Window Quarterly
Vol. I, No. 3, January 1990
Copyright 1990

[Permission is granted to use, print, reproduce this article 
provided the following acknowledgment is given:  From 
Window Quarterly 1, 3 (1990);  ACRAG c. 1990. 

***

HOW SHALL WE REMEMBER

by Vigen Guroian

Some fifteen years ago, I began collecting oral histories of 
survivors of the Armenian Genocide.  Among those whose 
stories I heard were members of the Richmond, Virginia 
Armenian community, where my wife June and I lived at the 
time.   One of these was a lady, born in Zeitun in south 
central Turkey.  When she was a small child her family 
moved to nearby Marash where in the Spring of 1915 the 
deportations began.  Her father already had been conscripted 
into the Turkish military never again seen by his family, 
presumably a victim of the Turkish policy of conscripting 
Armenian males into the military and executing them.  She 
and her remaining family were marched that year across 
Turkey into the Syrian desert, a march which in her memory 
lasted forever.  During  the journey, this young girl of seven 
witnessed the deaths of some seventy relatives.  Only she and 
her mother survived.
	
At the close of our final meeting together, I asked her how 
she could believe in God in view of her great personal loss 
and tragedy.  At first she demurred.  She said that she was 
not a priest or a theologian.  I insisted, surely she had thought 
about this matter. "Yes," she said, she had. Some of the men 
and women of her generation had succumb to bitterness and 
resentment, even anger against God. They would accuse God, 
"Why did God do this to us?" She, however, had not grown 
bitter.  There were, of course, moments of doubt and 
questioning even at this time in her life.  But her memories 
would return to her grandfather, a man of exceptional faith.  
For often during those terrible, violent days of the march, 
when she was tired and her small feet ached and she was 
thirsty and hungry  and wanted to stop but did not for fear of 
the soldiers whip, she would ask her grandfather, "'Grandpa, 
where are we going?'  he would answer, 'We are going to 
Jerusalem.'  I began to hate Jerusalem. I would say, 'I don't 
like Jerusalem.  I want to go home,' and there would be tears 
in his eyes.  He was weeping.  But I did not know why.   Only 
now I understand."

This patriarch of her family died in Syria.  However, before 
his death he left his family with one command and one final 
request.  The command was, "Even if they should put a knife 
to your neck, do not deny your faith.  Death lasts only one 
moment.  Renouncing your faith means giving up an eternity 
of joy with God."  His final request was that he be given a 
Christian burial.  And so he was.  Whereas the others whom 
the little girl saw die were carried away by oxen cart to 
unmarked mass graves, he was buried by his daughter-in-law.  
He had asked that at his burial a passage from II Timothy be 
read.  The lady could not recall the identity of the passage.  
But I doubt not that it was II Timothy 4:6-8.  "As for me, 
already my life is being poured out on the altar, and the hour 
for my departure is upon me.  I have run the great race, I 
have finished the course, I have kept faith.  And now the 
prize awaits me, the great garland (crown) of righteousness, 
which the Lord, the all-just judge, will award me on that 
great Day; and it is not for me alone, but for all who have set 
their hearts on his coming appearance" (NEB).  Finally, she 
said, "As I remember my grandfather, I also remember Jesus 
when he was crucified."  "This," she said, "is what gives me 
hope and sustains me.  And I believe in the resurrection and 
that we will live even after this death on Earth . . . Maybe 
God means the Armenians to be an example for the world."

How shall we remember?  I believe that the answer to that 
question was given to me some 15 years ago when I 
questioned this lady.  Yet even before Armenians ask 
themselves the question: How shall we remember? there is 
posited already the imperative to remember.  A wise man 
once said, "Memory is the secret of redemption." And so it 
certainly must be for Armenians.  To paraphrase a famous 
passage from Armenian literature: We remember in order to 
live.  Death not comprehended is mortality; death perceived 
is immortality.
	
