Note to self
by Paul Chaderjian
Time continues to speed up, perhaps just for me, but I hear it from others too. There's never enough time to do all the things we have to do and want to do. There's never enough time to keep ourselves with the news of the day, process the hundreds of e-mails that come through, look at the websites that attract us, watch the shows we want to watch, and hear the radio stations we want to hear. Let's not forget those nasty text messages. There seems to be too much happening around us in the information age, and that makes each moment more valuable. This stimulus overload should also make us question where all this information is coming from and what motivates those who send it to us or make it available to us. News channels want to make you continue watching, and there is always a natural reaction we'll have to someone else's action of a text message, phone call, or e-mail. All this should make us wonder what we should be listening to and really hearing, which messages are important to understand, why these messages are being communicated to us, what is the real news in the overwhelming amount of information we're being barraged with.
Like others, I want to know. I am interested in what's happening in my community, be it the Armenian community, the community of North Hollywood, Southern California, Central California, the United States, the Republic of Armenia, and the global community. All the information about these areas of interest come into my world via that cell phone that I can't seem to not be attached with. I have this growing desire to check it between a shower and shave to see if something important has come through voice mail, text message, or e-mail. The rest of the information we proactively seek by engaging in Internet chat, browsing favorite websites, turning on the dozen English-language news channels from the United States and Armenia or other English-language services like Iran's Press TV. Television station everywhere, newspapers, and almost anyone, anywhere, has access to using a satellite now, and they're up there in orbit allowing anyone, anywhere - organizations, individuals, governments, businesses, religions, churches, charities, con artists, cults, nationalists, bigots, and truly good and truly evil people - to send you messages, news, entertainment that will hold on to your focus, and information, be it true or false. Every human can be a broadcaster now, broadcasting to each other a majority of the 60,000 thoughts scientists say each human has during the course of the day.
Messages from a megachurch
One of the messages that I have chosen to regard as important and that I look forward to hearing every day comes through an e-mail list that I've subscribed to. The e-mails come from a Christian preacher in Houston. It seems a bit odd to admit, but these daily messages about God, spirituality, and how to be a better human and Christian come not from my church but some random megachurch (megabusiness) that uses the former Houston Rockets' basketball arena to assemble 14,000 congregants at a time and preach the word of God.
What I read and save in a special designated file in my e-mail are daily messages - about three to four paragraphs with scriptural references - about how to live life, helping others, having hope, dreaming about what's possible, being grateful, and other positive and Christian ideas to entertain and think about as one of the 60,000 thoughts that pass through our mind. Whether you believe in the Son of God or God, whether you're a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, an agnostic, or an atheist, these types of thoughts empower you as a human, keep you aware of the forces that rule your interactions, keep you from falling into the natural human state of misery, dissatisfaction, and creating misery, a state that all religions seem to agree is the premise of human beings. But even though that may be our natural and default state, it doesn't have to be who we are. Messages of hope and holiness help keep us on the right track in how we think about ourselves and others, how we relate to others and the world, and how we choose what's important in the barrage of information hitting us every waking hour.
Being born to a people that boasts about being the first Christian nation, being brought up in the Armenian Apostolic Church and having it as my primary connection to spirituality, I consider myself a Christian. However, the critical thinking skills we are taught in school prompt me to also read other spiritual and religious teachings as I search for answers about why I exist. If our natural human state is being miserable, unsatisfied, never being satiated or having enough, then my natural state is also one of not being satisfied with what I have learned or know about what has happened to me and my people. I ask questions about the curses and unfortunate things that have happened to us, like Genocide, civil war, and manmade or natural disasters I have witnessed from television. I ask why these events happen, what they really mean, and what I should make of or think about these personal and global events. I wonder about existential mysteries as much as why I'm bombarded with the messages I'm receiving in this information age. I wonder about meaning while I wander through facts, figures, opinions, and ideas, also somewhat cautiously asking what the people sending me the information expect me to do about the information. Do they just want me to keep tuning in, because an even more sensational story is coming up? Do they want me to buy more, save money by buying more things I don't need because these things I'm told I must have are on sale? Do they want me to vote for their party or not vote at all; after all, how functional is any democracy in the world, especially one that is financed by big business and doesn't give voters a real choice? Do these messages and their messengers want me to support more military action to grow our economy or to invest in stocks, donate money, be more passive, buy more insurance, ask my doctor about medications that will make me look like the happy, middle-aged man who looks like a million bucks in advertisements? Why is everyone telling me all these things and how am I supposed to react to all this? Or is the information age a tool to make us simply overwhelmed and too entertained to even care and do something about our world?
