Recently, I read the interview of the Finnish Orthodox monk, Seraphim Seppälä, with panorama.am, who, turns out to write a 500-page book about our culture, and now he is getting ready for a new book about the Armenian Genocide. He says, “Armenia is the last corner of the Middle Eastern cultures where the old Christian tradition is still preserved in the entire culture, starting from operas to holy places.” Seppälä, like many other foreigners, considers Armenia the home of his soul.
When reading such confessions, I once again become convinced of how we, Armenians, do not understand what kind of country we are lucky enough to live in, how much we still have to read, study, and, most importantly, realize trying to understand ourselves. Our household minor “pains and sorrows”, and regular grumblings bothers us a lot. Like people living on the beach do not consider the sea a miracle of the nature and are deeply astonished at what thousands of tourists have found in this water, so as we do not appreciate the spiritual aura that our air is saturated with, which is more expensive and rarer than the sea.
Part of the problem, of course, is in our and older generation Soviet upbringing. Everything changed for me, since the moment when in summer of 1990 Father Grigor baptized me in the church of Verishen village, Shahumyan region. (By the way, consciously, we know that our old churches are not built in “random places”, but whether we genuinely feel it). The next 24 years passed although with routine difficulties, but more interesting and satiated than the preceding 30 years.
The second problem is that both in the Soviet period and now, literature and history in our schools, I think, are taught wrong. “These came to make an incursion, they came to broke and destroy, and our poor people are constantly suffering.” It is time to come out of the image of this sufferer and to answer one question in the textbooks: if over centuries, we are only “raided,” then due to what we are speaking in a language that exists for millennia and write with the letters, which were created in the beginning of the 5th century.
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Eventually, complete “satiation” of our exclusive spiritual wealth is hampered, no matter how controversial it may sound, by the “smart ones” who visualize our culture and traditions as a kind of canned food, which is necessary to protect from “malware” West, Russians, globalization and so on. Culture should not be protected but made it working.
An ancient Chinese jar reads, if you feel the wind of changes, build not a shield to be protected from the wind, but a windmill.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
