We have never had so much spiritual knowledge at our fingertips, and yet many of us still feel spiritually tired. With a few taps, we can listen to a sermon, join a Bible study, learn about the saints, or watch an explanation of the Badarak. We can spend hours moving from one teaching to another, always discovering something new. Our minds keep filling, but our hearts remain restless. Perhaps the problem is not that we need one more teaching. Perhaps we need to begin living w

In Armenian, two words can both be translated as “fear”: վախ—vakh and երկիւղ—yergyoogh. Yet spiritually they describe two very different movements of the human heart. Vakh is ordinary fear, the fear that makes us hide. Yergyugh is holy awe, the reverence that draws us closer to God. After Adam disobeyed God, he heard the Lord walking in the garden and hid among the trees. “I was afraid,” he confessed (Genesis 3:10). This is vakh, the ordinary fear of danger, pain, punishment,

This past weekend, I returned to Holy Virgin Mary and Shoghagat Armenian Church in Belleville, Illinois, in the greater St. Louis area, where I began my ministry in America in 2015. On Saturday, members of my parish family joined me in the kitchen to prepare Nushkhar, the bread of Holy Communion. For two years, preparing Nushkhar was part of my Sunday morning rhythm. Even now, whenever I make this sacred bread, I remember the words of St. Paul: “Because there is one bread, we