There is then a moral and political significance to our 
remembering. If Armenians forget the deaths of a million and 
one half and in doing so allow the world to forget also, they 
surely will have issued a warrant for future Talaat Pashas, 
Stalins, Adolph Hitlers, Idi Amins, or Pol Pots to carry out 
their murderous schemes against people with whose skin 
color, religion, ethnic origin or political persuasion they find 
fault.  This remembrance and struggle must never be selfish. 
Such remembrance and struggle must be done in the spirit of 
love and sacrifice as an offering of self in solidarity with all 
suffering people on this strife torn and agonized planet.
	
Centuries ago Rabbi Hillel wrote: "If I am not for myself who 
will be, but if I am only for myself what am I?"  Allow me to 
add to Rabbi Hillel's words:  "If a people who have suffered 
murder at the hands of an evil government do not defend the 
inviolability of their own national spirit and culture, what are 
they, but if they do not voice that truth in defense of other 
peoples who have suffered a similar injustice how can they 
be taken seriously?   Armenians ought to be at the front lines 
of the human rights struggle world-wide.  If they were, their 
own plea in behalf of themselves would be far more 
persuasive.
	
I am deeply troubled, however, by the obsessive and narrow 
use to which the Genocide has been put in order to reassert 
Armenian identity and fortify Armenian nationalism--just as 
some Jews have used the Holocaust to reassert Jewish 
identity and deflect criticisms of the state of Israel.   We 
speak of martyrs.  Yet more often than not we mean victims; 
and we plead to the world that we are the true innocents.  
This is a dangerous state of mind, one to which, sadly, the 
Armenian Church also, has willing contributed.  Having 
thrown itself into the struggle for justice, the Church has 
neglected its primary responsibility for healing the afflicted 
nation.  It has lacked the courage to faithfully tell the Gospel 
story and cast the suffering of the Armenian people in the 
context of the story of the only One who was truly innocent 
and yet was unjustly nailed to a cross.  That crime was not 
rectified but, nevertheless, opened the way to salvation.

Every April 24th, Armenians in all places mark a day of 
remembrance for those who died as victims and as martyrs of 
the Armenian Genocide. On that day, year after year, the 
Armenian Church has joined in the demand for justice.  Yet 
even those most sympathetic to our cause outside of the 
Armenian community have advised us that while justice is 
important there is no guarantee it will come;  nor may it be 
what is most needed.  As Professor Roger W. Smith of the 
College of William and Mary has written: "The emphasis 
must be on truth and healing" even more than justice.
	
Frankly, the world may choose to forget what happened to 
the Armenian people seventy-five years ago.  It is even 
possible our children will choose to forget the Genocide if all 
such remembering brings is the world's denial and the burden 
of being victims; and all that it unleashes is the gut ripping 
tiger anger.  Such remembering
must serve a greater end than the demand for an earthly 
justice, a justice the world may or may not grant us.  It is that 
purpose about which I have chosen to address.  And this 
requires talking about Christian faith.  For something 
devastating happened to Armenian Christianity in the 
Genocide.  For many faith became impossible.  For others the 
habit persisted but not the conviction.  Yet how little we have 
heard about this--except the anguished cries of our poets.  
"Let us swear," wrote Yeghish# Charents, "that when we 
find/God in paradise offering comfort/to make amends for 
our pain,/let us swear that we will refuse/saying No, send us 
to hell again./ We choose hell.  You made us know it 
well./Keep your paradise for the Turk."  Thus, even beyond 
the moral and political significance of the Genocide, there is 
a profound religious dimension to it--one which needs to be 
addressed.
	
Allow me to begin by telling a story of the Armenian writer 
Teotig who collected accounts of the clergy and their 
martyrdom during the great catastrophe.  One day in 1915, as 
in so many Armenian towns and villages, the 800 families of 
Kourd Belen (Turkish, meaning Wolf's Hill) near Izmir 
(ancient Nicomedia) were given orders to evacuate their 
homes and form a caravan of deportation.  The pastor of the 
village was an eighty-five year old priest, Fr. Khoren 
Hampartsoomian, who for all his years as a priest had served 
the people of Kourd Belen.  Fr. Hampartsoomian was 
instructed to lead his people out of the village.  As the 
procession of bewildered, frightened and disoriented 
Armenians left the outskirts of the village, nearby Turks 
came out to view the exiles, and taunted the priest, calling to 
him, "Good luck old man. Who are you going to bury today?"  
The old man replied: "Yes.  God is dead, we are rushing to 
his funeral."
	
