Remembrances for December – 2024

 

Dear friends, if you have time, please pray for these members of the Southern family on the day they reposed.  Many thanks.

But one may ask:  ‘What good does it do to pray for the departed?’  An answer is offered here:  https://orthochristian.com/130608.html

Along with prayers and hymns for the departed:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6je5axPodI

3 December

William Grant Still, born in Mississippi, raised in Arkansas, and a well-respected musical composer.

https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/william-grant-still-1775/

6 December

Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, he had the difficult task of leading the South during the War, and was unjustly tortured by his Yankee captors for two years after the ordeal had ended.  Interestingly, his death occurred on the feast day of one of the Church’s most beloved saints, Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker (the same St Nicholas associated with the Christmas season).  There have been a number of times when St Nicholas has miraculously interceded on behalf of those wrongfully accused; perhaps we will find in the Eternal Day that there was some connection between St Nicholas and Pres Davis during his imprisonment.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/clyde-wilson-library/a-sacrifice-for-his-people-the-imprisonment-of-jefferson-davis/

https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2019/12/06/103484-saint-nicholas-the-wonderworker-archbishop-of-myra-in-lycia

10 Dec.

Gov Francisco Hector, an active governor of Spanish Louisiana (1791-7), some of whose more far-seeing plans went unfulfilled because of geopolitical events outside his control.

https://64parishes.org/entry/francisco-luis-hector-baron-de-carondelet

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hector-baron-de-Carondelet

12 Dec.

Andrew Lytle of Tennessee, one of the great men of the South of any age.

https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/andrew-nelson-lytle/

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/86282498/andrew-nelson-lytle

14 Dec.

General George Washington, probably Virginia’s and Dixie’s most famous son.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/washington-vs-lincoln/

15 Dec.

Maggie Lena Walker, an enterprising black business woman whose talents allowed her to found, among other things, the St Luke Penny Savings Bank and build it up into an organization with 1,500 branches.

https://www.biography.com/scholar/maggie-lena-walker

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/9104631/maggie-lena-walker

17 Dec.

John Stewart, a free black man from Virginia who became a great preacher amongst the Wyandott Indians in Ohio.

https://www.bu.edu/missiology/missionary-biography/r-s/stewart-john-1786-1823/

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/stewart-john-1786-1823/

https://www.wyandot.org/stew1.htm

https://www.wyandotte-nation.org/culture/history/published/missionary-pioneer/

18 Dec.

Antoine Dubuclet, one of the most successful free black plantation owners in Louisiana and the whole South.  He would later serve as Louisiana’s State Treasurer.

http://www.frenchcreoles.com/CreoleCulture/famouscreoles/johnaudubon/johnaudubondubuclet.html

19 Dec.

Thomas Holley Chivers of Georgia, a talented poet, a doctor, and an acquaintance of Poe.

https://allpoetry.com/Thomas-Holley-Chivers

24 Dec.

Charlotte ‘Lottie’ Moon, the self-sacrificing Virginia missionary to China.

http://cgbcbelton.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/lottie-moon1.pdf

http://bpnews.net/53987/chinese-government-designates-lottie-moons-church-as-historical-site

Also, to celebrate some of the saints of December from the South’s Christian inheritance of various lands, follow these links on over:

https://southernorthodox.org/orthodox-saints-for-dixie-december/

https://confiterijournal.blogspot.com/2019/12/happy-feast-for-saints-of-december.html

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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!

Offsite Post: ‘The Ten Commandments Charade Continues’

 

We are beginning to wonder whether or not Louisiana’s State legislators who advocate placing the Ten Commandments in public schools have actually read them; their statements in support of the legislation (HB71) do not square very well with the Commandments themselves.  Here is another example from LRN:

The House overwhelming approves legislation requiring schools that receive state dollars to have the ten commandments posted in their classrooms. Opponents say its unconstitutional because it’s an endorsement of religion, but Chalmette Representative Michael Bayham argues the Ten Commandments set the foundation for laws we follow today

 

“This is where we get our foundational beliefs of what’s right and what’s wrong. Otherwise where do we get our sense of right and wrong? Does it just pop in our heads? Or does it just come from a statue book? Everything traces back to the ten commandments in Western civilization.”

