IIn Memoriam

In loving memory of Lida Hagopian, a gem of purest ray serene, an innocent soul, born in the hallowed Old City of Jerusalem, whose footsteps also echoed in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, and on the sunswept sidewalks and distant shores of Australia.

The idyll begins in

Jerusalem’s Old 

City on June 22,

1966, just a year

before the fateful

Six Day War that

changed the map

of the Middle East

forever.

    Jerusalem was still part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan at the time, and a wall still truncated the city.     She was not there when the wall came down on June 5. She was in another part of the world, in Kuwait.     The tiny sheikhdom had gained its independence only a few years before but the pace of life was still slow and easy.  As in all other parts of the  Middle East, people had more time for each other. Neighbors kept their doors open (and the air conditioners on, for the temperature was known to break through the 40 degrees mark), and hospitality was more than an attribute, it was the law of the land.     In this warm and friendly atmosphere, little Lida learned to take her first steps and utter her first words. The neighbors doted on her. In fact, the building block where they lived resembled an extended family, where everyone not only knew and trusted everyone else, but where everyone was welcome in everyone else's home.     To add to the gregarious atmosphere, Lida's grandparents, who were living in Jerusalem, visited frequently, spending months at a time in Kuwait, and shamelessly spoiling the child.     There were regular visits to the sea, and endless gambols in the warm waters of the Gulf.     When Lida cut her first tooth, the relatives and friends were invited to celebrate the occasion in the traditional Armenian ceremony, the "hadigaseghan", steaming plates of boiled wheat, liberally spiced and garnished with sultanas, pomegranate seeds and an assortment of other condiments.      The sojourn in the oil-rich emirate, with its sandstorms, its sun-scorched sands, hospitable people, soft beaches and warm sea was short-lived. Three years later, Lida was to join her parents in embarking on another trek, this time to Australia.      She went to school in Sydney - but ten years later, she was back in Jerusalem, for another stay, this time an 18-year stretch, before returning once again, to Australia.      The lucky continent was an eye-opener for Lida, the experience both novel and painful. Novel in the discovery of a new way of life, with greater freedom and tolerance, and painful because few of the old values she had absorbed in childhood, still prevailed.      Lida's return to Jerusalem, the city she grew to cherish all her brief earthly life. was another milestone in her life.  It was here that she nurtured her growing love for both music and the kingdom of God. This was the city made blessed by the imprints of Jesus, the night journey of Mohammed, and the dreams of Moses.     Her love of music was nurtured here. For years, she kept meticulous track of every week's top-ten hit songs chart, taping almost every single song that had made the charts during that period.     She made pilgrimages to every last one of the holy sites associated with the three monotheistic religions. She prayed at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, she visited the Aqsa mosque on "lailat ul qadar", the night when, as Islam believes, the gates of heaven are thrown open and the faithful can have direct communication with their Creator, and she placed her prayers in the cracks of the Western Wall, in the Hebrew tradition.     And she went to Lourdes.     She immersed herself in the freezing waters flowing from the spring, a prayer on her lips, a hope in her heart.     If there was a miracle, its secret was shared with her Creator.     The fact that she was a Jerusalemite Armenian, a member of a gallant free-thinking community, gave her the open-mindedness and spiritual largesse she needed to accommodate all the religions of the world. She felt at peace not only with the Bible, Qur'an and Torah, but the sacred scriptures of Buddhism as well.     Truly, her heart is a "pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks, a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Ka'aba, and the tables of the Torah and the book of the Qur'an", as in the words of Ibn Arabi. And she takes comfort in the promise of God in Merton's Fire Watch.     In I Corinthians 13, she finds an echo of her interpretation of what love and compassion should be.     And the papyrus of the Royal Mother Netchemet in the ancient Book of the Dead, mirrors her true essence.