Messages from our churches
One of the questions I'm asking in this essay is why the messages that steer me in the right spiritual direction and give me hope day-in and day-out in this utterly crazy modern age are coming from Houston. Why is my church sending me messages that highlight what Catholicos X or Y, Prelate, east or west, Primate, east or west, is up to this week, whom they've met, which banquet hall they ate at, whom they ate with, who went to see them and get their blessings, whom the church prayed for, what anniversary and fundraiser is being marked next week? You know what I'm talking about.
I want to know why spirituality, true, useful, much-needed words in understandable English or Armenian, are not the reason why the church is communicating to me. I want to know why these messages may or may not include a prayer of the day, a reading for the week. I want to know where the spirituality and lesson are amidst all these social, parochial, hierarchal, bless-the-rich and donate to the church messages.
People are going to be defensive and immediately point to their individual church newsletters, which I may not be privy to, since I am not a paying member of the church. But I see enough of these newsletters and attend enough services to know the messages I get from Houston are far more potent then anything I've seen being produced by my church.
My critics will write or call and point to websites and blogs, Bible-study groups, weekends away in the woods, men's groups, this or that resource, and how they are available if I had done some digging. They'll tell me it's all there, and I'm sure it is. I'm just asking why should I go out of my way to find half-baked newsletters in postal mail and public-relations-department-produced affirmations about the caste system in our ancient church when my favorite media-savvy, 21st-century preacher, who really gets real life in the trenches, already speaks right to me the messages I want and need to hear. And he speaks to me via multiple media platforms without me having to pay him a dime, without the theatrics of chants in some ancient Armenian language I can't decipher, without the Hollywood-blockbuster-worthy costumes, without the polluting incense that makes me cough, sneeze, and reach for the Visine. I get these neat little, nicely composed e-mails every morning offering me simple words, God via the Internet, God without drama or posturing, the God who died for my sins so that I may have a chance at eternal life.
Oh yeah. It's not even just an e-mail. There's even a weekly television broadcast, repeated on a dozen channels, weekdays and weekends, that I religiously TiVo to watch when I can. Oh yeah, there's even a podcast that downloads to my iTunes automatically and stays there to play with one click whenever I need some guidance and want to feel connected to not just God but to my humanity. God in the 21st century is closer to me and available more than He was when we weren't living the information age and could only turn to a Bible and try to interpret the riddles and rhymes.
Why complain?
OK. Here's where this essay turns upside down and I ask another question, which I'm entitled to as an Armenian and a member of the Armenian Church. If my spiritual needs are being met from some random church I will most likely never visit or frequent in person, then what am I complaining about? I'm just wondering why I can't have the best of both worlds. Why can't I listen to the liturgy on my iPod and hear a voice explaining the message in a hymn, and how the lesson in that hymn can be applied to my race on the freeways of L.A., when I'm interacting with coworkers and relatives. Why can't I turn my iPod on and hear a culture-specific spiritual message from my own church? Why should prosperity preaching not apply to things Armenian, to our community life, to our homeland? Why shouldn't biblical verses pointing the way to freedom from revenge and anger about the violence against us be a message I hear every year about April 24th? Where is the explanation of rebirth when we celebrate Independence Day or of courage when it's May 28th. There must be hundreds of opportunities to use our culture and tie the cultural experience to lessons that we need to hear as a people.
Yes, I do receive e-mails from my church. But they're pathetic. They may or may not include two-sentence prayers of the week; and mind you, they won't offer insight or interpretation about how that prayer applies to my dog-eat-dog world that I can navigate more peacefully and with more strength with prayers and my Houstonian preacher.
Why am I told to read this or that verse, when I'm not going to know what to make of the verse without the wise counsel of the men and women who have made a career of studying and interpreting these verses? After all, that's why we have these religious figures that we read about blessing this organization or visiting this or that school, praying over the dead or newlyweds. Why isn't the message that I hear from the pulpit something that relates to me more than it relates to our cultural ego? Why have I never been able to take my little notebook from Borders to inscribe a lesson to reread later in the week during a sermon at my church?
Wisdom for a trendsetting people
If we truly are a trendsetting people and knew ahead of everyone else in the world that Christianity was the way, why not also set a new trend of bringing the wisdom of the ages to our people in a palatable form, using the information age and all the tools man has created to exchange knowledge that applies to our lives day-in and day-out?
In our overwhelming 21st-century life, who needs to force him or herself out of bed on a Sunday morning, shave or put on lipstick on a day off, iron pants and a shirt, spray the hair and dab on the cologne or perfume so that we look the part of a church-going Christian who is in perfect harmony with his community? Why is our church a place of so much pretension and role-playing, a place to show off our cars and our tailored suits, a place of paying tithes only when we are written up about and honored for it?
