The uproar surrounding the retirement of New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees is another sign of the decline of traditional Southern culture. That a sports celebrity deciding to no longer practice his ‘craft’ can draw the awed admiration of so many people, from plain folks to high government officials is an embarrassment, a mark of shame. Louisiana’s Governor Jon Bel Edwards led this silly circus:
Saints Quarterback Drew Brees has announced his retirement from the NFL and many are saying thank you to number nine for the 15 years he gave to New Orleans and the state of Louisiana. Governor John Bel Edwards released a video message shortly after Brees announced his playing days are over.
“Thank you for putting New Orleans and Louisiana first, thank you for being a champion for our state, for our city, especially in a era that can sometimes be very challenging.”
. . .
--Taylor Sharp, https://louisianaradionetwork.com/2021/03/15/16877/
This statement is also very revealing:
. . .
Drew Brees did more for New Orleans than any other professional athlete ever had or ever could.
Brees raised our morale at a time when we were grasping for hope, he changed a franchise that was on a perpetual spiral of futility, he showed that greatness could sprout from the grounds of a city that has more things wrong than right, and he personified decency in a field where excessive living is en vogue.
Merci Beaucoup Drew.
--Mike Bayham, https://thehayride.com/2021/03/bayham-merci-beaudrew-to-nolas-patron-saint/
While acknowledging that Drew Brees gives some of his millions to charity, professional athletes overall do very little to strengthen the core of the societies/cultures of which they are a part. By and large, one would be justified in saying that they weaken them, in that their mass spectacles distract from more meaningful pursuits, giving instead a cheap psychic thrill that more and more resembles a substitute for real communities and for traditional religious gatherings and practices, as some folks openly admit:
FAW: Now the former law school dean and distinguished legal scholar has written a most unusual book: “Baseball as a Road to God.” That’s right, baseball.
SEXTON: The similarities between baseball and religion abound. The ballpark as cathedral; saints and sinners; the curses and blessings. But then what I’m arguing is beyond that surface level, there’s a fundamental similarity between baseball and religion which goes to the capacity of baseball to cause human beings, in a context they don’t think of as religious, to break the plane of ordinary existence into the plane of extraordinary existence.
FAW: John Sexton says that what happens here is more than just a game—that it reveals a dimension beyond the eyes and mind letting us, in his words, “see through to another, sacred space”—what John Sexton calls “the ineffable.”
SEXTON: “Ineffable” is the word we use for things we can’t capture in our language. The ineffable is the character of this religious dimension, sometimes labeled God. We’re talking about this place where the depth of being is.
FAW: And baseball can be an avenue to that?
SEXTON: Baseball is an avenue to that in the sense that there is this dimension that we experience in baseball of that which can’t be put into words.
FAW: In baseball, as in religion, says Sexton, the seemingly impossible is part of the game:
In 1956, when hard-drinking journeyman pitcher Don Larsen went from sinner to saint by hurling the only perfect game in World Series history; when Willie Mays made that seemingly impossible catch and throw in the 1954 World Series; and in 1955, when Sexton’s beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, after decades of coming oh-so-close, won their first and only World Series with an extraordinary catch made by Sandy Amaros. Those moments in baseball, like religion, says John Sexton, give a glimpse of something beyond.
SEXTON: The beauty and the experience in the intensified heightened sensitivity of the moment that comes with the Amaros catch, that comes with the Mays catch and pivot. The ecstasy of those moments can for some transport one to this transcendent plane.
. . .
FAW: Sexton says he chooses baseball over other sports because, like religion, it has its own sacred relics, prophets, and rituals. And like religion there is a kind of timelessness.
. . .
--https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2013/04/26/april-26-2013-baseball-and-religion/16067/
The Chicago Cubs have been around for less than 150 years. The human race has been around for several thousand years. By all accounts, there have been quite a few gatherings of human beings since 3000 B.C. With an estimated five million in attendance, the World Series parade for the Cubs on Friday afternoon tops almost all of them.
According to historians, the Cubs parade ranks seventh in history. The crowd was also the largest ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. The parade is also the biggest non-religious gathering in human history, although some would be more than ready to make the argument that seeing the Cubs win was a religious experience.
. . .
Here is the list of the top-10 biggest gatherings that the Cubs and the city of Chicago have joined:
1. Kumbh Mela pilgrimage, India, 2013 — 30 million
2. Arbaeen Festival, Iraq, 2014 — 17 million
3. Funeral of CN Annaduri, India, 1969 — 15 million
4. Funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran, 1989 — 10 million
5. Papal gathering in the Philippines, 2015 — 6 million
6. World Youth Day, Philippines, 1995 — 5 million
7. Chicago Cubs World Series parade, USA, 2016 — 5 million
8. Funeral of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt, 1970 — 5 million
9. Rod Stewart concert, Brazil, 1994 — 3.5 million
10. Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, 2012 — 3 million
. . .
--Joshua Sadlock, https://fansided.com/2016/11/04/cubs-parade-7th-largest-gathering-human-history/
Also: https://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/cubs/ct-cubs-religion-met-20161010-story.html
Steering back towards Christianity, there are a number of sacred feast days on the Orthodox Church’s calendar in March. Here are just a few that have connections with the South:
St David of Wales – March 1st
St Benedict of Nursia – 14th
St Alexis of Rome, the Man of God – 17th
St Patrick of Ireland – 17th
St Edward, King of England and Martyr – 18th
St Cuthbert the Wonderworker of all England – 20th
The Annunciation of the Archangel Gabriel to the Mother of God – 25th
Where are the tweets and video messages from journalists, governors, etc., in honor of any of them? There are very few or none at all (we might perhaps see something about St Patrick every once in a while). And yet they have done much more to shape and sustain true Western Christian culture than anything any sports athlete has ever done.
If New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana/Who Dat Nation want Drew Brees as their ‘patron saint’, they should expect the continued collapse of their society.
It is by honoring and befriending the true saints of our forebears, the pillars who uphold real Western civilization (that which is rooted in holiness, in the Orthodox Faith of the Apostles), the exemplars of Western-ness, that will bring about any real hope of improvement in Louisiana and in the rest of the South.
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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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