Hope for Deliverance

Russia in the 17^th century, much as we are today, was in the midst of a great ‘time of troubles’.  But she was delivered from them by a miracle from God, through the Kazan Icon of Our Lady.  (The story is related briefly below.) 

Seeing, then, what is possible through this wonderworking Icon, we ought to dedicate ourselves to praying before it as well.  These are the hymns the Church sings to Our Lady of Kazan.  Offer them to the Most Holy Mother of God along with your own heartfelt prayers, as often as you think best, that we might receive Her gracious help.  For Our Lady is not hard-hearted toward those who ask for Her intercessions.  (Skete.com and the Holy Trinity Monastery offer this Icon if you would like to have a copy in your home.  If you would like to order from the HTM, please read this.  Another option: Holy Transfiguration Monastery.)    

Troparion (Tone 4)

O fervent intercessor, Mother of the Lord Most High,

thou dost pray to thy Son Christ our God and savest all who seek thy protection.

O Sovereign Lady and Queen,

help and defend all of us who in trouble and trials,

in pain and burdened with sins, stand in thy presence before thine icon,

and who pray with compunction, contrition, and tears and with unflagging hope in thee.

Grant what is good for us,

deliverance from evil, and save us all, O Virgin Mother of God,

for thou art a divine protection to thy servants.

Kontakion (Tone 8)

O peoples, let us run to that quiet good haven,

to the speedy helper, the warm salvation, to the Virgin's protection.

Let us speed to prayer and hasten to repentance.

For the Mother of God pours out her mercy, anticipates needs, and averts disasters

for her patient and God-fearing servants.

(Hymns from OrthodoxWiki.)

This Christmas season, let us honor Our Lord by venerating His Most Pure Mother, Our Lady of Kazan, Protectress of the Southland, Our Hope for Deliverance.

--A short account of the Kazan Icon of Our Lady, as found in Vladimir Moss, Autocracy, Despotism and Democracy: Part 2, 2012, pgs. 213, 217, http://www.orthodoxchristianbooks.com/downloads/381_AUTOCRACY_PART_2.pdf :

“Wonderful is the Providence of God,” writes Protopriest Lev Lebedev, “in bringing him to the summit of ecclesiastical power at this terrible Time of Troubles… In 1579 he had been ordained to the priesthood in the St. Nicholas Gostinodvordsky church in Kazan. And in the same year a great miracle had taken place, the discovery of the Kazan icon of the Most Holy Theotokos. This was linked with a great fall in the faith of Christ in the new land, the mocking of the Orthodox by the Muslims for failures in harvest, fires and other woes. A certain girl, the daughter of a rifleman, through a vision in sleep discovered on the place of their burned-down house an icon of the Mother of God. Nobody knew when or by whom it had been placed in the ground. The icon began to work wonders and manifest many signs of special grace. The whole of Kazan ran to it as to a source of salvation and intercession from woes. The priest Hermogen was a witness of all this. He immediately wrote down everything that had taken place in connection with the wonderworking icon and with great fervour composed a narrative about it. The glory of the Kazan icon quickly spread through Russia, many copies were made from it, and some of these also became wonderworking. The Theotokos was called “the fervent defender of the Christian race” in this icon of Kazan. It was precisely this icon and Hermogen who had come to love it that the Lord decreed should deliver Moscow and Russia from the chaos of the Time of Troubles and the hands of the enemies. . . .

“On the advice of Patriarch Hermogen, the holy Kazan icon of the Mother of God was taken into the levy of Minin and Pozharsky.

“In the autumn of 1612 the second levy was already near Moscow. But it did not succeed in striking through to the capital. Their strength was ebbing away. Then the levies laid upon themselves a strict three-day fast and began earnestly to pray to the Heavenly Queen before her Kazan icon. At this time Bishop Arsenius, a Greek by birth, who was living in a monastery in the Kremlin, and who had come to us in 1588 with Patriarch Jeremiah, after fervent prayer saw in a subtle sleep St. Sergius. The abbot of the Russian Land told Arsenius that ‘by the prayers of the Theotokos judgement on our Fatherland has been turned to mercy, and that tomorrow Moscow will be in the hands of the levy and Russia will be saved!’ News of this vision of Arsenius was immediately passed to the army of Pozharsky, which enormously encouraged them. They advanced to a decisive attack and on October 22, 1612 took control of a part of Moscow and Chinatown. Street fighting in which the inhabitants took part began. In the fire and smoke it was difficult to distinguish friend from foe. On October 27 the smoke began to disperse. The Poles surrendered….

