All
across the Irish and British Isles, to look at
only one of the South’s main bloodlines, there are dozens and dozens of holy
places: shrines containing the relics of
saints, healing wells, hermits’ caves, monastic islands, and such like. St Fillan of Strathfillan (in Scotland)
provides a good ensample of this:
. . .
St.
Fillan (Foelan) lived in the eighth century. He was born in Ireland; his
mother was St. Kentigerna and his uncle was St. Comgan. From time immemorial he
has been much venerated in both Ireland
and Scotland.
He may have been educated at Taghmon Monastery in Wexford (Ireland) under
St. Fintan Munnu. Later, probably in about 717, he moved together with his
mother and other relatives to Scotland.
There he became a monk and lived the monastic life until the end of his life.
It is known that for some time Fillan preached the Good News together with Sts.
Kentigerna and Comgan and then retired to live as a hermit in a cave on the
site of the present-day village Pittenweem (“the cave’s place”) in the county of Fife. This village was to become one of
the most important places for his veneration. With time Fillan was appointed
abbot of a monastery in Fife but after several
years he gave up his abbacy and retreated to Glendochart (in Perthshire) where
he lived alone in prayer and contemplation and finally built a church. Today a
number of places and churches in the vicinity of Glendochart bear the name of
the saint.
During
his life Fillan by his prayer healed from many diseases the sick who flocked to
him. The hermit worked miracles. Once, when he was abbot, a wolf ate one of his
oxen while the saint was working in the field. The abbot commanded the wolf as
a penance to plough up that part of the field instead of the ox that it had
eaten. The wild wolf obeyed the saint and immediately fulfilled the task. The
veneration of St. Fillan in Scotland
was so strong that in 1314 the Scottish king Robert Bruce took the reliquary
with the saint’s arm with him to the Battle of Bannockburn and attributed his
victory over the English to the saint's intercession.
Fillan
reposed and was buried in Strathfillan, the centre of his veneration. He
probably built a church or a monastery on this site and preached to the local
Pictish population. The cave
of St. Fillan in
Pittenweem survives to this day. After his death the cave became a destination
for many pilgrims, and a holy well with healing power existed near it for many
years. In late medieval times a small Augustinian priory, associated with the
monastery on the Isle of May (in the outer Firth of Forth), was founded in
Pittenweem and named after St. Fillan. Several centuries ago Fillan’s cave was
left derelict and forgotten for a certain time. In about 1900, a horse that
pastured in a local priory garden suddenly fell into an overgrown hole. When
the hole was cleared it turned out that it was the saint’s cell, abandoned long
before. Several stones which had healing properties owing to Fillan’s prayers
were discovered in the cave together with the partly surviving holy well. In
2000, both the cave and the well were consecrated and opened for visitors.
St. Fillan’s cave
St. Fillan’s Priory ruins in Strathfillan
The
personal bell and staff of St. Fillan survive to this day: they are kept at the
National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
In the past this bell was usually placed above those who suffered from severe
headache—and the pain abated! In Strathfillan many lunatics were miraculously
healed in ancient times. D.H. Farmer and other researchers write that mentally
ill people used to be dipped into the Strathfillan well and then left for one
night, tied up in a corner of St. Fillan's ruined chapel. If the following
morning they were found loosed from their chains, they were considered to be
completely cured. This practice existed until the first half of the nineteenth
century. Today Strathfillan is a picturesque strath (a Scottish word meaning a
broad, often mountainous, valley) in west Perthshire with the river Fillan
flowing through it.
Healing stones of St. Fillan-1
In the picturesque village
of Killin, situated near Stirling, there are so-called healing stones, associated
with St. Fillan, and kept at a former mill. According to tradition, due to the
prayers of St. Fillan each of these stones heals a specific part of the body
from various diseases. . . .
Source:
Dmitry Lapa, ‘A Family of Saints: Sts. Kentigerna, Fillan and Comgan of
Scotland’, http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/76644.htm,
posted 20 Jan. 2015, accessed 25 Jan. and 3 Feb. 2015
Why,
then, is the South, after more than four hundreds of years, bereft of any such
places?
Because
doctrine really does matter. Because the
Great Schism of 1054 that tore Western Europe
away from the Orthodox Church also separated the Western churches from the full
experience of the grace of God. This
includes those Roman Catholic and Protestant churches of the South.
Southern
Christianity, like all Western Christianity, has become distorted, a prideful, humanistic
faith rather than an humble one grounded in and guided by the Most Holy
Trinity: Whether one speaks of
Protestant churches, in which the individual believer’s interpretation of the
Bible is the measure of all things, or of the Roman Catholic churches, in which
the Pope’s definition of the faith is the measure of all things, the mind and will
of man are exalted above God.
