On October 12 & 13, the Western Diocese held its annual clergy conference in Rancho Mirage, California. At the conclusion of two days of meeting, Abp. Hovnan Derderian, Primate, accepted Deacon Martin into the priesthood and renamed him Father Krikor.

Below is a log of the tweets I sent from both the meetings and the ordination. Originally published on my Twitter account, I post them here merely as a matter of record. No more commentary than what you find in these small essays. These are in reverse chronological order. The time references are tagged with a clock at 10/14/09, at 11:30A.M. PDT

· We all are invited to receive kiss of peace from newly consecrated Fr. Krikor.about 18 hours ago

· Abp Hovnan gives blessing and now preachers from Prophet Ezekiel – to hear command of God.about 18 hours ago

· Fr. KRIKOR gives first blessing.about 18 hours ago

· Abp. Hovnan consecrates forehead of Fr. Krikor- newly named.about 18 hours ago

· Holy Miuron entering sanctuary.about 18 hours ago

· Fr. Arshag amazing voice.about 18 hours ago

· Hymn of vesting. Mystery deep, without beginning.about 18 hours ago

· Archbishop Hovnan now prays for 7 graces on Martin. Places vestments on him.about 18 hours ago

· United we recite the Creed.about 19 hours ago

· Luke 4:14 is read. This again is the mission- more tomorrow on Next Step podcast.about 19 hours ago

· Archbishop on behalf of the church calls Martin. Now in apostolic manner lays his hands on him.about 19 hours ago

· Turning away from worldly pursuits. We witness he is worthy.about 19 hours ago

· At St. Margarite Episcopal- Palm Desert.about 19 hours ago

· Martin approaches altar to receive order of priesthood.about 19 hours ago

· Discovered a Broadsword bootleg which added the flavor to this trip.about 20 hours ago

· Because none of us admit to belonging to this group.about 23 hours ago

· Little bit of knowledge is very dangerous thing. Frightening too.about 23 hours ago

· Chicken Little – The sky is falling.about 23 hours ago

· Eoff… (OK to try to pronounce it out loud. You’ll know where i’m at.)about 23 hours ago from txt

· imagine Fr. McKenzie here. Wiping his hands… Anyone saved?about 24 hours ago

· MTday2- prayer is cool. Talk really is cheap.about 24 hours ago

· Satl’jan time.7:17 PM Oct 12th

· Ordination continues tomorrow.7:10 PM Oct 12th

· Remembers words of Karekin i, keeping image of God.7:05 PM Oct 12th

· Abp Hovnan reflecting on priesthood. Accenting mystery.7:03 PM Oct 12th

· Martin confesses the faith of the fathers.6:51 PM Oct 12th

· Martin renounces heretics.6:39 PM Oct 12th from txt

· Archbishop asking of his worthiness.6:38 PM Oct 12th

· Tiny clouds to the horizon. Gentle breeze.6:35 PM Oct 12th

· Open chr service in desert.6:33 PM Oct 12th

· Deacon Martin being called to the service of the Church.6:33 PM Oct 12th

· @suziesunshine – that’s why i’m choosing to put these notes under the MT label. Btw. still going.5:26 PM Oct 12th

· Lively (no pun) discussion on creamation and suicide.5:17 PM Oct 12th

· The mind twist is this- make the square peg fit. There is no solution. It doesn’t fit.3:53 PM Oct 12th

· Curvature of the spine- physically a sign of age? Otherwise defeat.3:14 PM Oct 12th

· @ahnoosh see early tweet re Mind Twister.3:02 PM Oct 12th

· Agree to call this the MT meeting? It’s part of the 30% trade off to do the 70% work.2:58 PM Oct 12th

· @ahnoosh i was chopping down a palm tree when a friend came by and asked if …he could help me swing the ax12:38 PM Oct 12th

· Starting a two day mind twist in the desert. Stand still on the 210 at Rialto.12:22 PM Oct 12th

Mass at the Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels

I’m not sure why this church affects me the way it does. It’s certainly not the type of church that I’d ordinarily associate with. It’s big. It seems impersonal. Still, it speaks to me like no other sanctuary in the Los Angeles area. My eyes swell up with tears and I find it hard to contain my emotions. It forces me to close my eyes and pray.

