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Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Donald Trump’s Garden of American Heroes

We were glad to see some of our Southern leaders pan Pres Trump’s proposal to build monuments to ‘American heroes’ in his speech before Mt Rushmore:

https://www.reckonin.com/clyde-wilson/national-garden

https://www.reckonin.com/neil-kumar/the-garden-of-american-zeroes

This is only right, as only a nation of imbeciles would honor Walt Whitman (a homosexual and Satan worshipper), a lounge-singer and womanizer like Frank Sinatra, Mohammed Ali (a Muslim boxer), or a butcher of Southerners and Native Americans like Ulysses Grant (https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/ulysses-s-grant-mass-genocide-through-permanent-peace-policy-Ing8OYiNuU6hw6ZgulRA9Q).

The South does not need any of these kinds of people for her heroes.  What she desperately needs is the Orthodox Saints of her forebears.  For in one Saint, just one Saint, there is such a close bond between God and man that it floods a people with the Grace of God for generations.  St Sergius, Abbot of All Russia (+1392), is a perfect ensample of this:

 . . . All the threads of the spiritual life of the Russian Church converge towards the great saint and wonderworker of Radonezh, and through all of Orthodox Rus the grace-filled, life-creating currents radiate outwards from the Trinity monastery he founded.

Naming a church for the Holy Trinity within the Russian land began with holy Equal of the Apostles Olga (July 11), who built the first Trinity temple at Pskov. Afterwards, similar churches were built in Great Novgorod and other cities.

The spiritual contribution of Saint Sergius in teaching the theology of the Holy Trinity is quite significant. The monk had profound insight into the secret mysteries of theology with the “spiritual eyes” of the ascetic, in prayerful ascent to the Tri-Hypostatic (i.e. in Three-Persons) God, and in the spiritual experience of communion with God and God-likeness.

“Coheirs of the perfect light and contemplation of the Most Holy and All-Sovereign Trinity,” explained Saint Gregory the Theologian, “are those which become perfectly co-united in the perfection of the Spirit.” Saint Sergius knew from personal experience the mystery of the Life-Creating Trinity, since in his life he became co-united with God, he became a communicant of the very life of the Divine Trinity, i.e. he attained as much as is possible on earth to the measure of “theosis” [“divinization”], becoming a “partaker of the Divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). “If a man loves Me,” says the Lord, “he will keep My words; and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him and make our abode with him” (John 14:23).

Abba Sergius, in everything observing the commands of Christ, belongs to the rank of holy saints in the souls of whom the Holy Trinity “has made abode.” He fashioned himself into “an abode of the Holy Trinity,” and everyone with whom Saint Sergius associated, he elevated and brought into communion with the Holy Trinity.

The Radonezh ascetic, with his disciples and conversants, enriched the Russian and the universal Church with a new knowledge and vision of the Life-Creating Trinity, the Beginning and Source of life, manifesting Itself unto the world and to mankind in the “Sobornost’” [“Communality”] of the Church, with brotherly unity and the sacrificial redemptive love of its pastors and children.

In the spiritually symbolic gathering together of Rus in unity and love, the historical effort of the nation became a temple of the Life-Creating Trinity, built by Saint Sergius, “so that by constant attention to It would be conquered the fright of the hateful discord of this world.”

The worship of the Holy Trinity, in forms created and bequeathed by the holy Igumen Sergius of Radonezh, became one of the most profound and original of features of Russian ecclesiality. With Saint Sergius, in the Life-Creating Trinity there was posited not only the holy perfection of life eternal, but also a model for human life, a spiritual ideal toward which mankind ought to strive, since that in the Trinity as “Indivisible” (Greek “Adiairetos”) discord is condemned and “Sobornost’” [“Communality”] is blessed, and in the Trinity as “Inseparable” [“Akhoristos” -- per the Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon in year 451] coercion is condemned and freedom blessed. In the teaching of Saint Sergius about the Most Holy Trinity the Russian nation sensed profoundly its own catholic and ecumenical vocation, and comprehending the universal significance of the Feast, the people embellished it with all the variety and richness of the ancient national custom and people’s verse. All the spiritual experience and spiritual striving of the Russian Church was embodied in the liturgical creativity of the Feast of the Holy Trinity, of trinitarian church rituals, icons of the Holy Trinity, and churches and monasteries of this name.