There is such a thing as a righteous anger with God.  Job is 
the greatest scriptural example of such anger.  Also, despair, 
even a sense of desolation, is sometimes a moment in the 
movement of faith. We cannot know for certain the feelings 
which welled up within the heart of Khoren Hampartsoomian 
on that terrible day in 1915; whether it was anger or despair 
or both which made him call out: "This time we are going to 
the funeral of God."  Could the old man's feelings have been 
like those of Jesus who on the cross exclaimed in his agony, 
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 
27:46 RSV).
	
Perhaps at that moment Khoren Hampartsoomian 
experienced the near destruction of the soul--that ultimate 
desolation--which became also the experience of the 
Armenian people.  It would be an untruthful remembrance of 
what happened to the Armenian people in those fateful years 
not to acknowledge the near total physical and spiritual 
destruction which they endured.  But such despair and 
desolation are not experiences which Armenians are called 
upon to perpetuate.  Indeed the persistence of such despair 
and desolation in persons or in an entire people is not a virtue 
but a deadly vice.  Neither should Armenians perpetuate 
anger at God.  For certainly God cannot be blamed for what 
men have wrought.  But, some will inject, "God should have 
intervened."  And this at what cost?  Would we have God 
withdraw from us that freedom which he built into our very 
nature, which is itself the very dignity that we share with our 
Creator as beings made in his own image?  Would we have 
God release us from responsibility for our own actions?  
Indeed the Turk, not God, is responsible for the horror of 
human carnage which seventy-five years ago flooded the 
earth with the blood of his slain brothers and sisters.

A Jewish theologian of the Holocaust has written: "God 
suffers not on account of what man does to him.  What could 
man do to God?  He suffers because of what man does to 
himself and his brother."  I believe that for every one of the 
million and one half men, women and children whose lives 
and deaths Armenians commemorate on April 24th, the Son 
bled upon the heavenly altar and the Father himself wept for 
every victim as well as every victimizer.  God was there 
among the tortured, molested, starved and butchered.  He 
who became flesh, lived among the powerless and suffered 
an ignoble death on the cross, was also present in the burning 
churches, on the winding death marches through mountain 
and valley, in the bloodied waters of the ancient Euphrates 
and the desert ovens of Der El Zor.  It was his body which 
was ravaged by hunger, lacerated by the horseman's whip, 
pierced by the gendarme's bayonet, broken by mountain 
climb, devoured by vulture and wild beast, torn from 
mother's breast, dashed against rock and stone, thrown in 
flesh choked rivers, swollen and cooked in desert heat, and 
buried in mass of earth and human wreckage.
	
God in Christ has made his tabernacle among us.  He has 
suffered the weaknesses of our flesh and taken up in his 
dying our protest against death.  I have said already that the 
issue is not one, finally, of justice or injustice.  Rather it is 
how we who confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, can make of 
our suffering and dying a righteous witness to his promises of 
eternal life.  If we are truly followers and imitators of Jesus 
Christ then we are as the grandfather said to the little girl all 
sojourners on our way to Jerusalem.  Sometimes our lack of 
faith has led us to protest, even to hate Jerusalem and the 
King under whose discipline we placed ourselves when in the 
baptismal waters we confessed before many witnesses our 
willingness to "fight the good fight of the faith; [and] take 
hold of the eternal life to which we are called" (I Timothy 
6:12 RSV).  The Lord of resurrection and life invites human 
beings to freely follow Him, but the path they must take once 
they have decided to do so is one tread already by Him up the 
rock of Golgotha with the awful weight of the cross upon His 
back and the agony of the crucifixion before Him.  For Christ 
the glory of Palm Sunday was followed by the humiliation of 
that Friday which we who follow Him dare call good because 
we in faith have the hope for life eternal, He having trampled 
down for us Death by death. Is it, therefore, so 
incomprehensible that the glory of Christian Armenia should 
in time have been revealed as the prelude to the Golgotha of 
1915?  Armenians had more than intimations of this 
throughout their history: the early persecutions under foreign 
domination, the devastation of the Memluk invaders, the 
slave yoke of Ottoman rule.
	