What if I needed God on a sleepless night when I was torn-apart, sick, depressed, jittery, confused about life? What if I need God and could not drive? What if I needed God and had been crying so much that I couldn't read the Bible, let alone remember what I learned about this verse or that verse. Could I call my church and make an appointment with the perfectly clad, costumed church leaders - who may or may not relate to my economic or spiritual poverty? Do these men whose hands we bow down to kiss relate to how impossible it may be to balance our cultural identity in a place like America? Do they care that grown men like me are finding spirituality somewhere else via the Internet or that it would take a hurricane hitting Houston to make me realize I was cheating on my church and tuned into a preacher in Houston for spiritual guidance? Did the Houston arena have to go black for me to realize my Armenian Church wasn't doing its job? Do these men who have dedicated their lives to God understand the minefields I have to maneuver because I am bombarded by 60,000 thoughts a day that include sin, lust, envy, sadness, hopelessness, insecurities, and crippling anxieties about the fact that theater and entertainment, social hierarchies and not fitting in overshadow spirituality in my church? Do the leaders of my church spend any time thinking how their words from the pulpit should inspire, heal, and provide practical application of Christianity to the random diasporans in the four corners of the world who feel guilty for tuning them out?
For now I am grateful, I guess, because I have Joel Osteen - the preacher from Houston. I have Charles Stanley, the I Ching, and the Tao Te Ching, and Wayne Dyer's interpretations of this ancient Chinese text.
Maybe someday our church will reawaken and roll up its sleeves, rethink its pathetic materialism-motivated, real estate-inspired fight to maintain empty churches under various seas, and think about what happens, what could happen during those scarcely populated services that would bring God to people like me. Maybe someday the stars of our church will be the Father Vazkens (Fr. Vazken Movsesian is a priest at St. Peter Armenian Church & Youth Ministries Center in Glendale) of this world, men who are exemplary in bringing real life to a living Armenian church. Maybe someday women who are more capable and more educated than many of today's clergy will be given a shot at bringing our church back to life. Maybe someday I'll wake up and my iTunes will play back a sermon from my church, talking to me - the son of a man who instilled in me so much love and passion for what's possible in the Armenian church that I could never turn my back when doing so would be so much easier and not upset anyone in our community. Maybe.
Time continues to speed up, perhaps just for me, but I hear it from others too. There's never enough time to do all the things we have to do and want to do. There's never enough time to keep ourselves with the news of the day, process the hundreds of e-mails that come through, look at the websites that attract us, watch the shows we want to watch, and hear the radio stations we want to hear. Let's not forget those nasty text messages. There seems to be too much happening around us in the information age, and that makes each moment more valuable. This stimulus overload should also make us question where all this information is coming from and what motivates those who send it to us or make it available to us. News channels want to make you continue watching, and there is always a natural reaction we'll have to someone else's action of a text message, phone call, or e-mail. All this should make us wonder what we should be listening to and really hearing, which messages are important to understand, why these messages are being communicated to us, what is the real news in the overwhelming amount of information we're being barraged with.
Like others, I want to know. I am interested in what's happening in my community, be it the Armenian community, the community of North Hollywood, Southern California, Central California, the United States, the Republic of Armenia, and the global community. All the information about these areas of interest come into my world via that cell phone that I can't seem to not be attached with. I have this growing desire to check it between a shower and shave to see if something important has come through voice mail, text message, or e-mail. The rest of the information we proactively seek by engaging in Internet chat, browsing favorite websites, turning on the dozen English-language news channels from the United States and Armenia or other English-language services like Iran's Press TV. Television station everywhere, newspapers, and almost anyone, anywhere, has access to using a satellite now, and they're up there in orbit allowing anyone, anywhere - organizations, individuals, governments, businesses, religions, churches, charities, con artists, cults, nationalists, bigots, and truly good and truly evil people - to send you messages, news, entertainment that will hold on to your focus, and information, be it true or false. Every human can be a broadcaster now, broadcasting to each other a majority of the 60,000 thoughts scientists say each human has during the course of the day.
Messages from a megachurch
One of the messages that I have chosen to regard as important and that I look forward to hearing every day comes through an e-mail list that I've subscribed to. The e-mails come from a Christian preacher in Houston. It seems a bit odd to admit, but these daily messages about God, spirituality, and how to be a better human and Christian come not from my church but some random megachurch (megabusiness) that uses the former Houston Rockets' basketball arena to assemble 14,000 congregants at a time and preach the word of God.
