Today marks the beginning of a new year, and the beginning of a new journey in my family’s life. I have been assigned as the pastor of St. John Armenian Church, and will take up my duties as soon as we are able to relocate ourselves to the City by the Bay.
For the past two and a half years you may have followed our experiences in Armenia on this blog, flickr, twitter, or Facebook, etc…, where I studied and prepared my mind and spirit for the calling of the Priesthood. By the grace of God, this period of time was fruitful and strengthened not only my vocation, but Annie’s as well. We returned to the United States with the blessing of the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin to continue our mission and serve our people.
Now, we look onto this new path thats laid before us and we are indescribably humbled. I am humbled that the faithful of St. John Armenian Church have given me the opportunity to be their pastor. I have some small faith in my abilities, more faith in my wife to be my support and my inspiration, and great faith that God will guide us where we falter.
As we start this new chapter in our lives, I’m going to take today’s gospel reading to heart. I’m going to make it my anthem, my motto for the rest of the year. Christ says,
Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves. – Luke 22:26
With the Lord’s help, youth and humility are going to be standards of my service. Youth is ignorance in the wisdom of men, which can be corrupt and conceited. Instead, it’s a type wisdom that flows truth and boldness. Humility is the most valuable of all virtues. The humble cast away their ego and their pride and become God’s tools for good. Without humility love couldn’t exist in this world.
I will fall short of these ideals… constantly. However, I pray that God grants me, and all us, the strength to pursue them relentlessly. Please join me in this prayer, and follow us as we begin this new journey in our lives.
If the TV show Cheers were a country, it would be Armenia. Why? “Everybody knows your name.”
Naturally, there are things that frustate me about living in Armenia, but having just returned after being away for almost three months, its absolutely wonderful to feel the impression that you make on the lives of the people around you. Some examples:
Some of my wife’s students from GhoghanjOn our taxi ride from the airport my wife and I were crossing the bridge to Yerevan, and we just happened to see a bunch of Annie’s students walking to school at 8 in the morning. We leaned our heads out of the car and yelled to get their attention, and when they saw us they just went nuts. This was the first thing that happened to us after we arrived! (Besides having to fight off price gouging taxi drivers, and losing a piece of luggage temporarily)
Later on that day I called for a taxi from my usual taxi company. The operator lady recognized my voice and asked me where I’d been all summer, and we had a 10 minute conversation. It was a repeat scenario with the taxi driver that subsequently showed up.
The next day we went to Artbridge, and the staff commented about how they haven’t seen us in so long, and wanted to know what we’ve been doing. This happened again at least one other restaurant we’ve gone to since then.
Even the lady that sells flowers near our old apartment stopped us to interrogate us about where we’ve been. We almost never bought flowers from her, but we had become accustomed to exchanging greetings as we passed one another during our daily routines.
Throw in about a half dozen acquaintances we’ve seen just walking around while apartment hunting, and it starts to feel like the whole city missed us while we were away. Well, perhaps they didn’t really miss us, or even care that we were gone, but they noticed, and thats a lot more than can be said of other places we’ve lived.
Its easy to be negative about living in a place like Armenia, because it doesn’t always have comforts and conveniences of our upbringing, but I’ve never experienced another place in the World where you can get a feeling like this.
published
One of my best friends, John Harrison a.k.a. ManilaRyce, has illustrated the cover for Bambu’s just released EP, “…Paper Cuts…”
Big congratulations to John for the good work, and more congratulations to all people behind “…Paper Cuts…” I just bought it on iTunes today, and its a great album.
The year was 2006, the web 2.0 revolution was well underway, the word “blog” was being used incessantly by the corporate news establishment, and I having many other more valuable things to do with my time decided to waste a good deal of it and publish a blog at mattash.com. The problem with blogs is that they only matter when you’ve got something that you not only want to say, but that you feel as though is important enough to share with the vast hordes of the Internet. I don’t often feel that way, and therefore the mattash.com blog (est. 2006) was defunct. In contrast my good friend Manila Ryce at The Largest Minority always has something to say to the hordes, and therefore his blog is meaningful and successful.
This isn’t to say that I am without opinion, nay indeed I have a wealth unqualified positions on many topics, but I just don’t want to write that much about them. Therefore I have moved this blog to a new (though not all that new) format: MicroBlog. The MicroBlog, removes the pressure of authoring prodigious prose, and allows you to just post a sentence or two if that’s all that you feel like. I already do this at twitter, so its not much of a stretch. Or if I want I can just link to a video, url, or photo, and provide a witty little caption. Why not? It sounds like fun.
The platform that I’ve found for this is called Chyrp, a very friendly and MicroBlogging app, that seems to do the job right. I’ve barely customized it, and in fact am practically using the default theme. This is a tragedy for someone who design websites, but I’m gonna take this slowly and see where it leads me. A real low-commitment affair.
So, check our my site occasionally, or better yet, subscribe to my feed. Thanks!