The theological insight of Saint Sergius in transformation was rendered as the wonderworking icon of the Life-Creating Trinity painted by the Saint Andrew of Radonezh, surnamed Rublev (July 4), a monastic iconographer, lived in the Trinity-Sergiev monastery, and painted with the blessing of Saint Nikon in praised memory to holy Abba Sergius. (At the Stoglav Council of 1551 this icon was affirmed as proper model for all successive church iconographic depiction of the Most Holy Trinity).

“The hateful discord,” quarrels and commotions of worldly life were surmounted by the monastic cenobitic life, planted by Saint Sergius throughout all Rus. People would not have divisions, quarrels and war, if human nature, created by the Trinity in the image of the Divine Tri-Unity, were not distorted and impaired by ancestral sin. Overcoming by his own co-crucifixion with the Savior the sin of particularity and separation, repudiating the “my own” and the “myself,” and in accord with the teachings of Saint Basil the Great, the cenobitic monks restore the First-created unity and sanctity of human nature. The monastery of Saint Sergius became for the Russian Church the model for renewal and rebirth. In it were formed holy monks, bearing forth thereof features of the true path of Christ to remote regions. In all their works and actions Saint Sergius and his disciples gave a churchly character to life, giving the people a living example of its possibility. Not for renouncing the earth, but rather for transfiguring it, they proclaimed ascent and they themselves ascended unto the Heavenly.

The school of Saint Sergius, through the monasteries founded by him, his disciples and the disciples of his disciples, embraces all the vastness of the Russian land and threads its way through all the remotest history of the Russian Church. One fourth a portion of all Russian monasteries, the strongholds of faith, piety and enlightenment, was founded by Abba Sergius or his disciples. The “igumen of the Russian land” was what people called the founder of the Domicile of the Life-Originating Trinity. . . .

To Saint Sergius, as to an inexhaustible font of spiritual prayer and grace of the Lord, at all times came in veneration thousands of the people -- for edification and for prayers, for help and for healing. And each of those having recourse with faith to his wonderworking relics he heals and renews, fills with power and with faith, transforms and guides upwards with his light-bearing spirituality.

But it was not only spiritual gifts and grace-filled healings bestown to all, approaching with faith the relics of Saint Sergius; God also gave him the grace to defend the Russian land from its enemies. . . .

In later times, the monastery continued to be an inextinguishable torch of spiritual life and church enlightenment. From its brethren many famed hierarchs of the Russian Church were chosen for service, one after another.

In the year 1744, for its service to the country and the Faith, the monastery was designated as a Lavra. In 1742 a religious seminary was established within its enclosure, and in the year 1814 the Moscow Spiritual Academy was transferred there.

And at present the Domicile of the Life-Creating Trinity serves as one of the primary centers of grace of the Russian Orthodox Church. Here at the promptings of the Holy Spirit the Local Councils of the Russian Church take place. At the monastery is a place of residence of His Holiness the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus, which carries upon it the special blessing of Saint Sergius, in the established form, “Archimandrite of the Holy Trinity-Saint Sergius Lavra.”

The fifth of July, the day of the Uncovering of the relics of holy Abba Sergius, igumen of the Russian Land, is a crowded and solemn church feastday at the monastery.

--https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2020/07/05/101910-uncovering-of-the-relics-of-venerable-sergius-of-radonezh

Dixie ought in no way to settle for Pres Trump’s silly Garden of American Heroes.  She has many Orthodox Saints connected with her past who could do for her something akin to what St Sergius has done for Russia:  St Alfred the Great of England, St Cuthbert the Wonderworker of All England, St Anthony the Great of Egypt, St Athanasius the Great of Alexandria, St Martin the Merciful of Tours, St Brigid of Kildare, St Genevieve of Paris, St Hilda of Whitby, St Audrey of Ely, St Moluag of Lismore, and others besides.  The demonic spirit of Americanism brings death; the Holy Ghost present in the Orthodox Saints brings life.  The South has a choice between these two.  We hope she will choose life.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

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