The way of imagination

  ( Left : Papken Topjian's uncle, for whom he is named, who used to be an Armenian priest and currently lives in Montreal.  Right : Papken upon completing the Basic Military Qualification course in the Canadian Armed Forces in 1999.) “A Portal named Papken”      William Saroyan (1908-81), an Armenian-American novelist and playwright, said: “I should like to see any power in the world try and destroy this tiny race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no longer answered.  Go ahead, destroy Armenia, see if you can do it.  Send them into the desert without bread and water.  Burn their homes and churches.  Then see if they will not laugh, sing, and pray again.  For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not build a new Armenia”.      The wind whipped the faces o...

May the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing to you, Oh Lord, our rock and our redeemer.   “Read, Point, Do: life in the kingdom of justice” (Lev. 19.9-18; Ps. 96; Lk. 3.1-20) C.S. Lewis begins his book Mere Christianity by noting that people who quarrel “say things like this: ‘How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?’ – ‘That’s my seat, I was there first’… -- ‘Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine’… Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it… [However], they do not in fact behave in that way.   They know the Law of Nature; they break it.   These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in” (pp. 3, 7). Lewis is underscoring the reality of the innate human sense of right and wrong, of justice .   We all know that life should be characterized by justice, or at the ...