By Walt Garlington
My father is fond of telling the story of his great-grandfather’s War sword. As a boy, he was in his grandfather John Riley Boyd’s house in Rogers, Arkansas. Resting above the hearth in a place of honor was the sword his grandfather’s father, a soldier in Tennessee, had carried with him in battle during the War of Northern Aggression. His grandfather saw him looking at it, so he took it down and placed it in my father’s hands. My father said it was like holding, in his words, ‘the holy grail.’
This story of my father’s represents an attitude that is widespread across Dixie, an attitude of reverence for people and things that are thought to possess and transmit a special energy of some kind, usually of the sort that heightens remembrance of a person or event.
This is expressed in different ways, sometimes publicly, sometimes privately. The family of Jefferson Davis provides some examples of the latter, similar to the one given about my father and the War sword.
- Mr. Davis’s wife Varina, writing to her mother about John C. Calhoun’s funeral (1850): ‘I will bring you a piece of his [Calhoun’s] hair when I come home’ (“Jefferson Davis: Private Letters 1823-1889,” Hudson Strode, edr., New York, Da Capo Press, 1995, p. 60).
- Mrs. Davis to her father, after the death of her son Samuel (1854): ‘When I can I will send you some hair and a miniature of Sam’ (p. 79).
- Mrs. Davis to Mr. Davis (1866): ‘Your dear letter enclosing your hair reached me safely upon my arrival here and cheered me at the threshold even more than the loving reception of my dear friends the Cobbs’ (pgs. 232-3).
A poem of Henry Timrod’s beautifully describes a public, communal expression of the South’s numinous sense. It his ‘Ode,’ for the decoration of Confederate soldiers’ graves in Charleston, South Carolina, 1867:
I.
Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.
II.
In seeds of laurel in the earth
The blossom of your fame is blown,
And somewhere, waiting for its birth,
The shaft is in the stone!
III.
Meanwhile, behalf the tardy years
Which keep in trust your storied tombs,
Behold! your sisters bring their tears,
And these memorial blooms.
IV.
Small tributes! but your shades will smile
More proudly on these wreaths to-day,
Than when some cannon-moulded pile
Shall overlook this bay.
V.
Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!
There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies,
By mourning beauty crowned!
It is interesting to note before going forward that the bodies of these fallen soldiers bear a more potent sacramental power than what we have noted above (i.e., something that conveys holiness). This is very much akin to what we find in the Orthodox Church; but we will speak of that in a moment.
First, though, we should say that for Southrons matter is not simply a nominalistic agglomeration of atoms – dead, inert, interchangeable. It can be imbued with a certain power through its association with extraordinary moments in the lives and deaths of people.
This innate but inchoate sense of Dixie’s people finds its fulfillment in the Orthodox Church’s teaching about holy relics. To begin with, she teaches that the goal of all the creation is union with God (His energies, not His essence). Blessed Fr. Dumitru Staniloae writes,
The general basis of the mysteries [the sacraments, in Western parlance–W.G.] of the Church is the faith that God can operate upon the creature in his visible reality. In this sense the general meaning of the mysteries is the union of God with the creature, and the most comprehensive mystery is the union of God with the whole of creation. This is a mystery that contains everything, and there is absolutely no part of reality not contained within it. This union begins with the very act of creation and is destined to find its fulfillment through the movement of creation toward that state in which “God is all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). Is there anyone who can explain the meaning and the depth of this union, the way in which the Word of God is present within the reasons of created things and the way He is at work, sustaining and governing them toward their goal of complete union with Him? (The Experience of God, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Vol. 5: The Sanctifying Mysteries, Ionita and Barringer, trans. and edr., Brookline, Mass., Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2012, p. 3)
St. Justin Popovich (+1979) explains this vis-à-vis mankind:
Everyone and all are set on their mystical path toward God, toward the God-Man. Inasmuch as it was created by God, the Logos, matter possesses this same theocentricity. Moreover, by His advent into our earthly world, by His all-embracing condescension as God and Man for the redemption of the world, the Lord Christ clearly demonstrated that not only the soul, but matter also was created by God and for God, and that He is God and Man; and for it, matter, He is all and everything in the same manner as for the soul. Being created by God, the Logos, matter is, in its innermost core, God-longing and Christ-longing.