"Maybe," the lady said, "God means for Armenians to be an 
example to the Earth."  Having endured the death of their 
physical body, the loss of the earthly homeland, and been 
dispersed throughout the world as sojourners in strange 
lands,  one would have hoped that Armenians could have 
recaptured their biblical minds, for Armenians are a biblical 
people.  Were they to regain their biblical vision, Armenians 
could recognize and therefore rededicate themselves to that 
Christian witness and discipleship which their forbearers so 
willingly took up and for which so many of them gave up 
their lives.  How shall Armenians remember?  By 
remembering God first who called Abraham to "go out to a 
country which God had promised to give him.  He left his 
own country without knowledge of where he was going.  By 
faith he lived as a foreigner in the country that God had 
promised him.   For Abraham was waiting for the city which 
God had designed and built, the city with permanent 
foundations" (Hebrews 11:8-10 TEV).  I am not one who 
spurns the deep desire of many, I think most Armenians, for 
a restored homeland.  I bring up this subject because in 
remembering the martyrs of the Armenocide, Armenians 
must not make the terrible error of reducing, indeed 
trivializing, their martyrdom to merely a sacrifice for 
nationhood, culture or any other human creation one calls 
Armenian.   For "Behold," exclaimed the prophet Isaiah, "the 
nations are like a drop from a bucket,/and are accounted as 
the dust on the scales;.../All the nations are as nothing before 
him,/they are accounted by him as less than nothing and 
emptiness" (Isaiah 40:15-17 RSV).
	
How shall Armenians remember the martyrs?  May they be 
remembered as among those faithful whom the author of the 
Epistle to the Hebrews recalled.
   
"It was in faith that all these persons died.  They did not 
receive the things God promised, but from a long way off 
they saw and welcomed them, and admitted openly that they 
were foreigners and refugees on earth.  Those who say such 
things make it clear that they are looking for a country of 
their own.  They did not keep thinking about the country they 
had left; if they had, they would have had the chance to 
return.  Instead, it was a better country they longed for, the 
heavenly country.  And so God is not ashamed to have them 
call Him their God, for He has prepared a city for them" 
(Hebrews 11:13-16 TEV).

We have a responsibility to the martyrs.  Before all else we 
must perpetuate the faith for which they died.  If our faith 
should expire then the martyrs' example and the hope which 
Armenians rightly discern in their deaths is lost to those 
living and all those who follow in the future.  For whatever 
meaning their deaths have is located in that faith in the 
Crucified and Resurrected One of whom they themselves 
testified through their very dying.  That is what martyrdom 
means after all.  It means to witness.  "Some were mocked 
and whipped, and others were tied up and put in prison.  
They were stoned, they were sawed in two, they were killed 
with the sword.  They went around clothed in skins of sheep 
or goats, poor, persecuted and mistreated. The world was not 
good enough for them!  They wandered like refugees in the 
deserts and hills, living in caves and holes in the ground" 
(Hebrews 11:36-38 TEV).  The world has not changed very 
much in two thousand years.  These words were written by 
the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews in recollection of the 
witness born to God's redemption by the patriarches, 
prophets and the faithful throughout history until the coming 
of Christ.  But he goes on to exclaim, "What a record all 
these men have won by their faith!  Yet they did not receive 
what God had promised, because God had decided on an ever 
better plan for us. His purpose was that only in company with 
us would they be made perfect" (Hebrews 11:39-40 TEV).
	
Here is the meaning and the purpose of the commemoration 
of the deaths of the million and one half, not to praise man 
but to praise God and strive with renewed conviction to be 
followers of Him in whom the martyrs and all the faithful 
who have journeyed before us--indeed in whom all of 
creation--rejoice.

