Remembrances for March – 2025

 

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

March 3^rd

M. E. Bradford, one of the South’s best defenders in the latter half of the 20^th hundredyear:

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/remembering-mel-bradford/

https://theimaginativeconservative.org/author/m-e-bradford

March 7^th

Jean-Baptiste de Bienville

‘Canadian naval officer Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, served as three-time governor of the French colony of Louisiana intermittently from 1702 to 1743. Bienville and his older brother, Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, traveled on an expedition that arrived in Louisiana in 1699. Together they explored the lower Mississippi River valley and established a permanent French settlement in Louisiana, Fort Maurepas. Bienville proved particularly talented, though not always successful, as a negotiator with local Native Americans. In 1718, he chose the site where New Orleans, named for the French Duc d’Orléans, was built.’

https://64parishes.org/entry/jean-baptiste-le-moyne-sieur-de-bienville-2

March 13^th

Elizabeth Madox Roberts, a gem of a writer from Kentucky:

http://emrsociety.com/Biography

March 19^th

Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle

‘French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, is perhaps best known for giving the region and ultimately the state its name: Louisiana. In 1682, while searching for a water route to the Gulf of Mexico, La Salle—accompanied by a small group of European and Native American explorers—arrived at the point where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico. There, he planted a post and claimed the river and its basin for France, naming the territory La Louisiane in honor of King Louis XIV. In so doing, La Salle helped set the stage for the next eighty years of French rule in the new colony.’

https://64parishes.org/entry/rene-robert-cavelier-sieur-de-la-salle

March 20^th

Lewis Grizzard, one of the many good comedians Southern culture has produced:

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/its-a-trick-general-theres-two-of-them/

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/topics/lewis-grizzard/

March 24^th

Frances Fisher Tiernan (Christian Reid, pen name) of North Carolina.  Another of the often-overlooked Southern authors.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/frances-fisher-tiernan-north-carolinas-margaret-mitchell/

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/21026460/frances-christine-tiernan

March 25^th

Philip Ludwell III.  ‘He was born in 1716 in Virginia. After completing his education at the College of William & Mary and marrying, he sailed to London in 1738 in order to be received into the Orthodox Church. One of the largest landowners in the colonies, he remained true to the ancient Christian faith till the end of his days and earned the esteem of his peers, including many of the Founding Fathers of the future United States of America.’  Interestingly, he reposed on the Feast Day of the Holy Annunciation.

https://www.ludwell.org/

https://southernorthodox.org/philip-ludwell-iii/

https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2023/03/25/100884-the-annunciation-of-our-most-holy-lady-the-theotokos-and-ever-vi

March 27^th

General Richard Gano, a good example of the kind of Christian soldier who fought for Dixie in the War with the Yanks:

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/gods-general/

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/9813/richard-montgomery-gano/photo

March 28^th

Margaret Junkin Preston, sister-in-law to Stonewall Jackson and a good poetess and novelist:

https://civilwar.vt.edu/margaret-junkin-preston-poetess-of-the-south/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Junkin_Preston#Bibliography

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/7737366/margaret-preston/photo

March 28^th

Earl Scruggs.  ‘Earl Scruggs, once compared to violinist Niccolo Paganini, not only pioneered the three-finger banjo but played it to standards of taste and technique unmatched by thousands of disciples over seven decades. He was an important figure in the birth of the bluegrass genre, and also brought his artistry to the fields of country, folk, and rock, to college campuses, and to television and the movies.’

https://www.bluegrasshall.org/inductees/earl-scruggs/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJOIqmlI65Y

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/87507819/earl-eugene-scruggs

Also, to celebrate some of the saints of March from the South’s Christian inheritance of various lands, follow these links on over if you’d like:

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

https://confiterijournal.blogspot.com/2020/03/happy-feast-for-saints-of-march.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 Unbroken Line of New England Radicalism’

 

Prof. David Hackett Fischer gives an overview of the chief characteristics of New England’s ancestors, who hailed from the coastal southeastern counties of England, mainly East Anglia and Essex, in his praiseworthy book, Albion’s Seed.  Among them were an inclination toward industrial pursuits, urban living, equality, and rebelliousness against established authorities in religion and politics (Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, New York, Ny., Oxford UP, 1989, pgs. 42-9).

