Last week in Lowell, Massachusetts, I was taken to City Hall to see a memorial khachkar, a cross-stone called “A Mother’s Hands”. As I reached up and touched the bronze hands above the cross, my thoughts immediately turned to my grandmother Eva, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide. I remembered her steady, patient hands making needle lace, and how, when I was a teenager, she taught me to lace. Needle lace is delicate work. It requires patience, attention, and care. You do not

A few weeks ago, I was in Washington, D.C. during cherry blossom season. The city was filled with beauty: trees covered in soft pink and white blossoms, almost like a living painting. But what struck me just as deeply were the trees that had been cut down. Even from some of those trunks, new shoots were already beginning to grow. Life was quietly rising where everything seemed finished. We all know what it feels like to face something in life that seems cut down: a dream, a p

Years ago, when I was a student at Sevan Seminary, we had a psychology class during our fourth year. In one of those sessions, we learned about what is called cognitive reframing; the ability to look at the same situation from a different perspective and, by doing so, discover a new meaning within it. At the time, it felt like a modern psychological insight. But as the years passed, I came to realize that the Holy Scripture and the spiritual fathers had been teaching this wis