"His purpose was that only in company with us would they 
be made perfect,"  wrote the author of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews.  These ought to be sobering words.  This is the 
seriousness of God's calling. This is the magnitude of an 
enduring reason for our remembering. Armenians must 
perpetually call up the memory of these martyrs before God, 
making the martyrs' sacrifice their own, joining them before 
the throne of God, heirs together of God's eternal Kingdom.  
For, as the same author continues, "[We] have this large 
crowd of witnesses around us.  So then, let us, therefore rid 
ourselves of everything that gets in the way, and the sin 
which holds to us so tightly, and let us run with 
determination the race that lies before us.  Let us keep our 
eyes fixed on Jesus, on whom our faith depends from 
beginning to end.  He did not give up His cross!  On the 
contrary, because of the joy awaiting Him, he thought 
nothing of the disgrace of dying on the cross, and is now 
seated at the right side of God's throne" (Hebrews 12:1-2 
TEV).

"Maybe," said the lady, "God means for us...to have a special 
purpose."  We have hardly begun to discern that purpose.  
The immediate concern of Armenians after the Ottoman 
Turk struck his awful blow at them was to find a way to 
survive, to nurture the orphaned nation in all the strange new 
lands into which its members had been exiled.  Then in 1965 
with the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the 
Genocide, a new consciousness began to emerge. Armenians 
found the will and the way to voice the anger, the outrage 
and the pain of what had happened to them, to their parents 
and grandparents.  This served its purpose.  In its best light 
this activity raised the consciousness of Armenians to the 
significance of the Genocide for them and for other people.  
It was the first Genocide of this century, the awful 
predecessor of the Holocaust and all  the human slaughter 
and state inflicted mass murder which is the mark of this 
century.  These lessons served as the foundation upon which 
the seventieth and seventy-fifth commemorations were built.  
But such remembrance has also given rise to a habitual 
harping and lamentation, to a destructive self pity, guilt and 
defensiveness and an uncontrollable rage.  Armenians have 
been frustrated, at times frenzied and in all too many 
instances unable to make creative use of their experiences.
	
Beyond the often rehearsed secular and political significance 
and uses of the Armenian experience, there is a spiritual 
service Armenians can render.  I have not intended to 
diminish the importance and nobility of those secular and 
political causes served by the remembrance of the 
Armenocide.  For some such remembrance has meant waging 
the argument for restoration of the Armenian historic land 
and independent nationhood; for others it has been the 
occasion for pressuring Turkey to admit finally that indeed a 
genocide was perpetrated and Ottoman Turkey was 
responsible; for others it has meant the opportunity to add the 
voice of Armenians to the universal plea for human rights 
and the prevention of genocide.  I have been a participant in 
such causes.  I always have believed, however, that the full 
measure of the meaning which the Genocide must obtain for 
Armenians in order to translate the deaths of the one and one 
half million into the fullness of life for themselves and for 
their posterity is not comprehended in any one or even all of 
these causes. Beyond these causes is the necessary condition 
that Armenians witness to the faith which makes the martyrs 
alive with God.
	
There is no meaning in the senseless slaughter of a million 
and one half people aside from the certain knowledge that 
Jesus Christ by his own death and resurrection has conquered 
death and all its forces in this world.  History, particularly as 
it bears the mark of fratricide, provides no meaning for itself.  
It stands in need of the redemption which is in Jesus Christ.  
Christ is risen and so are the Armenian martyrs.  Yet like the 
disciples who, when first confronted with the awful truth of 
the crucifixion of their Lord and by his presence in His 
spiritual body did not recognize him, Armenians have been 
incapable of recognizing that the resurrected life is theirs.   
Why do I say this?  Because if Armenians had recognized 
this the churches would be full.  Armenians in the diaspora 
would not have let go of a whole generation of their own, my 
generation and now its children, who are so conspicuously 
absent from the pews of all the parishes in America whether 
those of the Diocesan or the Prelacy.  The true lasting service 
to all the victims and martyrs of 1915 will be when 
Armenians rededicate themselves to the evangelization of all 
those whom they have left stray and build up the Body of 
Christ with the same earnest exhilaration of the first disciples 
and saints of the Church.  In such service God surely will 
reveal His purpose, replacing the pain of remembrance with 
the joy of his presence.

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