Supper at Emmaus

Titian, 16th century

The Habit of Prayer

In ages past, prayer was both a natural routine in a man's day as well as a refuge during moments of distress.

Today, most Western men have been robbed of their birthright. It is not so much that we do not know our prayers. Memorizing the Lord's Prayer, the Angelic Salutation or the Apostle's Creed requires but a few minutes of effort even for a man completely unfamiliar with them. Rather, it is that we have lost the habit, the instinct, for prayer.

Yet, we assure you that all is not lost. You need not despair that the habit of prayer is beyond you. Somewhere in Scripture, Saint Paul says that all men know God on some level, in some way. Even if you have never once said a prayer in your time on earth, you have indeed prayed. At innumerable moments in your life, when you have mourned or feared some terrible outcome or event, you have unknowingly reached out to the Lord with your sighs, with the groans of your spirit.

Even in empty, godless despair, you have spoken to Him.

Do not discount the value of these wordless supplications in the eyes of the Lord. They have kept you grounded in metaphysical reality, in the tacit understanding that this universe seems arbitrary and cruel and that you and yours live only by the grace of God.

How Else Might We Pray?

But there are other purposes to prayer outside of these spontaneous bursts of existential alarm. Otherwise, the Lord would not have taught a specific prayer to his apostles, nor would they have continued to mark the hours of the day with specific prayers.

Thus the church has always utilized a formal liturgy to recite prayers throughout the day, outside of those individual prayers which we send up to God in the form of brief verbal petitions or cries of anguish. These prayers are communal, shared by the brethren in company with one another or physically alone but in spiritual communion.

These prayers of the liturgy are an excellent treatment for the spiritual disease which has brought about a prayer famine in so many men's lives today. If you have been repelled from typical modern church settings by feminized environments and an infantile approach to worship, then this formal approach may be the ideal way to ease you into a fruitful life of prayer.

Why Should the Knights Pray Anyway?

It is easy today to discard prayer as a useless endeavor when there appears to be so much to do in the "real" world. Praying, from that perspective, might seem like a household chore that can wait while we keep the house from burning down.

However this viewpoint ignores the knowledge which we all possess about the present maladies of society: they do not truly stem from failures to fight communism or the proliferation of pornography and sexual perversion. Those things are but symptoms of the social malady which overtook Western civilization in the 20th century as men stopped worshiping God and began worshiping themselves.

In medicine, it is foolish and often futile to treat symptoms and not the root cause of those symptoms. Just so in the spiritual world. While there is great need for strong, virile men to stand up and fight today, there is a greater need for those men to realign their souls with God through proper worship and prayer.

That is why the Knights of the Resurrection have crafted their own divine office. They do not mean to disparage the liturgy that the church as a whole uses. Instead, these texts and prayers are meant to nourish a charism particular to men's needs today.

When to Pray 

The beauty of the divine office of the Knights of the Resurrection (DOKR) is in its flexible structure. It assigns hours to prayers but also allows for the interruptions of men who are, naturally, busy working to support themselves and their families.

The traditional divine office of the Church is organized similarly but with more assigned hours of prayer. The prayers of the DOKR are more limited in number and length because it is expected that knights are busy. In fact, only the prayers of Lauds, Vespers and Compline are required, though knights are strongly encouraged to pray Matins.

• Matins

Traditionally, the hour of matins was prayed by monks in the middle of the night. They woke from their rest and prayed for long periods before returning to sleep before dawn came and they resumed prayers and heard mass.

This is an ideal but many knights may find it difficult to manage. Nevertheless, you may think of this opportunity to stand fire guard for your loved ones, rising from sleep to briefly pray and be alert to the voice of the Lord. 

If you cannot manage to pray at this time, try to at least read the scriptural passages from this hour at some free point during the day. They are specifically chosen from the Word of God to inspire you to lead a christian life.

