praise God, the Armenian Church does. The Armenian Church says that you are a mystery to yourself, so stop trying to grasp yourself from other things, people, even God. Instead, start trying to give yourself away to other things, people…
The moral of this powerful story is clear and always relevant. There is no venom quite so deadly as mistrust and fear. Fear of the unknown; fear of the other; fear of failure; fear of death—nothing causes spiritual and emotional paralysis more effectively than fear. It corrodes faith, cuts off our pathways for giving and…
One of the old names for our church is the Armenian Apostolic Church. We very much like to stress that our church has a direct connection with the apostles who had a direct connection with our Lord Jesus Christ. In addition to the Gospels, we emphasize that other aspects of our faith; sacraments, church hierarchy…