 

Gun Control and Local Decision-Making

Edmund Burke taught us that few rights are absolute:  That is, a community's particular circumstances will determine the extent to which a right may be virtuously exercised.  To that end, if a town, county, parish, or state determines that it is in their best interest to ban or restrict this or that gun, sale of this or that ammunition, etc., we must let them go their way, however much we may disagree with their decision.

What must not occur is a command from on high directed to every town and village and state to ban this or that - or else.  A couple hundred men and women in D.C. oughtn't try to settle the issue for more than 300,000,000 others who all live under quite different conditions.  No, let each locality decide for itself; that is the only wise and moral way of handling a question of this magnitude in a country of this size.

Some Thoughts on Newtown

(There are many angles from which one can view this terrible crime.  For example, the psychological or the religious.  Below is what came to my mind after listening to a radio report about the shooting; let us call it the wider political view of the dreadful event.)

Radio France International stated in their broadcast on Saturday morning (15 Dec. 2012) that the five worst school shootings have all taken place within the States of this unfortunate Union.  Remembering John Remington Graham’s simple but powerful truth from his book Blood Money - when something in history appears which would not be expected to exist, that thing has appeared because of the plans men purposefully put into action - we must ask why this particular pattern of violence has emerged in the schools of the united States and not elsewhere.

The answer in short:  These murders and others like them are likely the latest method employed by the international moneyed elite in their attempt to subjugate the people of these States to their will. 

A bit of explanation is perhaps in order.  The first stage of this takeover was fomenting the awful kin-slaying falsely called a civil war (the South was not trying to conquer Washington, D.C., but instead trying to rid herself of its growing mischief).  In the fires of that tragedy many noble men and institutions were lost on both sides, allowing the elite to begin their consolidation of political power in Washington and their financial power in New York City. 

They strengthened their grip on the country by less violent, though no less significant, means in the coming years:  the 14^th, 16, and 17^th Amendments to the u.S. Constitution which tore down some of the great bulwarks that had protected local self-determination for so many years; the Federal Reserve Act, which granted the elites nearly complete control of the (now unwillingly united) nation’s economy; and widespread, unchecked industrialisation and mechanisation made more and more formerly independent, self-sufficient farmers, craftsmen, and labourers together with their families into wage-slaves of the elite who owned the factories, the railroads, etc.

Other steps such as the ruin of true education and the use of film, TV, etc. to stupefy and indoctrinate the general public will have to go unmentioned for the present.

Our immediate concern is that the elite are now entering the final stages of their enslavement policy toward the united States.  They desire us to be as the docile, groveling beggars of Western Europe who blindly worship the Provider State controlled by this same elite from behind the scenes, whose wealth is taken from them by the state and transferred to the elite.  But that is unlikely to happen here so long as the greater part of the folk is armed (and suspicious of government power).

The elite’s answer to this dilemma?  Bring about (whether directly or indirectly involved) shootings at public locations (schools, the theatre in Aurora, Colorado, and so on), demonise the guns, place heavy restrictions on their use, and in the end, outlaw and confiscate as many of them as possible. 

It sounds outlandish and outrageous, like the ranting of a fool.  But we must remember who we are dealing with.  These elites are the of the same ideology and families as those who started a war among our forefathers that killed several hundred thousand men on our own soil; who funded the Nazis in Germany and the Soviets in Russia; and who today are sowing wars in Africa and the Middle East so they can better exploit the people and resources of those lands for their enrichment (among other wicked acts).

These are not nice but misguided men and women.  That is a title best hung on the elite’s puppets in Washington and in our own state capitals, otherwise called Democrat and Republican governors, senators, etc.  These elites are in fact very evil people, and we must expect them to do very evil things to achieve their ends. 

