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’: ​

Today we embrace in thought all of our compatriots, right down to the soldiers who fulfilled their duty in Syria, battling for the freedom of the Christian people as if defending their own cottage. We remember our ancestors, great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, those who gave us the baton of love, and by their prayers lit in our hearts the fire of faith and fidelity to Christ. May the Lord grant repose to our fathers, brothers, and sisters, forgive them their transgressions voluntary and involuntary, and hedge us in by their prayers today, at the beginning of the third millennium, from fears and timidity, help us be cleansed from every defilement of flesh and spirit, and give us the fortitude to resist public seductions and to invest our little mite into the moral rebirth of the fatherland. 

But if we fail to honor our departed Southern forefathers and mothers, we will become depraved, demonic: 

Today, on Radonitsa day, when we want to speak about the past and remember our grandmothers, and recall those who have contributed to our spiritual formation, I recall the thought of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, who said, “The measure of a people’s savagery corresponds to the extent of their forgetfulness and oblivion to which they consign the departed.” And when today you arrive to our city cemeteries, hearts ever painfully sinking upon sight of the ancient, pre-revolutionary tombs with crosses to date unrestored, earlier destroyed by the hands of godless people. 
 
Whence comes such truly demonic hatred, poured out upon our departed? Whence memorials disfigured, and granite slabs crushed and broken to be used as building material? Why was it necessary to extract the remains of Michael Nikiforovich Katkov in the Alekseevsky Monastery necropolis, where I now fulfill the obedience of confessor, and shove a cigarette into his mouth? It was some crazy komsomols that did it. What is this infernal, Luciferian, irrational hatred? It seems that behind these terrible phenomena stands, of course, a mystical sense of the unity of generations, and to obstruct this unity, to dismember and rend us from one another, the present age and the prior age, is the ancient dream of the spirit of evil—the spirit of negation and destruction. Because the Christian who is rooted in the past in his heart, the Christian who preserves the loving, reverent, and respectful memory of his ancestors, kings and queens, princes, and soldiers who gave their lives on the field of battle for the faith, the king, and the fatherland, is truly an unshakable edifice— he will not be dislodged by the winds of change. A Christian will never be cannon fodder in the modern pseudo-democratic “Maidans,” will never become a plaything or toy in the hands of demagogues, who first and foremost brainwash this or that ethnic or social group, turning them into mankurts, depriving them of their historical memory, and using them to destroy the cultural life of the remaining peoples. 

Knowing and loving our Christian ancestors, as Fr Artemy says, will extinguish the fires of Revolution; but denigrating and erasing their memory will most certainly ignite and feed it.  Mr Rod Dreher is rather clear on this point: ​

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever,” said Cicero. This, explains Kundera, is why communists placed such emphasis on conquering the minds and hearts of young people. In his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera recalls a speech that Czech president Gustáv Husák gave to a group of Young Pioneers, urging them to keep pressing forward to the Marxist paradise of peace, justice, and equality. 
 
“Children, never look back!,” [cries Kundera’s character Husak], and what he meant was that we must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory. 
 
A collective loss of historical memory—not just memory of communism but memory of our shared cultural past—within the West is bound to have a devastating effect on our future. It’s not that forgetting the evils of communism means we are in danger of re-creating precisely that form of totalitarianism. It’s that the act of forgetting itself makes us vulnerable to totalitarianism in general. 
 
Put another way, we not only have to remember totalitarianism to build a resistance to it; we have to remember how to remember, period. 

If we here in Dixie, we who still love her, will unite and celebrate this Day of Rejoicing, we may be assured that the Southern remnant will be strengthened and blessed by God.  And we may also find that some of our wayward Southern brothers and sisters, those disappointed and disillusioned by Americanism, communism, BLMism, technological progress, or what have you, will rejoin us in Dixie’s gracious and welcoming Big House, for authentic Christian tradition, shining with the Light of Truth, will attract those to it who are no longer blinded by their devotion to idols. ​