The most obvious proof of this is the fact that God the Word has become Incarnate, has become man (St. John 1:14). By His Incarnation, matter has been magnified with Divine glory and has entered into the grace- and virtue-bestowing, ascetic aim of deification, or union with Christ. God has become flesh, has become human, so that the entire man, the entire body, might be filled with God and with His miracle-working forces and powers. In the God-Man, the Lord Christ, and His Body, all matter has been set on a path toward Christ — the path of deification, transfiguration, sanctification, resurrection, and ascent to an eternal glory surpassing that of the Cherubim. And all of this takes place and will continue to take place through the Divine and human Body of the Church, which is truly the God-Man Christ in the total fullness of His Divine and Human Person, the fullness “that fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:23). Through its Divine and human existence in the Church, the human body, as matter, as substance, is sanctified by the Holy Spirit and in this way participates in the life of the Trinity. Matter thus attains its transcendent, divine meaning and goal, its eternal blessedness and its immortal joy in the God-Man.
The human body as well as the soul can be sanctified, can be united with the Uncreated Glory/Energies of God, and this holiness can be passed to objects associated with a holy man or woman. A passage from “The Way of a Pilgrim“ (p. 42) illustrates this:
The old man to whom this rosary [a better translation would be ‘prayer rope’—W.G.] belonged was a saint. Now what is the meaning of sanctity? For the sinner it means nothing else than a return through effort and discipline to the state of innocence of the first man. When the soul is made holy the body becomes holy also. The rosary had always been in the hands of a sanctified person; the effect of the contact of his hands and the exhalation of his body was to inoculate it with holy power-the power of the first man’s innocence. That is the mystery of spiritual nature!
There are numerous holy relics associated with Orthodox saints. Amongst Dixie’s ancestors, the Celtic saints had a fondness for handbells, some of which have survived to our time, like St. Conall of Inishkeel’s (+7th century), also called St. Conall Cael.
The holiness of the body that radiates outward to help and bless others is also seen in the South’s Orthodox forebears. St. Bede includes some instances of this in his “Ecclesiastical History of England.” In one place (Book III, Ch. IX), for instance, he says of the Martyr-King Oswald of Northumbria (+642),
How great his faith was towards God, and how remarkable his devotion, has been made evident by miracles even after his death; for, in the place where he was killed by the pagans, fighting for his country, sick men and cattle are frequently healed to this day. Whence it came to pass that many took up the very dust of the place where his body fell, and putting it into water, brought much relief with it to their friends who were sick. This custom came so much into use, that the earth being carried away by degrees, a hole was made as deep as the height of a man. Nor is it surprising that the sick should be healed in the place where he died; for, whilst he lived, he never ceased to provide for the poor and the sick, and to bestow alms on them, and assist them.
But these manifestations of holiness are not to be relegated only to the earlier ages of the Orthodox Church’s life: They are to be experienced in all ages. The Lord Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8); the effects of His Grace upon humanity will also be the same through all ages. And true to those declarations, we find a contemporary Southerner, the Orthodox Archbishop Dmitri Royster of Dallas (+2011), whose relics have been discovered to be incorrupt – a mark of a saint. Five years after his death, his body was to be moved from a cemetery in Restland to a grave on the grounds of St. Seraphim Cathedral in Dallas, according to his wishes. What met those present was an extraordinary surprise. The iconographer of St. Seraphim’s and a good friend of Blessed Dmitri’s, Vladimir Grigorenko, was present at the uncovering and relates,
I personally negotiated with the Funeral Director that Church representatives must be allowed to oversee this transition. I have to admit, during this negotiation the Funeral Director (with 25 years of experience) explained to us in details what horrific picture we would see if we chose to be present.
Several people, clergy and laity from different parishes throughout the diocese, including myself, were chosen to participate. Dr. Ron Rodriguez, MD, Vladika’s primary physician, was one of them.
In the early morning of March 4, when Restland employees opened the concrete vault that contained Vladika’s wooden coffin, I was ready to see all these horrible things I was told about.
To our amazement, Vladika’s coffin was found intact amidst the wet atmosphere of the sealed vault and was easily opened.
The Funeral Director, who was present there in a complete haz-mat mask, stated that she had never seen a non-embalmed body in such a condition after 5 years in the grave, and that she believes it is a miracle.
The rest of the account is provided here.
We await word of miracles worked by Archbishop Dmitri, but it appears that the circle of Orthodox sanctity has closed here at the South. 417 years after her birth, Dixie has given birth to a native saint of her own. This is the ultimate goal for Dixie and for all the peoples of the world: our transformation into holy men and women, into saints clothed with incorruption.
Glory to God for the sacraments of memory that have survived here in the South and may He inspire us to reach for the greater mysteries – the full acquisition of the Grace of the Holy Ghost that heals and sanctifies soul and body and makes us truly saints!
Walt Garlington is a chemical engineer turned writer and editor of the website Confiteri: A Southern Perspective. This longtime Southern Baptist, then Anglican, was united to the Orthodox Church in 2012 and makes his home in Louisiana where he attends a GOA parish.
Feature photo: An image from historic Hollywood Cemetery overlooking the James River in Richmond, Virginia.