It is remarkable how true New England has remained to that inner logos of hers as sketched by Prof. Fischer (and how insightful he was to see and describe it so well).  She remains as urban, industrial, and ocean-facing as ever, delving especially into new technologies like robotics.

But especially notable is her continuing revolution in the intertwining realms of politics and religion, particularly the institutions of marriage and family.  Prior to their departure from England to North America, Richard Hooker in the Preface to Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (published in 1594) describes how the Puritans took multiple wives:  ‘These men, in whose mouths at the first sounded nothing but only mortification of the flesh, were come at the length to think they might lawfully have their six or seven wives apiece . . . .’

Polygamy would continue famously with Mormonism, dreamt up by New England’s Joseph Smith, who has an impeccable Massachusetts Puritan family pedigree on his father’s side.  But less famously known are the destroyers of the traditional Christian family who were part of the Yankee abolitionist circles.  One of the South’s best apologists, George Fitzhugh, draws attention to one of them in Cannibals All! (1857), a fellow by the name of Stephen Pearle Andrews who was in high standing with the Yankee elite of his day:

‘We wish to prove that the great movement in society, known under various names, as Communism, Socialism, Abolitionism, Red Republicanism and Black Republicanism, has one common object: the breaking up of all law and government, and the inauguration of anarchy, and that the destruction of the family is one of the means in which they all concur to attain a common end. We shall quote only from Stephen Pearle Andrews, because he is by far the ablest and best informed of American Socialists and Reformers, and because he cites facts and authorities to show that he presents truly the current thought and the general intention. Mr. Andrews is a Massachusetts gentleman, who has lived at the South. He has been an Abolition Lecturer. He is the disciple of Warren, who is the disciple of Owen of Lanark and New Harmony. Owen and Warren are Socrates and Plato, and he is the Great Stygarite, as far surpassing them, as Aristotle surpassed Socrates and Plato. But it is not merely his theories on which we rely; he cites historical facts that show that the tendency and terminus of all abolition is to the sovereignty of the individual, the breaking up of families, and no-government. He delivered a series of lectures to the elite of New York on this subject, which met with approbation, and from which we shall quote. He established, or aided to establish, Free Love Villages, and headed a Free Love Saloon in the city of New York, patronized and approved by the "Higher classes." He is indubitably the philosopher and true exponent of Northern Abolitionism’ (pgs. 287-8).

Mr. Fitzhugh quotes at length from Mr. Andrews’s Science of Society, and a couple of passages about marriage stand out:

‘Every variety of conscience, and every variety of deportment in reference to this precise subject of love is already tolerated among us. At one extreme of the scale stand the Shakers, who abjure the connection of the sexes altogether. At the other extremity stands the association of Perfectionists, at Oneida, who hold and practice, and justify by the Scriptures, as a religious dogma, what they denominate complex marriage, or the freedom of love. We have, in this State, stringent laws against adultery and fornication; but laws of that sort fall powerless, in America, before the all-pervading sentiment of Protestantism, which vindicates the freedom of conscience to all persons and in all things, provided the consequences fall upon the parties themselves. Hence the Oneida Perfectionists live undisturbed and respected, in the heart of the State of New York, and in the face of the world; and the civil government, true to the Democratic principle, which is only the same principle in another application, is little anxious to interfere with this breach of its own ordinances, so long as they cast none the consequences of their conduct upon those who do not consent to bear them.

‘ . . . In general, however, Government still interferes with the marriage and parental relations. Democracy in America has always proceeded with due reference the prudential motto, festina lente. In France, at the time of the first Revolution, Democracy rushed with the explosive force of escapement from centuries of compression, point blank to the bull's eye of its final destiny, from which it recoiled with such force that the stupid world has dreamed, for half a century, that the vita principle of Democracy was dead. As a logical sequence from Democratic principle, the legal obligation of marriage was sundered, and the Sovereignty of the Individual above the institution was vindicated’ (pgs. 291-2).

What Mr. Andrews’s says in his book in 1851 about disassociating people from the normative male and female dichotomy of the sexes and the redefinition of marriage foreshadow what would follow in New England in the decades to come.  These seeds were slow to germinate, but now that they have, they have borne multiple harvests of radicalism in quick succession – unsurprisingly in Massachusetts, the birthplace of Puritan Yankeedom:

In 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that same-sex couples had a ‘right’ to marry.

