A Nice Reconnection

 I am writing this to share a very nice and unusual experience this weekend, as it was something I feel was defining for me personally.  I want to first give some background on where this happened, then the experience itself, and my own history as to why it is significant.  This is one of those things that in all honesty I cannot explain, but it felt amazing and there was something happening there.  

A few weeks back on a whim during my job search, I decided to do something different.  After looking into a few things, I discovered to my personal joy that there is an Armenian school in Washington, DC, called Shnorhali School, and it is affiliated with a sizeable Armenian Apostolic parish, St. Mary.  A week or two after just submitting an inquiry about whether they may need teachers, the principal - a nice lady named Nunik Nishanian - called me and wanted to schedule a meeting about finding out what role I could take on there.  She told me that their priest, Fr. Hovsep, and his family were visiting Armenia and would be back before the end of August, and therefore the best day to set up something would be on August 30, or yesterday.  So, I made the arrangements, and with Barbara in tow, we made the journey via Uber down there yesterday.  Not knowing the times when everything would be taking place, I more or less decided the best time to leave to go down there was around 7:30 AM, and so we did.  We arrived there at about 8:22 AM, and waited for a short time until a deacon came in and unlocked the church, allowing us to go in.  The deacon, a very friendly guy, told us to essentially just make ourselves comfortable.  At 9:30, the younger kids had instruction in singing Armenian chant with a young subdeacon, and then a prayer service followed by their Badarak (Divine Liturgy) followed, and that was almost 2 hours.  I will have more to say about the liturgy momentarily because that is where a very unique experience happened to me, but after the liturgy, there was a coffee hour where I got to have an informal conversation with Fr. Hovsep - he was a very nice priest, and is currently finishing up a Ph.D. himself at Catholic University of America - and then I got to sit in on the parent orientation for the school there.  After, I talked briefly to the principal, got to peruse the gift shop (where I found an Artsakh flag - I wanted one of those - as well as some Armenian coffee and flavored olive oils), and then we caught our Uber back home to Baltimore.  It ended up being an all-day thing, as we got home yesterday after 3, but it overall was a good experience.  It has been an objective of mine to attend at least one Armenian Badarak, as I already knew the liturgy somewhat and could identify the chant in it by tunes due to a cassette (and later CD) recording of the Komitas Liturgy I received years ago.  The Armenian Badarak is perhaps one of the most beautiful liturgies of the Church - there is a melancholy dimension to it, but it is also very reverent and holy as well.  But, what happened to me during that liturgy yesterday is what was significant, as I have never experienced anything like this before, and I want to talk about it now. 

Although everything in the Badarak was in Armenian except the Epistle reading (which was done by an altar server) and the homily, we had a liturgical text in both Armenian and English so it was easy to follow - knowing the tune to the various chants also helped keep my place too, as I am familiar with how the various parts of it - the Der Voghormia (Lord Have Mercy), the Soorp Troparion (this is the Sanctus in the Roman-rite Mass essentially) and the Hayr Mer (the Armenian "Our Father") are all very familiar to me, and when I hear the tune for the chant (which I believe was composed by Komitas) I know immediately where I am in the liturgy.  And, like the Roman, Byzantine, Maronite, and other historic liturgies of the Church, the Armenian Badarak has essentially the same fundamental elements, although somewhat ordered differently, so as to be consistent with the ancient liturgical form these other historic liturgies are based upon.  This means that despite the language difference, one who participates in these liturgies is still a participant in the "Mass of the Ages" and God's Holy Spirit is still definitely in it, if not more so in the case of what I experienced yesterday.  One very important difference about the Armenian Badarak that most other liturgies (with the exception of the Coptic, Syriac, and Ethiopian liturgies) do not practice is that the participants in the liturgy at the altar - the priest or bishop, deacons, subdeacons, and acolytes - do not wear shoes when they are participating in their functions.  Many have a set of specially-made altar slippers, while others (especially the teenaged acolytes) are in just their socks.  However, at a given moment in the liturgy itself, the priest who is consecrating the elements of the Eucharist must remove his slippers and the ornate miter he wears.  This is a serious connection to the Old Testament practice of removing shoes when on holy ground, and its reverence is actually a profound thing to see.  All of these various elements of yesterday's Badarak set the stage for something profound to happen inside me as I was observing the liturgy.  At a point in the liturgy, the way the priests, deacons, and subdeacons were chanting the Badarak made something deep inside me click, and the English translation I was following in the book literally jumped from the page at me, and the feeling of that was surreal.  I am not sure how to correctly articulate it, but something about that beautiful chant, the translation on the page (and it was liturgical content that I had heard in other forms many times in Masses and liturgies ranging from traditional Anglican to Coptic), and the general connection I have had for four decades with the Armenian people caused something to just sort of snap in place, and it was as if God's presence came to me in a special way.  I have honestly never felt anything like that before, and it was a very beautiful feeling but one I still cannot totally explain - I can explain what happened, but the exact feeling I cannot pinpoint.  I just know that in that liturgy I experienced God in a special way I had never experienced before, and I would love to be able to experience that again in all honesty.  Now, I have had these little supernatural "blips" happen in Masses before.  Not long after my First Communion into the Catholic Church in 2000, as a matter of fact, I was sitting in a Mass at the Cathedral of St. Jude in St. Petersburg, FL, and when Fr. DeJulio who was the celebrant started saying the words of consecration over the Body and Blood, I recall as plain as day seeing a pillar of fire descend over those elements - for me then, it was a teaching moment I believe, showing the exact point bread and wine were transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ.  On another occasion, I attended a Serbian Divine Liturgy (also in St. Pete) and a profound joy came over me there during that liturgy - it moved me to tears.  I later found out that this was described by the Russians as an emotional experience called umilenie, and to describe that it is like a tender, sweet and comforting touch of God's Spirit on someone that goes to the core of their being and pierces any filters or walls the person has.  That was a beautiful experience as well.  A third time something like this happened was just three years ago at St. Mary's Church in Hagerstown.  When Fr. James, the celebrant, was giving the homily, I recall seeing this huge angel standing behind him with its wings outstretched, and what that showed me was that this priest, Fr. James, had a shepherd's heart and God was protecting him.   However, as powerful as all those past things were, what happened in that little Armenian parish yesterday was something completely different, and in order to explore that further, let me recap my own connection to the Armenian people as I believe that has a huge bearing as to why this happened.

