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Eastern Liturgy in the West: the Case of the Armenian Church MICHAEL DANIEL FINDIKYAN

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Eastern Liturgy in the West: the Case of the Armenian Church MICHAEL DANIEL FINDIKYAN Eastern Liturgy in the West: The Case of the Armenian Church MICHAEL DANIEL FINDIKYAN I am not a specialist in the field of inculturation, so what I offer you is not at all a scholarly address; I will not in any way claim to be comprehensive or definitive in my remarks. That leaves me free to ruminate and to reflect with you on the topic at hand without the obligation to be systematic, or even to tie up loose ends. I shall speak to the topic of inculturation as a student of the history of liturgy and as a representative of the Christian East, specifically as a priest of the Armenian Orthodox Church, and as a practitioner of the Armenian Rite. My hope is that my remarks will leave many threads for you to pick at during our discussion later. Let our ruminations begin, therefore, with a bit of background for the purpose of contextualization. The Armenian Church is one of the so-called Oriental Orthodox Churches. Along with the Coptic, Ethiopian, Syrian (”Jacobite“), and Malankara Orthodox Churches, the Armenian Church is distinguished from the other Orthodox Churches (Greek, Russian, and so on) by its Christology, that is, by its rejection of the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon and its particular formulation for understanding the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ. In liturgical rite, history, and spirituality, however, the Oriental Orthodox Churches are actually quite distinct one from the other.1 Today the Armenian Rite is used or practiced by an estimated six million faithful of the Armenian Church, as well as approximately three hundred forty-four thousand members of the Armenian Catholic Church in communion with Rome. What we call the Armenian Rite is a complete and integrated system of worship; a unique synthesis of liturgical usages and practices that expresses the instinctive, traditional response of the Armenian people to God’s providential activity in history. That history begins with the Bible, of course. Medieval Armenian historians have traditionally viewed the history of the Armenian people in direct continuity with the Bible.2 Since the proclamation of Christianity as the state religion in the early fourth century, Armenian historiographers have systematically and unapologetically interpreted their own unfolding history in light of their faith in Christ. Until the eighteenth century there simply is no such thing as Armenian secular history. The Armenian Rite is a system of common prayer, that is, prayer for the community, composed, collated, and utilized by the Armenian people for the Armenian people, having its own distinctive inner logic and perspective.3 This system of worship includes not only the Divine Liturgy but also the services traditionally conducted each day—morning prayers, evening prayers, Compline prayers at bedtime, a unique and beautiful daily Sunrise Service, and various forms of all-night vigils.4 The rite includes the sacraments, which for us Armenians are traditionally not limited to seven, as they are in the West, but include blessings for the sick, a variety of very poignant penitential services, as well as all kinds of other liturgical ceremonies like funerals, the consecration of a church, the blessing of water, footwashing on Holy Thursday, the blessing of grapes, and many others. Moreover, the liturgical Rite of the Armenian Church, properly speaking, is not even limited to church services. It comprises the texts of the prayers and hymns in all of their theological and poetic splendor; the system of organizing these liturgical texts for certain days; the selection and arrangement of church feasts throughout what is called the liturgical year; the cycle of saints’ commemorations; the lectionary; even the vestments worn by bishops, priests, deacons, and altar servers. The liturgical Rite of the Armenians goes on to include the peculiar melodic patterns of sacred music, and even the architectural structure of the church building and the sacred art that adorns it. After all, the church edifice must be designed to accommodate the liturgical services and rituals that take place within its walls (and not infrequently outside as well). All of this constitutes the Armenian Rite. Its rituals, prayers, hymns, and underlying theology are inextricably linked to the history, culture, and distinctive theological perspective of the Armenian people. The liturgy of the Armenian Church, in other words, expresses how the Armenian people have experienced and understood the Christian faith throughout the centuries. The renowned specialist of Eastern Christian worship, my teacher Robert Taft, S.J., has expressed the role of liturgy in the Eastern Christian churches in these rhapsodic terms: The key to the heart of the Christian East is its