It’s getting to be a habit. I escape here on an annual pilgrimage of sorts. On the road to this sanctuary I listen to some haunting sounds from 1982 – Armenian chants and prayers that I’ve digitized from analog recordings. I get to hear my spiritual father and myself on this recording, exchanging words of ordination expressed in the finest of classical term. The words I hear mean so much more to me today and it makes me wonder. I think back to those days, and confess that at the time I didn’t fully understand the meaning of these words nor the thoughts behind them. In reciting them, I hear the attempts at a fluent reading and the quality of my voice, even from its analog sources, betrays a true naiveté.

Grabbing an extra breath in this huge church, I meditate on that naiveté: the dreams and intentions that were there. Happily, the dreams remain but the frustration of making them real are sometimes overwhelming. I think of the naiveté that young children are supposed to have; I think of my kids and know that life is moving at a difference pace today. Perhaps I can blame that uncontrollable momentum for my deafness to the sounds of naiveté in the youth today.

Maybe that’s why I come to this big cathedral on my ordination anniversary. It’s big. It’s spacious, yet it’s simple. It’s much like my life – unfolded now into a weave that’s sometimes uncontrollably large, but the sight of a sunset or a child’s smile brings me back to the simplest of pleasures. And, when in prayer, now with my eyes closed, I try to be in touch with that naiveté.

“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” (Matthew 19)

Noon Mass – it is as grand and as simple as the Cathedral where it takes place: Procession in. A soloist sings the introit. The priest welcomes everyone to worship. The Holy Scripture is read and the priest speaks the sermon appropriate to the day. He then invites the congregants to prayer. He remembers the words of Institution and invokes the Holy Spirit to change the bread and wine to the Sacred Body and Blood. The Peace of Christ is proclaimed throughout the church with real hugs and handshakes. The congregation participates in the Holy Eucharist. And now… without any further delay… some 30 minutes after the service began… are you ready? The congregation is dismissed! And the Lord Jesus be with everyone. Amen.

It certainly was grand. It was overwhelming. It was simple. I imagine much like the Original Supper in the Upper Room. “Grand,” “overwhelming” and “simple” would probably be terms used by the original twelve who ate with Jesus that evening.

We’ve complicated matters, haven’t we? We’ve lost our youth. We’ve lost our naiveté. But we don’t give up. This ministry began with Christ’s words from Luke 4* and it’s why we still fight for a dream that can come true: A day when God’s children can all unite on a common table of Love.
—

This coming Sunday is Varaka Khatch. It’s unique to the Armenian Church. It is a grand yet simple expression of the Cross. And yes, I’m listening to Van Morrison’s “You don’t pull no punches…” on the Veedon Fleece Album as I write this.

* Luke 4^{: 16}He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. ¹⁷The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: ¹⁸“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, ¹⁹to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”^e]”>

²⁰Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, ²¹and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Don’t know where this originated. I’ve printed this on a small card and have kept it next to my computers for the last 25 years. So it goes back a while and probably had more meaning back then anyway (as you can tell by the technical terms).

Thought I’d present it here just to share something from the past, BUT even more to exemplify a theme we’ve kicked around many times, particularly in our Bible Study program, that all writing must be viewed in the context in which it was created, written and developed. I look at this prayer and remember a time when commands would echo on screen and printer, when it was necessary to understand algorithms in order to make sense of program structures and development, and I remember when all programming led to hours/days/weeks of debugging frustration and a prayer for smarts was always in order. Today, someone reading this prayer without an understanding of early computer-programming might offer a courteous smile or harshly condemn it as mocking Christianity. It certainly has a different meaning for the person who used a computer back in the late 70’s as a opposed to someone who’s first computer application was setting up an account on Facebook.

So here it is, from the early days of computing with this small prayer added from me – especially to those who would quote Holy Scripture in a literal manner – that this serve as a reminder that even the Bible was created in a time and place in history and not outside of it.

KEYBOARD PRAYER

Our Program, who art in Memory,
‘Hello’ be thy name.
Thy Operating System come,
Thy commands be done,
On the Printer
As they are on the Screen.
Give us this day our daily data,
And forgive us our I/O errors
As we forgive those whose
logic circuits are faulty.
And lead us not into frustration,
But deliver us from power surges.
For thine is the algorithm, the
application and the implementation
Looping for ever and ever.

