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Tuesday, July 25, 2023

Offsite Post: ‘Praying for the Departed Holds a People Together’

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.

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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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