What I read and save in a special designated file in my e-mail are daily messages - about three to four paragraphs with scriptural references - about how to live life, helping others, having hope, dreaming about what's possible, being grateful, and other positive and Christian ideas to entertain and think about as one of the 60,000 thoughts that pass through our mind. Whether you believe in the Son of God or God, whether you're a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, an agnostic, or an atheist, these types of thoughts empower you as a human, keep you aware of the forces that rule your interactions, keep you from falling into the natural human state of misery, dissatisfaction, and creating misery, a state that all religions seem to agree is the premise of human beings. But even though that may be our natural and default state, it doesn't have to be who we are. Messages of hope and holiness help keep us on the right track in how we think about ourselves and others, how we relate to others and the world, and how we choose what's important in the barrage of information hitting us every waking hour.
Being born to a people that boasts about being the first Christian nation, being brought up in the Armenian Apostolic Church and having it as my primary connection to spirituality, I consider myself a Christian. However, the critical thinking skills we are taught in school prompt me to also read other spiritual and religious teachings as I search for answers about why I exist. If our natural human state is being miserable, unsatisfied, never being satiated or having enough, then my natural state is also one of not being satisfied with what I have learned or know about what has happened to me and my people. I ask questions about the curses and unfortunate things that have happened to us, like Genocide, civil war, and manmade or natural disasters I have witnessed from television. I ask why these events happen, what they really mean, and what I should make of or think about these personal and global events. I wonder about existential mysteries as much as why I'm bombarded with the messages I'm receiving in this information age. I wonder about meaning while I wander through facts, figures, opinions, and ideas, also somewhat cautiously asking what the people sending me the information expect me to do about the information. Do they just want me to keep tuning in, because an even more sensational story is coming up? Do they want me to buy more, save money by buying more things I don't need because these things I'm told I must have are on sale? Do they want me to vote for their party or not vote at all; after all, how functional is any democracy in the world, especially one that is financed by big business and doesn't give voters a real choice? Do these messages and their messengers want me to support more military action to grow our economy or to invest in stocks, donate money, be more passive, buy more insurance, ask my doctor about medications that will make me look like the happy, middle-aged man who looks like a million bucks in advertisements? Why is everyone telling me all these things and how am I supposed to react to all this? Or is the information age a tool to make us simply overwhelmed and too entertained to even care and do something about our world?
Messages from our churches
One of the questions I'm asking in this essay is why the messages that steer me in the right spiritual direction and give me hope day-in and day-out in this utterly crazy modern age are coming from Houston. Why is my church sending me messages that highlight what Catholicos X or Y, Prelate, east or west, Primate, east or west, is up to this week, whom they've met, which banquet hall they ate at, whom they ate with, who went to see them and get their blessings, whom the church prayed for, what anniversary and fundraiser is being marked next week? You know what I'm talking about.
I want to know why spirituality, true, useful, much-needed words in understandable English or Armenian, are not the reason why the church is communicating to me. I want to know why these messages may or may not include a prayer of the day, a reading for the week. I want to know where the spirituality and lesson are amidst all these social, parochial, hierarchal, bless-the-rich and donate to the church messages.
People are going to be defensive and immediately point to their individual church newsletters, which I may not be privy to, since I am not a paying member of the church. But I see enough of these newsletters and attend enough services to know the messages I get from Houston are far more potent then anything I've seen being produced by my church.
My critics will write or call and point to websites and blogs, Bible-study groups, weekends away in the woods, men's groups, this or that resource, and how they are available if I had done some digging. They'll tell me it's all there, and I'm sure it is. I'm just asking why should I go out of my way to find half-baked newsletters in postal mail and public-relations-department-produced affirmations about the caste system in our ancient church when my favorite media-savvy, 21st-century preacher, who really gets real life in the trenches, already speaks right to me the messages I want and need to hear. And he speaks to me via multiple media platforms without me having to pay him a dime, without the theatrics of chants in some ancient Armenian language I can't decipher, without the Hollywood-blockbuster-worthy costumes, without the polluting incense that makes me cough, sneeze, and reach for the Visine. I get these neat little, nicely composed e-mails every morning offering me simple words, God via the Internet, God without drama or posturing, the God who died for my sins so that I may have a chance at eternal life.
Oh yeah. It's not even just an e-mail. There's even a weekly television broadcast, repeated on a dozen channels, weekdays and weekends, that I religiously TiVo to watch when I can. Oh yeah, there's even a podcast that downloads to my iTunes automatically and stays there to play with one click whenever I need some guidance and want to feel connected to not just God but to my humanity. God in the 21st century is closer to me and available more than He was when we weren't living the information age and could only turn to a Bible and try to interpret the riddles and rhymes.
