How to wear crosses correctly — SILVERS.

Despite the fact that this attribute of Chris­tian­i­ty is quite pop­u­lar in our coun­try 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 wear­ing it is impor­tant for every Ortho­dox Chris­t­ian. A body cross is giv­en to a per­son after the cer­e­mo­ny of the sacra­ment of Bap­tism and is worn lat­er through­out his life. Some­times peo­ple pre­fer to have small censers, icons, var­i­ous Chris­t­ian sym­bols as amulets. 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 oth­er acces­sories.

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

What you need to know

The most impor­tant con­di­tion for wear­ing a Chris­t­ian body cross is aware­ness of its mean­ing — it is not a piece of jew­el­ry. The cross, giv­en dur­ing Bap­tism, does not need to be tak­en out for gen­er­al inspec­tion, because its pri­ma­ry task is to pro­tect a per­son, not to show one’s 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 man­i­fests itself.

Psy­chol­o­gists claim that peo­ple from the poor­er stra­ta of the pop­u­la­tion usu­al­ly try to dis­play large gold­en body cross­es. So they try to draw atten­tion to them­selves, believ­ing that gold can­not be hid­den under clothes. In this way, the church attribute ceas­es to be a pro­tec­tion for its own­er, turn­ing into an ordi­nary orna­ment made of pre­cious met­al.

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

The same can be advised to women who are going to a par­ty or any enter­tain­ment insti­tu­tion. 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 it is not nec­es­sary to leave it at home in any case. By the way, this is exact­ly what many believ­ers did dur­ing the times of the Sovi­et Union, when the church was offi­cial­ly banned.

What he should be

There is a fair­ly com­mon opin­ion that the four-point­ed cross is unique to Catholi­cism. In fact, Ortho­doxy rec­og­nizes all of them: quad­ran­gu­lar, octag­o­nal, with and with­out the image of Jesus. At the same time, the mate­r­i­al used for pro­duc­tion is diverse. It is desir­able only to attach spe­cial impor­tance to the prop­er­ties of a cer­tain per­son. For exam­ple, there are peo­ple in whom sil­ver prod­ucts can cause dark­en­ing of the skin. There is noth­ing wrong with this — such a per­son just needs to choose a cross made of a dif­fer­ent mate­r­i­al.

The main thing that dis­tin­guish­es a real body cross from a dec­o­ra­tive one is its sanc­ti­fi­ca­tion before wear­ing. If it is pur­chased in a shop at the church, there is no need to wor­ry about it — you are guar­an­teed to buy a pre-con­se­crat­ed cross. It is desir­able to con­se­crate a prod­uct from a jew­el­ry store in the church — this process takes only a cou­ple of min­utes.