How to wear crosses correctly — SILVERS

Despite the fact that this attribute of Chris­tian­i­ty in ours is quite pop­u­lar as a dec­o­ra­tive ele­ment and is often per­ceived in iso­la­tion from church tra­di­tions, its sym­bol­ism should not be ignored at all.

Accord­ing to the canons of the church, the Ortho­dox cross is a sym­bol of vic­to­ry over sin, so it is impor­tant for every Ortho­dox Chris­t­ian to wear it. A pec­toral cross is put on a per­son after the rite of the sacra­ment of Bap­tism and is worn in the future through­out life. Some­times peo­ple pre­fer to have small amulets, icons, var­i­ous Chris­t­ian sym­bols as a tal­is­man. As a rule, the church has noth­ing against such attrib­ut­es, how­ev­er, accord­ing to its rec­om­men­da­tions, first of all, you need to wear an Ortho­dox cross, and then the rest of the acces­sories.

From the point of view of reli­gion, putting on a cross, a per­son renounces the dev­il. In addi­tion, worn after Bap­tism, it sym­bol­izes the ablu­tion from sins and the spir­i­tu­al renew­al of the per­son­al­i­ty. And the cor­rect wear­ing of this attribute shows the readi­ness of peo­ple for fur­ther spir­i­tu­al devel­op­ment and con­stant strug­gle against evil.

What you need to know

The most impor­tant con­di­tion for wear­ing a Chris­t­ian pec­toral cross is the aware­ness of its mean­ing — it is not a piece of jew­el­ry. The cross giv­en at the time of Bap­tism does not need to be put on pub­lic dis­play, because its pri­ma­ry task is to pro­tect a per­son, and not show his sta­tus. Wear­ing a cross for fash­ion is con­sid­ered a spe­cial sin, because the process itself must be con­scious — this is how the pow­er of this acces­so­ry is man­i­fest­ed.

Psy­chol­o­gists say that peo­ple from the poor­er seg­ments of the pop­u­la­tion, as a rule, try to demon­strate large gold pec­toral cross­es. So they try to draw atten­tion to them­selves, believ­ing that gold should not be hid­den under clothes. Thus, the church attribute ceas­es to be a pro­tec­tion for its own­er, turn­ing into an ordi­nary jew­el­ry made of pre­cious met­al.

The pec­toral cross should be worn only under cloth­ing so that it is clos­er to the chest, name­ly, to the heart. It is not rec­om­mend­ed to remove it even in the bath or when tak­ing a bath. In some cas­es, for exam­ple, if you are engaged in wrestling, you can put it in a pock­et spe­cial­ly sewn for this pur­pose on your clothes. It is unac­cept­able to cling a cross to your ear like an ear­ring or on your wrist like a pen­dant — in this case it turns into an ordi­nary trin­ket.

The same can be advised for women who are going to a par­ty or any enter­tain­ment venue. If the style of cloth­ing does not pro­vide for the pres­ence of a cross on the neck, it can be pinned with a pin on the back of the cloth­ing, but in no case should you leave it at home. By the way, this is exact­ly what many believ­ers did dur­ing the Sovi­et Union, when the church was offi­cial­ly banned.

What should he be

There is a very wide­spread opin­ion that four-point­ed cross­es are unique to Catholi­cism. In fact, Ortho­doxy rec­og­nizes every­thing: both four-point­ed and eight-point­ed, with and with­out the image of Jesus. At the same time, the mate­r­i­al tak­en for man­u­fac­tur­ing is diverse. It is only desir­able to attach par­tic­u­lar impor­tance to the prop­er­ties of a par­tic­u­lar per­son. For exam­ple, there are peo­ple in whom sil­ver prod­ucts can cause dark­en­ing of the skin. There is noth­ing wrong with that — just such a per­son needs to choose a cross for him­self from anoth­er mate­r­i­al.

The main thing that dis­tin­guish­es a real pec­toral cross from a dec­o­ra­tive one is its con­se­cra­tion before wear­ing. If it is pur­chased in a shop at the church, you do not need to wor­ry about this — you are guar­an­teed to buy a pre-con­se­crat­ed cross. It is advis­able to con­se­crate a prod­uct from a jew­el­ry store in a church — this process takes only a cou­ple of min­utes.