In 2023, the City Council of Somerville, Mass., ‘unanimously approved an antidiscrimination ordinance to protect people in polyamorous and other consensually nonmonogamous relationships.’

Now, in 2024, the Massachusetts Legislature is moving quickly to approve the use of human surrogates and other techniques to allow LGBT people to ‘build families’:

‘State representatives unanimously passed a bill on Wednesday they said would update Massachusetts law to better reflect the diverse ways people build families.

‘The bill lays out clear paths to establishing legal parentage for families that have children through assisted reproduction, like surrogacy and in-vitro fertilization.’

Somerville again proves her radical bona fides with the statement of her representative, Christine Barber, that this legislation will help tear down ‘barriers to reproductive justice’ that other States are fiendishly erecting.

What will New England radicalism give birth to next?  One shudders to think, considering the foregoing.  And, indeed, we may already have an answer with the new attempt to generate sympathy for ‘minor-attracted persons.’  The North American Man/Boy Love Association began in Boston, after all.

This is a tragedy for New England.  They have been given a gift by God, zealousness or enthusiasm, but they use it to accomplish evil ends that grieve God and harm themselves and others.

What a dishonor to their ancestors!  Among their ancient kinfolk in Old England were holy men and women, who used this gift of zeal as it should be used – to love God and their neighbor.

St. Botolph, the monastic founder of Ikenho (+680) for whom Boston is named (a contraction of ‘Botolph’s Town or Stone’), banished evil spirits and diffused the Grace of God throughout southeast England and even beyond that region:

‘In Iken St. Botolph struggled much against the demons who dwelled in that area in great numbers and vexed him continually. By the power of the sign of the cross and through his austere ascetic life the venerable man vanquished them and drove them away from the area.

‘Abbot Botolph gathered around him many brethren, instructed them in the spiritual life and became famous as a wise and learned mentor. Everybody saw a loving and caring father in him. He himself cultivated the land in Iken and thanks to his labours the formerly swampy soil around Iken became very fertile. Already during his life, St. Botolph was loved all over England for his holy life, wisdom, miracles of healing, prophecies and for driving out evil spirits. He was a good example for his spiritual children in all things. According to his life, “All loved Botolph: he always was humble, modest, friendly and mild in communication, proved the truth of his sermons by example of his life… He taught his monks the rules of Christian perfection and the decrees of the Church Fathers. He thanked God both in good and sorrowful times alike, knowing that He makes everything for the good of those who love Him”. The saint excelled in extreme mercy, poverty and kindness.’

Especially in the latter words, we see what a contrast there is between the Christian spirit of St. Botolph and the unmerciful, mercenary, and unkind New England Yankees.

The life of St. Etheldreda (Audrey), foundress of the monastery of Ely (+679), is similar.  Her family’s life is a rebuke to the Yankee impiety towards the traditional Christian family and towards traditional Christian statecraft of governors:

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/the-unbroken-line-of-new-england-radicalism/.

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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: ‘Mainstreaming the Demonic: Megami Tensei’s Un-Orthodox Programming’

 

The Megami Tensei video game series has been a popular one over the decades.  Since its first appearance on the NES in 1987 (released on 9-11, no less), it has surpassed 19 million units in sales.  A spin-off series, Persona, has sold another 15 million units as of 2021.  Another entry in the MT series is releasing in 2024, which makes this an ideal time to explore the messaging that is at the heart of such a popular video game series.

The root of the MT series is a Japanese science fiction trilogy of novels written by Aya Nishitani.  Those who have looked more deeply into science fiction will recall that there is a heavy element of predictive programming within it:

Researcher Michael Hoffman defines “predictive programming” as follows: “Predictive programming works by means of the propagation of the illusion of an infallibly accurate vision of how the world is going to look in the future” (205). Through the circulation of science “fiction” literature, the ignorant masses are provided with semiotic intimations of coming events. Within such literary works are narrative paradigms that are politically and socially expedient to the power elite. Thus, when the future unfolds as planned, it assumes the paradigmatic character of the “fiction” that foretold it.