The front entrance of St. Mary Armenian Apostolic Church in Washington, DC

The ornate carvings on the front door of the church

The inner sanctuary (note, there is a curtain on the altar that is closed at pivotal parts of the Badarak)

The ornate carved Armenian khatchkar (cross) at the front entrance, which was donated by a generous group of parishioners as noted on the plaque in the back 

In order to understand how I was invited to an Armenian church for a possible teaching opportunity with their school, let me take you back 28 years.  In early 1988, I had become interested in Byzantine history, and in reading about the Byzantine Empire I came across a small nation of people called the Armenians.  The Armenians are the indigenous Indo-European inhabitants of eastern Anatolia and the south Caucasus region, and they are direct descendants of an ancient kingdom called Urartu, which is mentioned in the Bible.  Urartu was a big regional power in its day, and it was noted for having some skirmishes with the Assyrian Empire that lay to its south (the interesting twist is that it would be the descendants of both of these peoples who would become the first nations to convert en masse to Christianity, and they would also share a lot of persecution and atrocities committed against them in centuries to come).  By the time Rome came to be the great imperial power it was, somehow the transition between the ancient Urartians and the modern Armenians happened, and the region has been known as "Armenia" since.  Learning of the unique Christian heritage of the Armenian people, I took a keen interest in them during my junior year of high school, and had amassed a considerable amount of information on them, thanks to a large packet that the Armenian Archdiocese sent me that summer (I still have some of those booklets even today).  When I learned more about what the Turks had done to them over the centuries, I began to take up their cause, and by the time I started college I knew these were the people I needed to foster a vocation to.  This early interest climaxed in 1995, when a trip to California where I actually preached at St. Nareg Church in Montebello, CA, where my dear friend Dr. Krikor Haleblian pastored.  Due to some unforeseen things that happened in subsequent months after that trip, I slowly began to table my interest in Armenians and Assyrians, and while I still advocated for them when I could, I was not as into it as I was in my late teens and early 20s.  However, in 2017 something began to happen which started calling me back to this original love, and it happened ironically in my own family tree.  You see, I come from a line of people who had nobility connections going back over 1500 years, and somehow about 900 years ago some of my ancestors ended up being Crusaders who went to the Holy Land, and one prominent family of them I am connected to is the House of DeLusagnon.  When the DeLusagnons embarked on the Crusades, they forged a bond with some Armenian noble families who had been dispersed by Muslim hordes to areas on the southeast coast of what is today Turkey and extending into northern Lebanon, and with these Armenian noble families (including the ones who contributed to my own DNA, the Mamikonians) they forged the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia.  One of the descendants of this family would also interesting enough come to be the tsar of Bulgaria in the later Middle Ages too, and that is how my personal bloodline ties into an Armenian root.  That was perhaps one of the most amazing discoveries I have made in my genealogical research in years, and it contributed to me rekindling my interest in Armenian topics again, along with the long-awaited release of The Promise in theatres in 2018 as well as my discovery of the very amazing Kohar Symphony Orchestra.  All of this together was a kick in the butt I needed to rekindle my first love with the Armenian people, and I have been slowly building back my legacy with them since.  Yesterday though was pivotal - I connected with an actual Armenian community near me in a very special way, and I may be getting more involved with them in weeks to come as that teaching opportunity is still very real.  I now just leave it in God's hands, and will be revisiting this later.

This is going to be one of those two-part discussions this time, as there is another aspect to this that also deals with how I define myself as a Catholic.  The recent controversies and craziness coming from Leo out of the Vatican have caused me to make a lot of decisions, and I want to spend some time talking about that tomorrow.  It has no bearing on whether I will stay Catholic or not, but it will redefine what my personal Catholic faith is going to be, and I have come to some sobering conclusions about that I want to discuss separately at another point.  Thank you for letting me share something as special as a personal thing that happened in an Armenian church yesterday, and will see you soon.