Love, Identity, and the Journey Home

Arriving in Armenia as an Armenian, you feel obligated to love. When watching the ground to get a feel for your entire surroundings, your gaze feels upwards, and your eyes are seized by the sunny wintry shadows paving every postcard worthy moment. And every moment is postcard worthy because you perceive it with love-filled eyes. And you perceive everything with love-filled eyes because your ancestral homeland decodes you through tears and love.

Your connection to the land here is not for one moment brittle. The snow feels right even though it’s your first time seeing it. The trees seem recaptured from when you dreamt of them as a child and supposedly carried them on your back to Australia. The ornate rugs of old remind you of your family waiting for you oceans away.

But it’s so nice being here, caring for that voice in you that feels partly devoured by the diaspora and partly enflamed with desire. The slowness of time is helpful in processing your mind transfixed on ideas; you’re trying to avoid romanticism. But what if romanticism was your ancestor’s salvation?

Since arriving here you’ve been recording short films of everything. Snow hungrily spiking down ceilings, skylines washed against dusty windowpanes, the sound of motorways on Saturday afternoons, the entrance of iconography-infused churches. And the reason you’ve been capturing every single thing is because you don’t want to forget and to not forget, you must contain something of glorious Armenia in your mind.

You’ve always felt a disconnection with nature because it’s uncontainable. It’s always stood as aloof for you, and for you to understand the place of something in your heart, you need to contain it. You’ve been containing Armenia through your dialogues with it behind eyes of love and hate. You love it so much that you can say there are things you hate about it too.

The equilibrium tips in the favour of love and your winter hands are warmed by the crisp sunlight and the promise of redemption situates your hope to keep wandering.

The Search for Identity in the Homeland

You’ve wandered around the city squares, the back streets where stray dogs unofficially rest, the noisome markets, the very brown village your aunty is from. You’ve wondered why your identity in your birth country feels so problematic and less tense here. You’ve wandered around huge galleries, drunk from fresh pulpulaks, journeyed family homes searching for what they have in common. You’ve wondered how you can part from this perfect match solidifying home.

The simplicity will be gone when you get back. And it’s not a simple thing to be working out your identity in a land that opens to you. Your sister in response to you said that it’s the people, not the land that makes us feel welcome or unwelcome. But the voice of the land is tinged with tears and an instinct to nurse you in her protective womb.

You are a nursing child here, and it’s simple to be young in a new country you’ve arrived at everyday in your life. It’s not simple to be taking in new information every day, but you’re a nursing child and that’s what nursing children do, and your mother’s milk is truly an elixir.

People’s stares in glorious Armenia are unwelcoming, but the land, the hands that bake bread, your beautiful language being spoken everywhere better than you, are too beautiful to part. But you have to leave every room you walk into. When you say goodbye, you will be leaving the womb.

It will be just as I say, and you will grow to love milk that isn’t your mothers. Your new home will be so different to the womb, and it will remain painful for you. But newly leaving the womb, you will be cared for.

Embracing the Infinite Journey of Home

You were contained in the womb but after leaving, the world cannot contain you.

You are but dust and ashes, completely at God’s mercy to breathe, to receive revelation about your identity, to love, to hate. But the world cannot contain you once you leave the womb.

That you’re pondering all this shows you are preparing to leave when the time is right. The time for now is to eat and cry and be vulnerable and to allow yourself to be nursed by the country with a place, not making space for you.

And if you can’t contain everything… if your psyche is burdened and intrigued so that you’re swallowed by the infinite, be in awe that you care so much. And know that the ideal for how Armenia should be carried your ancestors along; they could not contain it either.

If they could contain it perfectly, they would not fight for it. The power of infinite Armenia would not send them on their way to the battlefield. Their imagination and hope would run dry.

But if you can contain it, let it go and toss it to the heavens, unfolding your hands to receive the infinite so that when it’s time to kiss the black stones and starry people goodbye, the aspiration for infinity will lead you back to this grounded country that unfortunately changes from one moment to the next. Infinity will inspire you to hope for home wherever you go.

The Yerevan taxi driver was right when he said, “The important thing is that you’re a Christian,” because wherever you go, because the Spirit lives in you, you find home. And people can’t help but to be drawn to you because you carry home.

It’s all too simple, however, and you stay unsatisfied. What type of worshipper you will be in the new creation is what keeps you up at night, the fullness of your identity to Christ. You want to give your wholehearted self to him, so keep giving, giving, giving. He is preparing for you numerous lessons about home. Just wait.