The South
has not surrendered completely to Yankee/globalist/atheist cultural domination,
so one may still find respect for the dead among our people – folks stopping
their vehicles on the side of the road when a funeral procession drives past; handing
down old sayings, tools, letters, furniture, and other heirlooms to the newer
generations; celebrating the Memorial Days of fallen Confederate soldiers, etc.
This
continual act of remembering and honoring the foregoing generations helps keep
a people from disintegrating and dying.
Mr Mark Atkins expressed this in a recent
essay when he said,
We are who we are not just because of our
own experiences, but also because of the experiences of our parents,
grandparents, their great-great-great grandparents, their
great-great-great-greats, and stretching on back into the mist of the forgotten
past.
Likewise peoples may be thought of as a
chain, each link representing a generation, each bearing strong resemblance to
the previous one.
And like the individual, peoples set up
like concrete too and change but slowly. And like individuals, peoples are
inclined to take the path of least resistance. And as with individuals, this
often leads to their degradation. And like individuals, if the people will not
face their degradation, repent of it, and reform their ways, they can be
assured that their descendants will eventually curse them, that is, unless they
vanish and fall off the timeline altogether.
It is
essential for Dixie’s survival to keep these intergenerational links strong,
but more than a mental acknowledgment of that truth is necessary. It must be incarnated, lived, practiced year
after year. And there is a day, the Day
of Rejoicing, the second Tuesday after Easter, that pulls together these
varying strands of individual and collective remembrance of the departed, and
unites them in a beautiful way. The
Orthodox archpriest Father Artemy Vladimirov describes some of the basic aspects for
us:
Radonitsa [the Russian name for
this day—W.G.]—so the day is called, is when we, according to ancient
tradition, having prayed and communed of the Holy Mysteries of Christ in the
church of God, go to the cemetery to visit those graves tender to our hearts,
to tidy them up, and to see among the greenery the newly-sprouted and happy
daisies, or to plant tulips or daffodils. Mentally, we exchange the triple kiss
with the departed, receiving into our wide open and unveiled hearts, together
with the breath of the spring breeze, their answer: “Indeed He is Risen!”
So, standing at the Panikhida
with our red candle, we as if enter into mysterious communion with the reposed.
Indeed, tidings are delivered heart to heart. After all, yet earlier, having
communed of the Holy Mysteries of Christ, having tasted of the Most Pure Body
and Blood of the Lord, we, as if little children, gather ourselves together at
the Divine throne unseen, and both the heavenly and earthly branches of the
Church interpenetrate one another—which is why at Radonitsa always “The soul
believes, the tears break forth—And all is light, so light!” Because,
devoting time to the remembrance of those who loved us, whom we loved, we as if
meet their souls, which in Christ have the blessed means of seeing and hearing
us, following us and before the Lord Jesus Christ interceding for timely help
for those of us yet laboring in asceticism, in struggles, and in battles.
He speaks
further of how this celebration ties the generations together:
But today, on this joyous day,
let us recall that the great Russian poets, in particular Sergei Yesenin, have
an entire early cycle of verse, “Radonitsa.” We, entering our humble Russian
cemeteries, sitting for at least a while under the spreading crown of a willow
or birch, can depart to the world of memories cherished in our hearts. All of
you, of course, remember the Latin dictum, “De mortuis aut bene, aut
nihil”—“Either speak well of the dead, or say nothing at all.” And on
Radonitsa, dear friends, let us necessarily carve out some time and wrest but
half an hour from the rapacious hands of this world, which turn the wheels of
progress, carrying us away with tomorrow’s projects, and take a respite from
the hustle and bustle and, in retrospective we will see and survey the
thousand-year path traversed by our country, and spiritually meet and
triply-kiss those through whom our beloved fatherland was created. Let us pray
for the repose of princes, many of whom became victims of their own disunity,
and for those who fell in battle at the Kalka River, or the Sit River, and let
us pray for the heroes of the Russian spirit on Kulikovo Field, who against the
godless hordes went out in white tunics, and Nepryadva, stained the color
of red, which gave birth to the Russian people, consolidated and monolithic, as
said our president about our thousand-year nation, composed of many tribes and
peoples: “Monolithic and multi-faceted.”
. .
.
Let us pray for the Russian
peasantry, which endured the most severe, unprecedented genocide in the
twenties of the twentieth century, for the unknown peasants, who, exiled to
this same Archangelsk, froze and stood in stacks by the fences, because the local
residents had no heart to give them alms.
Fulfilling this duty of ours,
recalling our own Southern mothers and fathers, statesmen, soldiers, explorers,
writers, Sunday School teachers, those who died during the Reconstruction
occupation, and so forth and praying for them, we will receive a very precious
gift – ‘the moral rebirth of the fatherland’:
. . .
The rest is
at https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/praying-for-the-departed-holds-a-people-together.
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us
sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!