This being the case, it is all the more urgent to understand what gamers are being exposed to in the MT series.  Right from the start, in the first game in the series released in 1987, he is immersed in a deeply demonic storyline, one that has a great deal of relevance for us today – the use of technology to summon demons:  ‘The plot sees Akemi Nakajima, a clever high school student who is the reincarnation of the deity Izanagi, develop a computer program which summons demons from the realm of demons. Initially using his program to gain revenge on his tormentors, the program goes out of control and he unleashes a horde of demons.’

Rod Dreher wrote recently about the real-world exploration of using technology to communicate with demons:

In one of the book’s later chapters, Pasulka profiles a woman she calls “Simone,” a top investor in Artificial Intelligence and other tech fields. One thing that might startle you (it did me) in coming to the UFO and related fields is that most of those involved in it at a high level do not believe these are beings from other planets. Rather, they believe that these are some kind of discarnate superior intelligences from another dimension. I mentioned this in London this week to an investor from California, who said yes, everybody he knows in Silicon Valley thinks that, and some even hold rituals to summon these intelligences.

 

Simone believes that AI is one way that these entities are opening up to communicate with us — and she’s excited about it. . . .

 

The “he” is a top figure in this field, a guy Pasulka has called “Tyler D.,” but who has been identified elsewhere on the Internet as Tim Taylor. “Tyler D.” claims to be able to “download” information from these beings — information that has led to the creation of new biotechnologies. If Tim Taylor really is Tyler D., then yes, the former NASA star has become rich as head of an innovative biotech firm. . . .

 

Last week, I sent Dr. Pasulka some interview questions about Encounters. In them, I posed a query about Simone’s view, and described AI as a “high-tech Ouija board.” Dr. Pasulka said she hadn’t thought about it that way, but yes, that’s pretty much what Simone (and many others in that field) are talking about: that AI is a vector that allows for the exchange of information with discarnate higher beings.

More than three decades after raising the subject, the ‘fiction’ of MT is now revealed as reality by the scientific elite.

A similar theme emerges in the 1990 entry of the series – using a nuclear blast to open a portal between our world and the realm of demons:  ‘The story is set in "20XX", 35 years after a nuclear apocalypse which devastates the world and permanently opens a portal to the demon world of Atziluth.’

And once again, a leading scientist, years later (2009), confirms that his kind are interested in using destructive acts to peak into other dimensions or allow something from them to come into ours:

A top boffin at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) says that the titanic machine may possibly create or discover previously unimagined scientific phenomena, or "unknown unknowns" - for instance "an extra dimension".

 

"Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it," said Sergio Bertolucci, who is Director for Research and Scientific Computing at CERN, briefing reporters including the Reg at CERN HQ earlier this week.

 

The LHC, built inside a 27-km circular subterranean tunnel deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva, functions like a sort of orbital motorway for extremely high-speed hadrons - typically either protons or lead ions.

 

The differences are, firstly, that the streams of particles are moving at velocities within a whisker of light speed - such that each stream has as much energy in it as a normal car going at 1000mph. Secondly, the beams are arranged in such fashion that the two streams swerve through one another occasionally, which naturally results in huge numbers of incredibly violent head-on collisions.

The possibility of a ‘nuclear apocalypse’ between the West and Russia and/or China, because of Western interference in the Ukraine and Taiwan, is also closer than ever.

Another idea presented in the MT series is demonic attacks on people inhabiting the cyberworld of virtual reality (Shin Megami Tensei: Nine, 2002 release date):

 . . .

The rest is at https://orthodoxreflections.com/mainstreaming-the-demonic-megami-tenseis-un-orthodox-programming/.

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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 Spiritual Dimension of the Border Crisis’

 

The number of illegal immigrants entering the United States is at record levels, and even Left-leaning sites can’t make those numbers look rosy (though they are trying).  Inept and corrupt political leadership is a major contributor to this crisis, but it would be a mistake to stop our analysis there.

Things that happen in the physical world are reflections of the things happening in the spiritual world.  If there is a flood of immigrants at the Mexican border, there is a spiritual reason for that.  The Holy Prophet Moses in his book of Deuteronomy spells it out for us.  He writes,

A nation which you have not known shall eat up the fruit of your ground and of all your labors; and you shall be only oppressed and crushed continually; . . . The sojourner who is among you shall mount above you higher and higher; and you shall come down lower and lower. He shall lend to you, and you shall not lend to him; he shall be the head, and you shall be the tail. . . . "Because you did not serve the LORD your God with joyfulness and gladness of heart, by reason of the abundance of all things, therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the LORD will send against you, in hunger and thirst, in nakedness, and in want of all things; and he will put a yoke of iron upon your neck, until he has destroyed you. The LORD will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flies, a nation whose language you do not understand, a nation of stern countenance, who shall not regard the person of the old or show favor to the young, and shall eat the offspring of your cattle and the fruit of your ground, until you are destroyed; who also shall not leave you grain, wine, or oil, the increase of your cattle or the young of your flock, until they have caused you to perish (28:33, 43-4, 47-51).