Rep. Bayham’s argument seems to be as follows:  We should support placing the Ten Commandments in public schools in recognition of the fact that they form the basis of modern Western laws.  That would be a fine thing to do, except it is wrong to claim that this is really the case in the West.  Let’s run through some of the Commandments and contrast them with modern law:

First Commandment:  Proclaims the Holy Trinity as the only True God; forbids the recognition of any other god.  Does any Western country or any State of the US officially recognize the Holy Trinity of the Bible as their God?  Do any of them forbid the worship of all other gods except the Trinity?  As to the first, only a tiny minority; as to the second, not to our knowledge.

Second Commandment:  The making and worshipping of idols are forbidden.  What Western country forbids this in their law code?  None.

Third:  Taking the name of the Lord in vain is prohibited.  What Western law code forbids this?  Rather, such an act is now protected as ‘free speech’ in most places.

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2024/04/garlington-the-ten-commandments-charade-continues/.

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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!

Offsite Post: ‘A Christian Anthem for Dixie’

 

Louisiana’s governor, Jeff Landry, has gotten his nose bent out of shape over the LSU women’s basketball team not showing proper respect for the ‘national anthem’.  This is a monumental waste of time and energy.  There are much more important things here in Louisiana he should be focused on (like the La. Legislature’s current session, to name but one).  Besides that, there simply was no anthem for the [u]nited States prior to 1931.  Why get your underwear bunched up over something that is such a novelty?

But it is worse than all that.  All those songs that people consider in some sense to be national anthems of the uS are very worldly minded:

‘The Star-Spangled Banner’

‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’

‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’

There is hardly any mention of God in them, and no mention of Jesus Christ a ’tall.  And when God is mentioned, the invocation is inevitably tangled up with building the Kingdom of Man, not the Kingdom of God.  Regrettably, as dear as the song ‘Dixie’ is to our people, its lyrics are also bereft of any real spiritual depth and value.

For the Christian Southern people, we must do better.  We can, in fact, do much better.  For there is a hymn to the Lord Jesus and His Life-Giving Cross, sung on the Third Sunday of Lent in the Orthodox Church (the Sunday set aside to honor the Cross of Our Lord midway through Lent) that would serve as a wonderful anthem for our people.  The lyrics are as follows:

 

Come, O believers, let us venerate the life-giving Cross. For Christ, the King of glory, voluntarily extended His hands on it and raised us up to the original blessedness, after the enemy long ago had captured us with the bait of pleasure, and caused us to be exiled from God. Come, O believers, let us venerate the Cross, by which we have been granted to crush the skulls of our invisible enemies. Come, all you families of the Gentiles, let us sing hymns to honor the Cross of the Lord. “We salute you, O Cross, for you are the complete redemption of Adam who had fallen. In you our most faithful leaders boast, for by your power they have mightily subdued the foreign enemy. Now we Christians with fear and awe salute you with a kiss, and we glorify God who was nailed to you, and we say, ‘O Lord, who were nailed to the Cross, have mercy on us, for You are good and benevolent.’”  (Source; music sheets for singing this hymn are here.)

This hymn resonates in powerful ways with themes dear to the Southern heart:  salvation from sin and death, heroism, Christian leadership.  In explaining the Sunday of the Holy Cross, the Church emphasizes these points while also drawing out others that Southrons can relate closely to (Eden/Paradise, heavenly joy, agrarianism, Resurrection, etc.):

 

As we have “crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24), and will have mortified ourselves during these forty days of the Fast, the precious and life-giving Cross is now placed before us to refresh our souls and encourage us who may be filled with a sense of bitterness, resentment, and depression. The Cross reminds us of the Passion of our Lord, and by presenting to us His example, it encourages us to follow Him in struggle and sacrifice, being refreshed, assured, and comforted. In other words, we must experience what the Lord experienced during His Passion - being humiliated in a shameful manner. The Cross teaches us that through pain and suffering we shall see the fulfillment of our hopes: the heavenly inheritance and eternal glory.

 . . .

The rest is at https://identitydixie.com/2024/04/13/a-christian-anthem-for-dixie/.

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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!

Offsite Post: ‘Yankee Cain and Southern Seth’

 

Southerners have often been mocked for their agrarian simplicity by Yankee-minded folks.  We know the insults well by now:  hicks, hillbillies, rednecks, and so on.  But Dixie should not be ashamed of this.  We ought rather to delight and exult in it.