• Lauds

Pray this hour when you rise, at whatever time that you normally wake. It is best to rise early in the morning before sunrise. However, a man's need to work may interfere with this if he works nights or evenings. 

This is particularly complicated for a man who works nights and wakes in the afternoon. The knights recommend that you still pray lauds in the morning but you may appreciate praying this hour of the office when you actually wake. We leave it to each man to do as he sees fit, keeping always in mind that perfection is to be strived for even if it cannot be achieved. 

The prayers of Lauds and Vespers are chosen from martial episodes in scripture, so that a knight may see how a man of God deals with confrontation and conflict.

• Vespers

A most excellent prayer of the Church. So excellent is it that many Protestant churches continue to recite these prayers and hymns, at least in Sunday evenings. Some call in evensong.

You should pray this hour of this DOKR when evening has come or when it is near. Make sure to keep it separate from the prayer of Compline.

• Compline

A minor and more individual hour in most versions of the divine office, the hour of Compline holds great importance for the knights because the prayers are those passages from scripture which remind us of our mortality and God's greatness.

Where to Pray

The Lord warns us not to pray ostentatiously, making a show of our piety in public. The best place to pray will often be in private for a knight. Should he find himself working alongside another knight as the time of prayer arrives, by all means they should try to find a private place to pray together. However, in many situations, a knight will be physically alone when the time of prayer arrives.

When possible it would be good to pray these hours in a church, ideally in front of the body of Christ on the altar.

How to Pray

A knight is not restricted to the words given in the texts here. Those are the minimum which must be said. Petitions and requests for intercession are always allowed and recommended.

Instructions are given in each hour for how to posture oneself during prayer. Sometimes, there are options but it is important to remember that, no matter what the text seems to indicate, we ALWAYS stand for any gospel reading.

The Miseducation of Western CIvilization

I used to be a high school history teacher. I only did it for a few years before I drifted out of the profession and became a full-time bum.

I think that my divorce probably had something to do with my departure from teaching but I was definitely disenchanted from the get go. I recognized quickly that it was just a conformity factory. I had both positive and negative memories of my own schooling before I got into teaching in my early 30s. After teaching in a high school with adult eyes, I couldn't see how anyone could enjoy their stay in such a hell-hole.

And I am not talking about a ghetto school. This was a decent, middle-class suburban school. But few of us teachers were really teaching anything useful. Furthermore, the principal tolerated scum bags by simply sending them back to class with big grins on their faces after you sent them to the office. Worst of all, no matter how hard I tried to alter the format, class always became a matter of getting everyone to "sit and listen".

Sit and Listen is a learning format for girls and emasculated boys. This is no way to raise young men. Sure, if they want to learn calculus or computer programming, they are going to have to sit still occasionally. But then their minds are active, problem-solving. The average high school is just a prison for young men with high T-levels.

I recognize that maybe I just wasn't a good teacher. Robert was a teacher for much longer than me, mostly in elementary, and claims to have loved it. But we both agree that there has to be a better way to teach young men. As it is, we are just criminalizing their natural behavior by putting them in cages and lowering the T-levels of those young men who submit to this imprisonment.

After I resigned from teaching, I gained an interest in the Great Books and realized that there was another, even greater defect in what students were learning. Or rather, what they were not learning.

We're More Intelligent Now?

Discussing matters historical with my students, one of the girls chimed in that things were different now because "We're more intelligent, We have more education."

I tried not to laugh at this declaration from one of my least-functional students. More educated? More intelligent?

These kids are literate, I will give them that. Facebook and texting demands that one be literate to some extent.

But truly more educated? More intelligent? What makes them think that?

I think that I know. They equate the number of classes passed with actual education.

That's why you hear so-called college-educated women spouting off about their education proudly when all they have really done is attended a bunch of classes about gender or culture in which all they had to do was write papers about how they felt and get the spelling and punctuation reasonably correct.

And what are they literate in? I looked at what the English teachers were having them read. Granted, there was a core of good American literature being taught. But the approach even to that is so nauseatingly politically correct that any value is really lost.