Why complain?
OK. Here's where this essay turns upside down and I ask another question, which I'm entitled to as an Armenian and a member of the Armenian Church. If my spiritual needs are being met from some random church I will most likely never visit or frequent in person, then what am I complaining about? I'm just wondering why I can't have the best of both worlds. Why can't I listen to the liturgy on my iPod and hear a voice explaining the message in a hymn, and how the lesson in that hymn can be applied to my race on the freeways of L.A., when I'm interacting with coworkers and relatives. Why can't I turn my iPod on and hear a culture-specific spiritual message from my own church? Why should prosperity preaching not apply to things Armenian, to our community life, to our homeland? Why shouldn't biblical verses pointing the way to freedom from revenge and anger about the violence against us be a message I hear every year about April 24th? Where is the explanation of rebirth when we celebrate Independence Day or of courage when it's May 28th. There must be hundreds of opportunities to use our culture and tie the cultural experience to lessons that we need to hear as a people.
Yes, I do receive e-mails from my church. But they're pathetic. They may or may not include two-sentence prayers of the week; and mind you, they won't offer insight or interpretation about how that prayer applies to my dog-eat-dog world that I can navigate more peacefully and with more strength with prayers and my Houstonian preacher.
Why am I told to read this or that verse, when I'm not going to know what to make of the verse without the wise counsel of the men and women who have made a career of studying and interpreting these verses? After all, that's why we have these religious figures that we read about blessing this organization or visiting this or that school, praying over the dead or newlyweds. Why isn't the message that I hear from the pulpit something that relates to me more than it relates to our cultural ego? Why have I never been able to take my little notebook from Borders to inscribe a lesson to reread later in the week during a sermon at my church?
Wisdom for a trendsetting people
If we truly are a trendsetting people and knew ahead of everyone else in the world that Christianity was the way, why not also set a new trend of bringing the wisdom of the ages to our people in a palatable form, using the information age and all the tools man has created to exchange knowledge that applies to our lives day-in and day-out?
In our overwhelming 21st-century life, who needs to force him or herself out of bed on a Sunday morning, shave or put on lipstick on a day off, iron pants and a shirt, spray the hair and dab on the cologne or perfume so that we look the part of a church-going Christian who is in perfect harmony with his community? Why is our church a place of so much pretension and role-playing, a place to show off our cars and our tailored suits, a place of paying tithes only when we are written up about and honored for it?
What if I needed God on a sleepless night when I was torn-apart, sick, depressed, jittery, confused about life? What if I need God and could not drive? What if I needed God and had been crying so much that I couldn't read the Bible, let alone remember what I learned about this verse or that verse. Could I call my church and make an appointment with the perfectly clad, costumed church leaders - who may or may not relate to my economic or spiritual poverty? Do these men whose hands we bow down to kiss relate to how impossible it may be to balance our cultural identity in a place like America? Do they care that grown men like me are finding spirituality somewhere else via the Internet or that it would take a hurricane hitting Houston to make me realize I was cheating on my church and tuned into a preacher in Houston for spiritual guidance? Did the Houston arena have to go black for me to realize my Armenian Church wasn't doing its job? Do these men who have dedicated their lives to God understand the minefields I have to maneuver because I am bombarded by 60,000 thoughts a day that include sin, lust, envy, sadness, hopelessness, insecurities, and crippling anxieties about the fact that theater and entertainment, social hierarchies and not fitting in overshadow spirituality in my church? Do the leaders of my church spend any time thinking how their words from the pulpit should inspire, heal, and provide practical application of Christianity to the random diasporans in the four corners of the world who feel guilty for tuning them out?
For now I am grateful, I guess, because I have Joel Osteen - the preacher from Houston. I have Charles Stanley, the I Ching, and the Tao Te Ching, and Wayne Dyer's interpretations of this ancient Chinese text.
Maybe someday our church will reawaken and roll up its sleeves, rethink its pathetic materialism-motivated, real estate-inspired fight to maintain empty churches under various seas, and think about what happens, what could happen during those scarcely populated services that would bring God to people like me. Maybe someday the stars of our church will be the Father Vazkens (Fr. Vazken Movsesian is a priest at St. Peter Armenian Church & Youth Ministries Center in Glendale) of this world, men who are exemplary in bringing real life to a living Armenian church. Maybe someday women who are more capable and more educated than many of today's clergy will be given a shot at bringing our church back to life. Maybe someday I'll wake up and my iTunes will play back a sermon from my church, talking to me - the son of a man who instilled in me so much love and passion for what's possible in the Armenian church that I could never turn my back when doing so would be so much easier and not upset anyone in our community. Maybe.
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