‘You Can’t Pour It in from the Top’

 

Southerners who love Dixie are distressed by the steady erosion of her culture.  Much has been lost due to overt attacks from enemies without and within as well as to our own carelessness and inattention over the years.  Like our honorable ancestors before us, many want to rise up and take action, to join the battle wielding weapons of some kind – political, economic, religious, cultural.

A wonderful English writer, and Orthodox Christian, Paul Kingsnorth cautions us against this approach in an essay of his, ‘The Moses Option:’

 

 . . . I think it is safe to say that ‘activism’ is a child of the Western way of seeing. We are an ‘activist’ culture. We like to identify problems and then solve them. We like to generalise about particulars. We like abstractions. We exist to ‘save the world’ or to ‘fix’ it, or to offer ‘solutions’. It is never enough for us to live in this world, to be content with who and what we are, to accept God’s will. No, we have to improve things; remake them in our image. This is the activist mindset, and it has been elevated to the status of a grand moral cause. It is, I would say, the West’s reason to live: our Big Idea.

A gifted Southern writer of recent times, Marion Montgomery, had an expression of his own that strongly echoes these thoughts of Mr Kingsnorth, that cultural renewal cannot be ‘poured in from the top.’  Southern cultural renewal won’t be accomplished primarily by our activism, by our carefully crafted plans and actions.  That is not to say they are completely unimportant, but much more important is what happens in our souls.  If we are faithful in living a true Orthodox life, the Grace of God that flows out from that will cause quite an upheaval around us.  Mr Kingsnorth recounts instances of this from Orthodox history in his essay, these being amongst them:

 . . .

The rest is at https://southernorthodox.org/you-cant-pour-it-in-from-the-top/.

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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!