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

Good morning, friends. Today, we celebrate the Feast of the Assumption of the Mother of God, her passage from earth to heaven. The Church tells us that after her peaceful dormition, her soul was received into the divine hands of her Son and carried up into heaven. Her body was laid to rest by the apostles in Gethsemane, and on the third day, she was raised and taken into glory. In our Armenian tradition, we speak of the Ննջումն Ս. Աստուածածնի, the Dormition of the Mother of G