RETURN.

Croatia, Safeway, St. James and a Moon that continues to inspire: Happy 40th

They say that the hand-held GPS I use in my car is technologically more sophisticated than the Apollo 11 Lunar lander. Although I’ve never really used my GPS anywhere outside of the bounds of California, I guess I can accept such a statement. I remember when a stack of punch cards, the size of the Los Angeles Phone book were needed to program a computer for a simple tic-tac-toe simulation and today my kid runs graphically enhanced arcade style games on his hand held “toy.” (And the price for this technology? Have you bought memory lately? They’re literally throwing it away. 1 or 2 GB for the price of S&H!)

So we’ve come a long way in 40 years, but the memory I have of the day that “we” reached the moon is not ready for the bargain-bin of outdated memory modules.

July 20, 1969 was a Sunday. I was 13 years old, at a church picnic organized by the St. James Armenian Church in Los Angeles.

The St. James parish itself was going through difficult times. Bad feelings were lingering from the the sale of the church building on Adams Blvd. and a pending law suit, that the Catholicos himself was trying to step-in and mediate. This was causing division and disharmony in the community. There was talk about deceit, scandal and theft – yup, all the topics that are bulleted under the “church life” header. And with construction taking place on the new sanctuary on Slauson Ave., the annual picnic was relocated to Croatian Park, somewhere in the L.A. area.

Croatian Park was used by the Armenian community frequently for their summer gatherings. I thought the name had something to do with sewing, because my grandmother would “crochet” our sweaters. So I naturally thought Croatian Park was the hangout for old ladies, sitting around with their crochet needles, making their grand kids happy with their handiwork. Little did I realize that the Croats were in an independence struggle just as the Armenian. I’d like to believe this was the reason that we used the facility, though I tend to believe the rental price was probably discounted. Still, Croatian independence was declared the same year as the Armenian’s in 1991, so there might have been a greater tie than a cheap place to hold a picnic.

America was in turmoil. We had lost faith in the institutions. The same young president who promised us the moon by the decade’s end had been gunned down on our streets and there was much talk about a large scale conspiracy. The year before we had lost MLK and RFK to assassin’s bullets. Even the new institutions were failing – there was rumbling that the Beatles were about to split.

So a summer picnic, with Armenian music, friends from the church was a nice little escape for everyone. But on moon landing day? I mean this was historic and if you wanted escape, can you think of any place farther away?

My dad was not really an observer. He would rather participate than watch – but I guess this playground was a bit too far. So that Sunday, July 20, in the midst of this church picnic, my dad told me we’re going for a walk. I was excited – we were going to go someplace to watch the lunar landing! A few days earlier, I was up at the crack of dawn to watch Apollo 11 launch. “10-9-8, ignition sequence begins, 6-5…”, I can never forget those words from Mission Control. And when they reached “0” it was lift-off, from our old B&W set to the ends of my imagination.

We found a Safeway store. This was one of the first supermarket chains in our area. During those years they had introduced the “Super S” as a branch of Safeway. In Super S you could find non-food items – such as TV’s! Yes, we made it – we were going to watch the lunar landing at Safeway on the display sets. I remember there was a TV set on the glass counter. Not too many people, but some had stopped.

There we stood and watched Neil Armstrong place his foot on the lunar soil. It was the completion of one dream and the beginning of another. It was an unforgettable moment.
Hard to believe that 40 years have passed. It’s a lifetime away.

The moon has inspired poets and romantics, mystics and philosophers since the beginning of time. It’s intrigued scientists. Some say its the same size as the Pacific Ocean – that maybe it was thrown out of there during the early formation of the planetary system? In “Moonstruck” they said the moon was as big as Frank Bigalow’s head! An early Jethro Tull song was an ode to Michael Collins, the one of three astronauts that piloted the mother ship and didn’t make the decent to the lunar surface. How sad to go all that way and not touch it – but each view of the moon finds its own inspiration – whether on the weightless surface, in Croatia, on the counter at Safeway or from the mother-ship. Our moon is inspiring. And today, I can’t resist a harvest moon, a blue moon, an eyelash moon or an eclipsed moon, just to take a break, call the kids outside and observe quietly and in wonder. We stepped on the moon 40 years ago and it still remains away and distant.