liturgy . It is only through the liturgy that Scripture, tradition, the Fathers, piety, spirituality—everything—is transmitted and lived. Sometimes . this expression of a living faith can become sclerotic, overgrown, too heavy. But underneath the overgrowth of centuries lie the jewels of a people’s incarnation of the gospel, waiting to be uncovered by someone willing to cut back the brush. I cannot imagine a more fitting, immensely rewarding ministry than to study the heritage of a people— and in the East that heritage is conserved and transmitted through the liturgy— in order to uncover its riches for the good of that same people, and of all peoples, to the unending glory of God’s eternal name.5 It is uniquely in its liturgy, therefore, that a Christian community’s particular experience of the Christian faith—in other words, its distinctive witness to Christ’s Gospel—is to be found. This is particularly relevant to Eastern Christian communities, and it is certainly true for the ancient Christian faith of the Armenian people. How do the Armenians understand the Gospel of Jesus Christ? What does Christ’s resurrection mean to the Armenians? What aspects of the Christian faith do Armenians consider particularly evocative? The liturgy of the Armenian Church reveals how the Armenians have believed in God, how an ancient people, mercilessly oppressed and persecuted for most of its existence, rooted its identity in Christian faith, not as some inert cultural manifestation or transient philosophical movement, but as a life-giving, life-sustaining, life-defining reality. Something more must be said about liturgy from an Eastern perspective. Liturgy in its fullest sense is simultaneously the means and the end of our Christian journey. All the churches of the Christian East share the conviction that the liturgy is more than common, corporate prayer. It is more than ”the service of God offered by the people of God,“ as one theological dictionary puts it.6 All of the Eastern churches share the belief that the liturgy is a genuine ”participation“ (koinonia) in the living Christ, to use St. Paul’s terminology (1 Cor 10:16). In the prayers, psalms, hymns, and rituals of the sacraments and of the services of the Daily Cycle, and most conspicuously in the Eucharistic Liturgy, our salvation is actualized, and the church’s true essence par excellence is manifested. The fathers of the Christian East rarely pass up the opportunity to avow that we actually experience Christ’s redemptive work by conducting the elements of the liturgy. The psalms and canticles of the Morning Office, for example, work on us. As we sing and pray them, as those sacred words wash over us, the salvation effected by Christ unfolds for us. They put us in touch with the Saviour, and with Christ’s redemptive acts in history. In the liturgy, Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy insists, the ”body“ is joined to its ”head“ (Col 1:18, 2:19), to continue with St. Paul’s imagery. If that is the case, then we can say that in our devotion to the liturgy, in our participation in the liturgy, we indeed grow in the Orthodox faith. We come to understand more deeply what the faith is all about. Consequently, in the Christian East we understand liturgy to be an exercise, a kind of nourishment, a sort of catechetical school, by the grace of the Holy Spirit.7 The late Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann expressed this idea deftly: Something happens in and through all these celebrations. Something happens not only in the Church but also in my life, in my life as an individual, as a member of a family, as a member of human society . something so beautiful, so heavenly, so crucial for real Orthodoxy that when we lose it—even though we can still build beautiful churches with domes and three-barred crosses and even know Orthodox melodies—we cease to be Orthodox.8 II. Let’s take a trip to Armenia. Allow me to lead you, via your imagination, on a visit to an Armenian Church in the old country. The church I have chosen is in the town of Etchmiadzin, about ten miles from Armenia’s capital city of Yerevan, in the shadow of the biblical Mount Ararat. In this town the patron saint of the Armenian people, St. Gregory the Illuminator (or Baptizer) converted the pagan Armenian king, Drtad, to Christianity in the early years of the fourth century. Armenia thus became the first nation to proclaim Christianity as its official religion, some years before Emperor Constantine did the same for the Byzantine Empire, and several decades before the Christianization of the Empire actually took hold and became permanent. Around this time St. Gregory was bowed down in prayer in a field, when, in a vision, he saw Jesus Christ descend and mark the spot on which the first cathedral of Christendom would be built. Hence the name of the cathedral, and of the town, Etchmiadzin: ”the place where the Only-begotten descended.“9 But we are not going to visit the cathedral of Etchmiadzin.
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