The Election of Mar Awa Royel to the Patriarchate of the Assyrian Church of the East

By Bishop Joseph (Ancient Church of the West) 

I was overjoyed to find out this last week that my friend and teacher, His Grace, Bp. Mar Awa Royel, has been elected to become the 122nd Patriarch of the Church of the East. As many of you know, H.G. Mar Awa was instrumental in having us move to Modesto, Ca, at the end of 2014, where we stayed for three years. 

During our time in Modesto, we learned a lot about the Assyrian culture, studied their language, and attended many of their beautiful Raze (mysteries/liturgies). We learned much about Mar Awa's dialogues with the Russian Orthodox and other groups, which gave us great hope that the Assyrian Church would someday find a hospitable reception amongst the world's larger churches. We also began the process of translating some of their beautiful liturgical hymns into Chinese, which resulted in several partial reconstructions that we are still using in our East Asian churches. The depth and beauty of the Syriac Christian Tradition still stirs me to the bottom of my soul, and I still find myself weeping at some of the translations of the Easter Vigil hymns that beloved Lector Eshu taught me. 

At the time, we were extremely interested in helping the Church of the East to build cultural and catechetical bridges with East Asian Christianity, which often looks to them as a root of Apostolic Faith in an otherwise non-Christian cultural milieu. I wrote extensively about their history in English and in Chinese, challenging the claim that the Church of the East was doctrinally "Nestorian" for my Balamand University Thesis, showing that they had re-communed with the Byzantine Church under the reign of Heraclius and Patriarch Sergius, and researching the meaning and usage of the Chinese Stele Cross. This cross-pollination has led to some truly wonderful Chinese hymns, and has resulted in many Christians in the underground learning more about their ancient Christian inheritance and finding a deeper root of identity that transcends many of the problematic western colonial definitions that are commonly taught or assumed.  

The Assyrians taught me about Anglicanism, from which I had been alienated my whole life  as a result of my father's broken relationship with my grandfather. My grandfather had been raised in the Episcopal Church, and had felt called to the priesthood before WWII. Unfortunately, after all the bloodshed of the Pacific theater, he felt alienated from God and found a former Roman Catholic Nun to marry upon his return to the US. Both were irreligious, and my father was raised only nominally Christian. An agnostic youth, my father came back to Christ through the influence of my mother's Baptist family, and my father became a Baptist pastor for nearly 40 years before his untimely death in 2018. By living with the Assyrians, I found out that there had been, at one time, some very biblical and orthodox Anglicans, who not only helped to preserve the East Syriac tradition, but also helped the Assyrian nation in some of their most dire time of need. They even inter-communed with Anglicans and used their churches for several generations, before Women's Ordination became the norm and the Assyrians reckoned them to have lost their priesthood. 

Our time in Modesto was a time of learning, soul-searching, and lead to my ultimate decision to try to restore our own ethnic and liturgical patrimony to Orthodoxy, the English Parochial Tradition, rather than trying to be an "orientalist" or an Orthodox "konvert," attempting to deny the validity, breadth, beauty and necessity of the Western Christian inheritance. The world is full of people who try to assume someone else's identity in order to be "right", and we end up in ungratefulness, confusion, and discontinuity. The Assyrians helped me see through these issues, and like them, appreciate the Christian faithfulness that has been handed down to me, rather than looking for a home amongst those who neither appreciated nor understood the culture of my birth. This does not mean that we abandon Orthodoxy. No! Instead, we must be Orthodox and in communion with the Orthodox from within our own cultural patrimony, loyal to both the Fathers of the Church and our earthly fathers, to whom we owe our lives. 

I will pray harder for His Holiness, Patriarch Mar Awa III, now that he must bear up under so many new hardships and stresses. It is a huge responsibility, picking up many old crosses and struggling under many new realities. The situation in the Middle East is daunting, and the secularization and apostasy in the West is also very harmful to the young people in the Assyrian Church. I pray that God will give the new Patriarch wisdom, patience, and success as he leads the Assyrian Church towards a brighter and more glorious future! May God bless him and cause his patriarchal priesthood to shine around the world, to the glory of the Holy Trinity and the spread of the Apostolic Gospel!

Hoya Brikhtah!