And
though the words of the Bible and such other parts of the Orthodox Tradition
that have survived in the Western confessions are powerful preservatives, they
will not be able to overcome the wiles of our enemy the Devil. Thus the countries of Western
Europe and many places in the [u]nited States are rapidly becoming
a graveyard, to use St Justin Popovich’s word.
The
kind of holiness found in St Fillan and the other saints before the Schism in
the West has fled; the Christian life is now something mostly outside a man,
something one approaches with the rational mind, the emotions, or the
imagination, an experience with a created grace (so it is taught), but no
longer the union of a man’s soul and body with the uncreated grace of God,
which is to say, with God Himself (i.e., His outgoing energies by which He
makes Himself known, not His unknown, inward essence).
This
is why no holy men and women have appeared in the South, why no holy places
exist among us. For the grace of God
overflows from them, onto the people and things round about them. As St John Maximovitch said,
Holiness
is not simply righteousness, for which the righteous merit the enjoyment of
blessedness in the Kingdom
of God, but rather such a
height of righteousness that men are filled with the Grace of God to such an
extent, that it flows from them, upon those who associate with them. Great is
their blessedness, which proceeds from personal experience of the Glory of God. . . .
Source: ‘The
Canonization of Saints’, http://www.holytrinitymission.org/books/english/sermons_john_maximovich.htm#_Toc100019545,
accessed 3 Feb. 2015
One
can therefore write, as Father Joseph Gleason has,
. . .
There
are some very special treasures on earth, which will outlive every tree,
outlast every mountain, and even survive the great and mighty day of the Lord
when “the elements will burn with a fervent heat” (2 Peter 3:10). These treasures will exist forever. Indeed,
they will be in heaven itself.
These
priceless treasures are the relics of the
Saints.
. . .
The
bones of Saints are considered first-class
relics, and have preeminence. Second-class
relics are also very special, holy, and are treasured by faithful
Christians. Second-class relics include objects worn, used, or touched by the
Saints. For example:
·
When the
prophet Elijah was taken into heaven, his mantle was left behind. Elisha picked
up this relic, and used it to perform a miracle, dividing the waters of the Jordan river so that he could walk across on dry land (2 Kings 2:9-14).
·
God commanded
the Israelites to place relics inside the Ark of the Covenant, which resided in
the Holy of Holies, the most sacred room in the Temple. These relics included a golden jar of
manna, a miraculous staff which had belonged to Aaron the high priest, and the
stone tablets which Moses had brought down from Mount
Sinai, bearing the Ten Commandments (Hebrews 9:3-4).
·
A sick woman
was instantly healed when she touched the hem of Christ’s garment (Matthew 9:20-22).
·
St. Paul touched handkerchiefs and cloths, and those cloths
were taken to the sick. When they touched these relics, “their diseases were
cured and evil spirits departed from them” (Acts 19:11-12).
Relics
point towards the Incarnation, where God takes on human flesh and sanctifies
the material world. In the Incarnation, God shows His ability to use created
matter in a miraculous way. And in the history of the Church,
miraculous events have happened thousands of times with the bones and
relics of Christian Saints. God Himself uses miracles to honor the relics
of His Saints. It is an example of where heaven breaks through into our present
world, renewing creation.
Indeed,
holy relics provide some of our first glimpses into heaven
itself. When this present world passes away and the sky is rolled up like a scroll, the bones of the Saints
will remain. They will be resurrected, they will walk again, and they will be
in heaven for all eternity.
Source:
‘Sacred Relics and a Present Glimpse of Heaven’, On Behalf of All, http://blogs.ancientfaith.com/onbehalfofall/glimpse-heaven/,
posted 15 Jan. 2015, accessed 3 Feb. 2015
The
South has always excelled in producing gentlemen, men of high attainments to be
sure, but men fitted for earthly pursuits, for ‘[military] camp and senate’ to
quote Richard Weaver. But there is a higher
calling, the making of saints (quoth Father Andrew Phillips), and that is what
the South, and every country, ought to try to pursue, as Dixie’s Orthodox
forefathers and mothers did and as the Orthodox try to do today in Greece,
Russia, Serbia, etc.
And
the South may be in a better position than most non-Orthodox countries to
rejoin those on the straight and narrow path of salvation, for as Dr Clark
Carlton has said, one cannot become a saint unless one becomes ‘a normally
functioning human being’ first,
and
this latter is what the gentlemen and ladies of the South have done well in
approaching.
May
God bring to full fruition the good work of salvation He has begun in the
South, that the shame of our barrenness, like that of St Hannah and Sts Joachim
and Anna, may be taken away forever in her giving birth to many saints.
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