Richard Weaver gives us good ground for doing so in his contrast of the Northern/Yankee and Southern types:

“Nowhere has the Northern mind more clearly embraced the Faustian concept than in the idea of progress. There is the constant out-reaching, the denial of limits, the willingness to dissolve all into endless instrumental activity, to which even some American philosophers have supplied theoretical support. Hence the incessant urge to be doing, to be transforming, to effect some external change between yesterday and today. The mood of the Americans, another French critic of a century ago remarked, is that of an army on the march. The language of conquest fills the air. They will ‘master nature’; they will ‘attack problems’; they will ‘control energy’; they will ‘overcome space and time.’ The endlessness of progress in these terms is the most generally accepted dogma. And thus enchanted by the concept of an infinite expansion, they reject the classical philosophy as too constricting.

“The Southerner, to sum up the contrast, has tended to live in the finite, balanced, and proportional world which Classical man conceived. In Cicero and Horace he has found congenial counsellors about human life. The idea of stasis is not abhorrent to him, because it affords a ground for the identity of things. Life is not simply a linear progression, but a drama, with rise and fall. Happiness may exist as much in contemplation as in activity. Experience alone is not good; it has to be accompanied by the human commentary. From this, I believe, has come the South’s great fertility in myth and anecdote. It is not so much a sleeping South as a dreaming one, and out of dreams come creations that affect the imagination” (“The South and the American Union”).

It is a fine historical, philosophical analysis, but the Christian South must go beyond these for justification of her way of life.  Wendell Berry is helpful in this respect.  Essays like the “The Gift of Good Land” provide a Biblical grounding for a life of restraint, of proper limits to human striving.  But Mr. Berry is mostly concerned with men and women being good stewards of the creation.  This is by no means unimportant, yet it nevertheless prevents him from fully developing a theological understanding of the Yankee and Southern types.

There is a man who can help us in this, however:  an exceptional teacher of the Holy Scriptures, Fr. Athanasios Mitilianaios, an Orthodox priest who fell asleep in the Lord in 2006.  In his exposition of verses from both Genesis and Revelation, he shows with remarkable clarity the two essential types of mankind to which the North and the South correspond.

In his sermon on Revelation 9:1-12 (an overview of which may be viewed here; all quotes from Fr. Athanosios are via that presentation), in which he describes the meaning of the terrifying locusts, he says,

“Do you know that a man who has no faith in God is terrified of the universe?  . . .  Man is afraid of earthquakes, hurricanes, and thunderstorms, elements which have really lost their balance and rhythm in these last decades, and which create an impression of a dangerous and unfriendly universe for today’s troubled man.  All of things torment, in the manner of locusts—as the text says—the man who has lost the purpose of his existence, the man who has lost his faith or belief in God.  Thus, the locusts of fury are already terribly tormenting today’s man.”

Fallen man, man separated from God, therefore, seeks out consolation for himself, something to take his mind off the foreboding world around him.  And he finds it in the unceasing development of advanced, technological civilization:

“It is not by mere coincidence that Cain and his descendants originally developed civilization. Cain and his four children created civilization. According to Hebraic tradition, his daughter invented the spinning wheel, using wool to make threads and clothing. From this it becomes obvious that the generations of Cain, and this is a very subtle detail, were primarily preoccupied with the development of civilization… God had cursed Cain, so he needed to develop something to lighten the burden of that curse. Thus, man became preoccupied with the elements of civilization because the purpose of civilization is to introduce consolation in man’s life.”

Here is the basic outline of one type of man – the type of Cain, which corresponds to Yankee man.  But what of the second type?

“In contrast, the descendants of Seth, who was born to serve as a replacement for Abel who had been killed by Cain, focused on the worship of God and the simplicity of life. To Seth also a son was born, and he called his name Enosh. At that time men began to call upon the name of the Lord (Genesis 4:26). He trusted in the Lord. So Enoch, or Enosh (Enos in the Septuagint), trusted and hoped in the name of the Lord and God.”

The second type is Seth, satisfied with simple living and worshipping God.  This corresponds to Dixie’s folk.

Fr. Athanasios expands on these two types.  Of Cain’s type, he notes further:

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/yankee-cain-and-southern-seth/.

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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!