The English peoples the world over have an active, vivid imagination and react emotionally to it (Hillaire Belloc, ‘The Conversion of England’, Essays of a Catholic, TAN Books and Publishers, Rockford, Il.: 1992, p. 62).  Thus, the elite give our imagination the most potent images they can conjure - innocent children, little, small, defenseless, slaughtered by men with guns - in the hope that we in our usual overly emotional response will recoil in horror and tamely accept the outlaw of these weapons that hinder their plans for us and for our fatherland.  This would leave firearms mostly in the hands of either government agents or criminals, neither of whom are trustworthy.

We shouldn’t overlook the very real suffering of those in Newtown.  The living and the departed need our prayers and whatever other help we can offer, now more than ever.  Nevertheless, the elite’s goal of our total subjugation is yet unrealised.  We must therefore expect more troubles of one form or another to come.  And when they do, let us not be found unprepared.

A Little Less Tech II

In addition to other 'advances' given us by the physical sciences - genetically modified food, toxic factory waste, Big Pharma's killer drugs and vaccines, maiming and death from car wrecks, etc. - we can now add a new one: cell phones.  From UPI:

Cellphone addiction shows similarities to compulsive buying and credit card misuse, a study by marketing researchers at Baylor University in Texas found.

...

Previous studies have shown young adults send an average of 109.5 text messages a day or approximately 3,200 texts each month. They receive an additional 113 text messages and check their cells 60 times in a typical day.

"At first glance, one might have the tendency to dismiss such aberrant cellphone use as merely youthful nonsense -- a passing fad. But an emerging body of literature has given increasing credence to cellphone addiction and similar behavioral addictions," Roberts said in a Baylor release Wednesday.

A return to the spirit of ancient Greek science, described by Simone Weil in The Need for Roots (tr. Arthur Wills, New York, Routledge: 2003, p. 242), is surely needed now more than ever:

As for technical applications, if Greek science didn't produce many, it isn't because it was incapable of doing so, but because the Greek savants didn't wish it.  These men, obviously very much less advanced than we are, as is natural seeing that they lived twenty-five centuries ago, feared the effects of technical inventions which could be made use of by tyrants and conquerors.  So, instead of delivering to the public the greatest possible number of technical discoveries and selling them to the highest bidder, they kept rigorously secret all the ones they happened to make for their own amusement; and, apparently, themselves remained poor.

If today's scientists won't put their harmful mindcrafts away for the good of the wider public, we need to do it ourselves, following the excellent example of the Amish and other wise folk.

Sevilla by Isaac Albeniz

For the sake of joy and beauty in dark times.

Watch here.

A Warning to Southern Baptists

Dr Richard Land, a leader in the Southern Baptist Convention, recently praised the work of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) for its immigration policy during a roundtable discussion of the topic aired on C-SPAN.  The CFR being one of the foremost organisations promoting one world government, this was cause for alarm.  After a bit of digging, it was found that he is indeed a member of the CFR and that his own stance on immigration echoes that of 'open borders' advocates like Sen John McCain and former Pres George W. Bush.

Are there other ties between the CFR and the Southern Baptist Convention?  Further study is surely called for.  All Southern Baptists of good will, take note and be alert.

The Apostle of Wessex

The South, as we have said here before, is a child of Wessex.  It is therefore very meet to highly exalt the man who carried the Christian Faith to our ancestors, and thus to us as well in an indirect manner.  That man is our holy father, St Birinus, Bishop of Dorchester-on-Thames, whose feast is celebrated today (3 December).  He it was who converted and baptised King Cynegils of Wessex and many of his subjects in 635 A.D., laying a solid foundation for that kingdom for years to come (which was nevertheless broken quite badly by the corruptions of the Norman conquerors in the 11th century).

A brief account of the life of St Birinus is available on pages 64 and 65 of this book by Vladimir Moss.

Holy Father and Missionary Birinus,

intercede with the merciful God

to grant our souls forgiveness of sins.

(Icon courtesy of Orthodox Outlet for Dogmatic Enquiries.)