The Great American Eclipse came and went on August 21, and like most other things these days it was a marker of American decline.
There they were, millions of Americans, dragging themselves from their pre-fabricated houses, for once ripping themselves free of their LED screens, their first-person shooters, their pornography, their Ding-Dongs and corn chips, their lite beer, their opioids—and for what? For worse than nothing. To ogle an astronomical occurrence—to stand mesmerized by a spectacle in the firmament, just like pagan savages thousands of years before the birth of Our Lord.
Yes, eclipse-watching Americans were little better than bone-through-the-nose tribesman, hoodwinked into fascination for a phony prodigy on high. Is it not a corrupt and pagan nation that gathers not for Christ, but to witness the meaninglessly fortuitous synchronicity of the earth, sun, and moon? Ask yourself: These days, do so many Americans gather on Sunday mornings, in Christian houses of God, and worship the Lord that their forebears were proud to worship? Not anymore.
This is what we paleocons mean when we insist that the United States is a post-Christian nation. Increasingly, those things that unite us, what few such things there are, lack any Christian content. Our public festivals no longer center around Christ. No, now they mandate that we stare in idiot awe at a heaven that, a vicious mainstream culture tells us, has been purged of God, that has been transformed into nothing but a light show, an excuse for the sort of New Age black mass in which Americans partook on August 21.
Our wickedness is total. We have forsaken the heritage of our forefathers. We consign our posterity to the hell that is life without a Christian conception of God. With all our technology, we are better than ever at tracking the movements of celestial bodies across the sky—but we pay no attention to the wanderings of our unmoored souls.
Do we not see that the only valid star for us to worship is the Star of Bethlehem, which led the Magi to our infant Lord?
I’m reminded that only one country still valorizes that star that heralded the birth of our Savior. That’s Russia, where several of the spires of the Kremlin to this day bear those red stars that belong to the iconography of Eastern Christendom. (It’s a common misunderstanding that the Kremlin stars are Communist symbols. In fact, they long precede the Bolsheviks, and are as Russian Orthodox as Avvakum; as the most holy Cathedral of the Dormition of the Theotokos; as the wonderful decaying monk’s corpses of the Pechersk Lavra; as a droning WASP pseud convert fanatic; as the wonderful oppression of the Tatar bastard traitors on the streets of RUSSIAN CRIMEA O MOST EXALTED.)
I like to think that those Kremlin stars have, in their own small way, exercised a subtle but real spiritual influence on the souls of Muscovites and indeed of all Russians who make the pilgrimage—as all Russians must—to the sacred Kremlin.
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My research continues on my book on the Dignity of Woman in Russian Orthodox theology and tradition.
As I’ve said before, I expect little financial remuneration from this book, which I’m writing for a small religious-oriented publishing house. But composing it is an intellectual as well as spiritual discipline. I rise early to read and write, hitting my desk before dawn—preceded to the work of the new day only by Mother and Sister Marie, whose matutinal labors start a good hour before mine. Well, what of that? A pig’s stall doesn’t muck, nor a heifer’s grippe-congested vagina unclog itself.
And come to think of it, it’s almost time for Daughter to start rising with Mother to help with the morning chores. My scholarly readings in Saint Gleb of Yuzhnaya Kolyma, indeed, suggest that pre-dawn labors are crucial to diminishing the sexual energy that moistens the loins of young girls, even young Russian Orthodox girls, in early adolescence.
More to come on this.