The Weapons of Our Warfare

​Folks in the States got another big hint recently of the totalitarian direction Washington City is headed with the raid on President Trump’s home in Florida.
 
Southerners who remember even a sliver of their history will understand that this is simply the post-Lincoln federal government reverting to type, as a review of the rule of the Yankee General Benjamin Butler in New Orleans in 1862 alone illustrates.
 
But if folks need other examples of what lies at the end of this sort of injustice, we offer one from the much-suffering nation of Georgia from the 20th century under the communists:

On August 14, 1924, a delegation from the village of Simoneti came to the metropolitan to request that he consecrate their local church. At the appointed time, the metropolitan arrived in Simoneti with his retinue and consecrated the church. That night, a group of Chekists (Soviet security agents) broke into the house where Metropolitan Nazarius and his entourage were staying, bound and beat them, and then dragged them to the village council. Without an investigation, the Troika (a Soviet extraordinary council of three judges) sentenced to death Metropolitan Nazarius and four other clergymen—Priest Herman Jajanidze, Priest Hierotheos Nikoladze, Priest Simon Mchedlidze, and Archdeacon Besarion Kukhianidze. A layman, Axalmotsameni, was also sentenced to death. They were shot to death in the Sapichkhia Forest.

This is the kind of benevolence that is waiting for Southerners and others in the States who do not give their allegiance to the Leftist/globalist/Marxist elite who have taken over Washington and many other powerful institutions in the [u.] S.
 
And while it is important to remain engaged in the existing political processes so that we can do what good we can in that arena, politics is ultimately only the outer manifestation of deeper spiritual processes.  We are not, therefore, going to defeat our inhuman, transhumanist, Marxist opponents simply with constitutional amendments, with revisions to the law code, and those kinds of things.  To overcome a demonic ideology, we must use weapons commensurate with the battle, which is at its root a spiritual battle.  Therefore, our main weapon will be the very thing that annihilated the power of the devil and his demons over mankind:  the Holy Cross of the Lord Jesus Christ.
 
Its power has been manifested over and over again in history:

In ancient times, a severe pestilence broke out in Constantinople, the capital of the Greek state, which claimed many human lives. After the Wood of the Cross of the Lord was carried through the streets of the capital with prayers and the sprinkling of buildings and homes with holy water at the request of the faithful, the deadly disease stopped, and all Christians offered the deepest thanksgiving to the Lord Jesus Christ.
 
--Archimandrite Kirill (+2017)

​St Ephraim the Syrian (+373) urges Christians to always do the following:

Instead of a shield, protect yourself with the True Holy Cross, marking your limbs and heart with it. Use the sign of the cross to overshadow yourself not only with your hand, but also in your thoughts mark with it your every occupation at the times: your arrival and your departure, your resting and rising, your bed, and whatever service you go through – first cross everything in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This weapon is very strong, and no one can ever harm you if you are protected by it.

​And perhaps most to the point is this account from the life of St Oswald, King of Northumbria (+642):

The place is shown to this day, and held in much veneration, where Oswald, being about to engage in this battle, erected the symbol of the Holy Cross, and knelt down and prayed to God that he would send help from Heaven to his worshippers in their sore need. Then, we are told, that the cross being made in haste, and the hole dug in which it was to be set up, the king himself, in the ardour of his faith, laid hold of it and held it upright with both his hands, till the earth was heaped up by the soldiers and it was fixed. Thereupon, uplifting his voice, he cried to his whole army, “Let us all kneel, and together beseech the true and living God Almighty in His mercy to defend us from the proud and cruel enemy; for He knows that we have undertaken a just war for the safety of our nation.” All did as he had commanded, and accordingly advancing towards the enemy with the first dawn of day, they obtained the victory, as their faith deserved (St Bede, Ecclesiastical History of England1, Book III, Ch. II, p. 136).

A similar spirit was within the Southern army as they fought against the invading Northern revolutionaries, as recounted by Richard Weaver in The Confederate South, 1865-1910 (later published as The Southern Tradition at Bay):

​ . . . the Southern people reached the eve of the Civil War almost untouched by the great currents of rationalism and skepticism, and their allegiance to the older religiousness was reflected in their fighting men.  Into the strange personnel of the Confederate Army, out of “regions that sat in darkness,” poured fighting bishops and prayer-holding generals, and through it swept waves of intense religious enthusiasm long lost to history (LSU dissertation, 1943, p. 96, PDF version).

​In other words, holiness matters.  Not the prideful arrogance of the Yanks and their near-of-kin, the globalists, that masquerades as holiness, but true holiness – the kind that arises when the Grace of God penetrates even into the muscles and the bones, to use the words of one of St John Chrysostom’s prayers.  And we carry it with us when we go about our business in the world, and even into the military battles we fight, and with it we are able to conquer our foes:

​Sennuphius was a great ascetic and wonderworker of the Egyptian desert. He was a contemporary of Patriarch Theophilus and Emperor Theodosius the Great. He is called the "Standard-bearer" because by his prayers he once helped Emperor Theodosius to gain a victory over the army of his adversaries. When the emperor summoned Sennuphius to Constantinople, Sennuphius replied that he was unable to do so but sent him his tattered monastic habit and staff. Setting out to battle the emperor donned Sennuphius' monastic habit and carried the staff and returned victorious from battle.

This we also see again and again in Church history – the presence of holy men and women, or their prayers, or the presence of some other holy object, turning the tide in battle for the Christians.  Archimandrite Kirill added to what he said above about the Holy Cross:

Later, another significant event was added to this miracle, namely that by carrying icons of the Savior and the Mother of God before his soldiers, the Orthodox Greek Emperor Manuel defeated the Saracens. At the same time, the Orthodox Russian Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky also defeated the Volga Bulgarians, carrying icons of the Savior and Mother of God. That these victories were won by a supernatural power was testified to by the Heavenly radiance emanating from the icons, illuminating the people who were there. 

​All of this fits quite well into the Southerner’s religious milieu.  Quoting Professor Weaver again:

Whether he was a Virginia Episcopalian, dozing in comfortable dogmatic slumber, or a Celt, transplanted to the Appalachian wilderness and responding to the wild emotionalism of the religious rally, he wanted the older religion of dreams and drunkenness – something akin to the rituals of the Medieval Church, and to the mystic celebrations of the ancients (The Confederate South, p. 97)

​Mundane politics will have its role to play in freeing the South from wokeness, Yankee imperial dreams, and the rest of those harmful ideologies and systems, but by itself it is quite impotent.  Only when the Southern people, armed with the Holy Cross of Christ, full of His Grace, carrying the icons of the Lord and His Most Pure Mother, singing the Psalms and other hymns – in our homes and in our churches, in our neighborhoods and about our towns – only then will we be able to crush the demons who provide the strength of Dixie’s enemies.  And that will enable victories on the other fronts of our battle:  cultural, political, etc.
 
To our enemies and other outsiders, we may well look ridiculous, weak, and foolish as we do these things.  However, the Holy Apostle Paul reminds us of something we must never forget:
 
‘ . . . the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men’ (I Corinthians 1:25).
 
Deo vindice!

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Notes:
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