When I was a student at the Monastery of Holy Etchmiadzin in the mid-70’s, I would walk in the courtyard and pass away my loneliness looking at the moon knowing that it is the same one we all see around the globe, the same moon that has been viewed by every single human being that has EVER inhabited this planet and every human being that will EVER take a moment to look up to the night sky. It’s our moon. Happy Moon Day.

For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me
by Ian Anderson
Watery eyes of the last sighing seconds,
blue reflections mute and dim
beckon tearful child of wonder
to repentance of the sin.
And the blind and lusty lovers
of the great eternal lie
go on believing nothing
since something has to die.
And the ape’s curiosity —
money power wins,
and the yellow soft mountains move under him.
I’m with you L.E.M.
though it’s a shame that it had to be you.
The mother ship is just a blip
from your trip made for two.
I’m with you boys, so please employ just a little extra care.
It’s on my mind I’m left behind
when I should have been there.
Walking with you.

And the limp face hungry viewers
fight to fasten with their eyes
like the man hung from the trapeze —
whose fall will satisfy.
And congratulate each other
on their rare and wondrous deed
That their begrudged money bought
to sow the monkey’s seed.
And the yellow soft mountains
they grow very still
witness as intrusion the humanoid thrill.

 

I didn’t mean to be mysterious about this; it’s just that I’ve been going at this Youth Ministry Center for the last six years without a break. And those six years can’t be categorized as “business as usual” because there was no concept of the “usual.” We began the Youth Ministry Center as a satellite of the Diocesan Youth Ministries’ Department and we’ve been developing it ever since. During the first few years, summer “vacations” meant organizing and running the camp programs for 500 to 600 campers and staff members. Later, the Youth Ministry was also given a parish to minister to the local immigrant community in one of the largest Armenian centers in the world. Simultaneously with the parish we’ve successfully continued quality programming geared at a new generation of believers in the Armenian orthodox message. And so – there’s really never been a time to break and catch a breath since 2003.

In April of this year, immediately after Easter, I informed the parish council at the church that we needed to move forward in new directions that would be challenging as well as meaningful. By the Grace of God, it is apparent that we’ve outgrown the facilities. Later that same month, I expressed the same concerns to the archbishop. The church at the corner of Stocker & Kennilworth, will always have a life as a neighborhood parish, but so many of our projects are crying out for space and room beyond what we can find in the immediate area. Furthermore, our electronic ministry – www.epostle.net – has grown beyond our wildest expectations, and we are now ready for the “next step” for the “Next Step.” We’re in negotiation with an European media firm as well as with an Internet consortium about expansion into video casts on European television as a full blown-out Orthodox ministry on the world stage.

Because we never abandoned our original charter as a Youth Ministries Center, we developed and implemented many activities and events which were conducted under the “In His Shoes” banner. From inner city conferences on violence, to seminars on forgiveness; from art projects on canvas, to breathing-art across the desert; from motivational weekends on Martin Luther King Jr., to weekly broadcasts about Armenian Orthodoxy; from local outreaches to the homeless, to massive fundraisers for the hungry in Africa, we set a standard and a pace for ourselves and hopefully a model of function for others.

Bottom line: we experienced growth at a very fast rate. Many of our projects need further development and there just is not enough hours in a day to dedicate to the growth process. So I asked for and received a “sabbatical” – a period of time away from the daily grind of the parish to contemplate and build these projects that are so vital to the welfare and growth of the Armenian Church.

I’m half way through this self-imposed exile and so much has been going on. I’ve been sharing most of it with you on the Next Step and of course Sundays through my sermons at the Divine Liturgy. (Yes, I’m there on Sunday mornings – after all, I have to worship someplace.) Meanwhile, I have a great team that has been holding down the fort during the week, and some fantastic/energetic priests who’ve been covering for me with the sacraments and counseling issues. Our website InHisShoes.org has links to all the places where you can find us.

Looking ahead and looking up. I will write more frequently now that things are falling into place. I just wanted a place to point people to – to this statement – so that there’s no confusion about the nature or purpose of this time away.