As for "world" literature, it is some of the most shallow tripe you have ever seen. After a snippet of real classics such as Homer or Dante, the teachers indulge themselves in tripe pushed out largely by modern authors (modern because outside of Western Europe until a century or so ago, you didn't even have anything resembling literature).

What's the Big Deal?

Some of you reading this may wonder what the big deal is. Many people today, cut off from their cultural birthrights by the educational excisions of the past few decades, have come to believe that it is enough to learn to read, write and do math. History and culture are extraneous, in their opinion.

It is this mental rape of the present generation that is leading us to our downfall. People do not know what they are being robbed of because the past is practically a blank slate for them. They have a PC-skewed version of the history of the last few generations in their head and ignore the preceding millennia because that was all "just a bunch of racist, sexist stuff." Or so their teachers told them.

This is true even for young men who think of themselves as libertarians or alt-right. They have been raised on a history so revised that, even after they rebel against political correctness, they still do no understand what is missing from their perspective.

The knights wish to preserve, at the very least, the racial memory of our finest moments. These include historical works and accounts that remind us of just how strong, and how weak, we can be. This includes the most gossamer delicate poetry as well as the martial beat of the psalms given in our liturgy.

So What Would the Knights Do?

The knights wish to retain all of the beauty that posterity has passed on to us in the Sistine chapel, Westminster Abbey, the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Ovid and Virgil, the wisdom of Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, even the philosophy of the men who questioned our own sacred beliefs, such as Hegel or Kant.

The West has been having a very satisfying conversation for the last few thousand years. This conversation begins with Sumerian tales such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Jewish collection of scriptures known as the Old Testament.

Today, though, we are threatened with the loss of the entire thread of the conversation as ignorant, weak men have turned away from confrontation with ideas and have acquiesced to the women in their lives. Now everything is acceptable and nothing is contested because potentially good men fel that they have no basis from which to begin an argument.

Why Should We Expect Opposition?

This goal is apparently modest. After all, we are simply talking about the preservation of a small collection of books and a body of artwork that could all be captured easily on a flash drive. In addition, there is all the architecture of Europe and America.

But you would find, had you the opportunity to implement an education in any school today, that teaching these things would cause a firestorm of protest.

Robert has already encountered this protest, even from people who are ostensibly on the "right" side
of these matters but act like shrieking liberals. Teach Latin in a Catholic school? He found that did not go over well.Yet all of our recent ancestors, both Protestant and Catholic, found Latin to be an indispensable part of a real man's education. Even the Greek Orthodox taught Latin, spiteful as they are against all things Western.

You see, these texts and paintings and buildings and ideas derived from our rich past offend modernists on a very fundamental level. Subtly or not, they expose the lies and reveal truths known since the beginning of time:

• Men are not equal one to another, nor are women. 
• Valor and strength are positive qualities.
• The family is the root unit of a nation
• A nation consists of a people, and is not defined by political borders
• We were meant to shape this world to our liking

There are many other things that you will learn from reading the Great Books. Most of the are repellent to a population of people that are changing their sexes and abusing their children with drugs, hormones and the filth spewed out by Hollywood.

You do not need this website to do so but we hope to provide a guide and some resources to make it easier to read the Great Books. It is unlikely that you have the time to dedicate to familiarizing yourself with your birthright like you did when you were young. 

This is another great crime of our time. In his late teens and early 20s a man has plenty of time, absent family and responsibilities, to learn in depth about his ancestors and their beliefs. If you are past that time, working and/or supporting a family, your opportunities to study are reduced.

But you must take every opportunity. Allow yourself to read the Odyssey or passages from scripture and you will soon find yourself drawn into this tapestry that includes you and every one who has ever existed.

Most importantly, fight against those who would take it away from you and your own posterity. They are waging a war against you and your children.

Get angry.

Read.

Stay angry.