 

All these curses shall come upon you and pursue you and overtake you, till you are destroyed, because you did not obey the voice of the LORD your God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which he commanded you (28:45).

In brief, when we see an invasion happening, it is likely because the country being invaded has turned its back on God the All-Holy Trinity and the commandments He has given its people to follow.  A look back through history gives abundant confirmation of this.  The ancient Roman Empire fell away into hedonism, debauchery, and persecution of Christians and was afflicted for centuries by Germanic barbarian invaders.  Some years later, after Christianity had taken root in Western Europe and the peoples there were flourishing again, the heathen Vikings were a scourge upon them because of their corruption.  The same thing occurred in Constantinople/New Rome, and that Christian Empire fell to the Muslim Turks in 1453 after centuries of encroachment and warfare by the Turks.  The Serbs fell under the Turkish yoke in 1389 for similar reasons.  Kievan Rus likewise was razed by the Mongols a little earlier, in the 13^th century, for falling into various disorders after rising to a high state of Christian civilization.

The same pattern is recognizable deeper in the past, with the Medes conquering the Persians centuries before the Birth of Christ, and so on.  And now we are seeing it in the United States and in Europe:  Sinful, evil things like pornography, easy divorce, psychedelic drug use, abortion, etc., are legal and being promoted as healthy ‘freedoms;’ people are abandoning Christianity; and following in their wake is a massive foreign population resettling in the midst of them.

Because of the causal connection between disobedience to God and harmful immigration flows, Christianity must become a regular part of the policy conversation at every level of government.  There is progress at the State level, where things like requiring the Ten Commandment to be posted in schools and universities and allowing Christian chaplains in many of those same places have advanced, as well as laws limiting social media use by children and requiring age verification for pornographic web sites.  But this sort of approach needs to become the norm, not the exception.

We must be honest with ourselves:  Modernity has had a terrible effect on us.  The acid bath of the Enlightenment has destroyed our love of God and made us worship idols instead.  We have focused on freedom in the past, but there is another big one in the West – mammon, or, as it is often referred to in our constitutions and other political tracts, property:  ‘John Adams made a similar assertion years later in 1790 in his Discourses on Davila, calling property as “sacred as the laws of God.” . . . During the Philadelphia Convention, John Rutledge of South Carolina reminded the delegates that “property was certainly the principal object of Society.”’

We will be ashamed to stand before the Christian martyrs in the next life, who saw the futility of rejecting God to worship earthly things:  ‘The [Roman] judge informed them of the imperial order that all were commanded to sacrifice to the gods. Nicander replied, that order could not regard Christians, who looked upon it as unlawful to abandon the immortal God, to adore wood and stones.’

We may not adore statues of Rome’s pagan gods these days, but without a doubt we have an idolatrous fixation on materialism/mammon.  This description of a Buc-ee’s makes the point entirely too well:

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2024/06/garlington-the-spiritual-dimension-of-the-border-crisis/.

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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: ‘Monasticism: Mystical Marriage with Christ’

 

Monasticism tends to have a bad reputation here at the South.  Marriage of man and woman, children, and ancestors have always been the focus and ideal of the Southern people.  A peak into Dixie’s literature confirms this.  In her novel The Great Meadow, Elizabeth Madox Roberts has the youthful brothers and one of their sisters exchange these lines:

 

‘Where will my land be, for my house?’ Diony asked.  It came to her now, as a sudden disaster, that Five Oaks would not be her place.  Other land higher up toward the Ledge would belong to Sam.  ‘Where mought be my place?’

 

‘You’d have to marry to get a place,’ Reuben answered her.

 

‘But suppose I mought not,’ she said.

 

‘Then God help you!  Iffen a woman isn’t married she has a poor make-out of a life,’ Sam said.  He was bending over the rope, his hands making a knot, his face earnest in what he said.

 

‘But God’s sake!  I never knew a woman that wasn’t married,’ Reuben said, as if his saying were final, half muttering, as if it were no matter.  ‘Come to think, I never knew one.’

 

‘Crazy Abbie, over at the court-house,’ Sam spoke after a moment of careful search.  ‘She carries out slops in the ordinary, the tavern place.  I never heard it said she ever had anybody marry with her’ (Hesperus Press Ltd., London, England, 2012, p. 11).

The typical Southern view of the abnormality of the single, unmarried state is flawlessly expressed.  Another Southern novelist, Margaret Junkin Preston, wrote in a similar vein.  In Silverwood:  A Book of Memories, young Edith expresses a desire for retirement from the world and wooded solitude:

 

“Doesn’t the taste of wood-life we are enjoying to-day, suggest how delightful it would be to have a rustic cottage—a permanent home, somewhere hereabouts, away from the world and all its vexations, where we could do as we please, unrestrained by the trammels of society,–happy in God, and nature, and one another?”

A very monastic sort of vision, which is summarily rejected by Edith’s mother precisely because of that feature:

 

“But to be serious,” said Mrs. Irvine—“you have need to be put into the heart of society, Edith, to eradicate your anchorite notions.  Silverwood, I’m afraid, is not the place for you.  God made us social beings, and we must not try to unmake ourselves.  The old convent life you profess sometimes to have a hankering after, apart, of course, I understand you,” as Edith was about to interrupt her with an explanation, “apart from its superstitious religion—this convent life tended to uproot all human affections from the heart of woman.  And it’s the idlest fancy, too, to suppose that those sisterhoods didn’t have constant jarrings and blickerings.  I dare say even at the period of their greatest purity, they were the hot-beds of such strifes as private households know nothing of.  So get rid of all these ideas, my daughter:  I don’t like to hear you advocate them even in sport” (Forgotten Books, London, England, 2015, pgs. 77-78, 80).

Hrmpf!  Case closed, right?  The single, unmarried state shall forever be reserved for the eccentrics and the unfortunates here in Dixie.

Well, perhaps not.  For the Orthodox Church has a few things to say in defense of monasticism, which, as we shall see, is actually another form of marriage and not a lonesome single state (though it may appear to be the latter to some).  But more on that anon.

The recently reposed Metropolitan Bishop Isaiah of Denver provides a much-needed counterpoint to the rigidly anti-monastic view of the largely Protestant South in his essay ‘Orthodox Monasticism:  A Brief Study for the Layman’.  He begins by noting the dismal view towards monasticism that exists today in many places (like Dixie):

 

We are living at a time in which the monastic life is not only considered abnormal, but is even ridiculed and condemned. Even they who profess to teach the word of God, especially within Protestant Christianity, cynically condemn the monastic life as useless, isolationist, abnormal, and not in conformity with the teachings of Christ. They teach that they who enter monasteries and convents certainly are not the ideal Christians.

He then begins to trace the origins of monasticism, beginning with St. John the Baptist:

 

Yet, history witnesses to us that the ascetic life, the life of monasticism has existed within the Church from the very beginning. Even before the Church had been established on earth, a voice came crying out of the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord. That voice belonged to Saint John the Forerunner and Baptist. It is not incorrect to see him also as the forerunner of monasticism within the life of the Church. For Saint John prepared the way for a King whose Kingdom is not of this world. Monasteries and convents more than anything else are vivid witnesses of that coming Kingdom.

 

Saint John had left his home and his people early in life and went to live in the wilderness (Isaiah 40:3, Malachi 4:5). He went to live the life of an ascetic. He had been there for several years, living the life of a hermit (heremitis). During that period he prayed incessantly, having dedicated his whole being to God. When the time came for him to fulfill his greatest mission, he returned to society to prepare the way for the King. He began by calling people to repentance and proclaiming that the Kingdom was close at hand. After he baptized Jesus in the Jordan, his mission was completed and from that point Jesus took up the message: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

And the Lord Jesus Christ Himself overturns the idea expressed by Mrs. Preston in Silverwood that monasticism is contrary to human nature:

 . . .

The rest is at https://southernorthodox.org/monasticism-mystical-marriage-with-christ/.

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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!