A crusader’s journey from dungeon to shrine

…Fr. Liviu Brânzaș ran away from external relationships, looking for another self in his invisible being. We were able to get closer to each other and reach a correspondence of souls. We didn’t know then what life would bring us, what God’s plan was. The desire to get closer to Him, to feel Him alive in our being, gave us the opportunity to share our moods and longings towards the summit of the Cross, which we wanted to climb without murmuring. The appetite he had for the act of spiritual knowledge gave me the opportunity, as in Târgșor, to take from my bag the sacred gifts with which the Paternity, the Philokalia and all the other works of the Holy Fathers had filled me, and to place them on the table of his thirsty soul.

Two or three months passed quickly. The separation brought Liviu Brânzaș greater and more beautiful spiritual gains on the divine level: Fr. Stăniloae, Fr. Ioan, Fr. Ioan Ageu, Fr. Ioan de Vladimirești and other spiritual teachers whom God had purposely sent to the dungeon, educated him in the spirit of the ancestral Orthodoxy.

I was to learn with great joy that the myrrh of the priesthood had descended on his head ‘like the dew of Hermon on Mount Zion’.

(Virgil Maxim, Hymn to the Cross Bearer. Abecedar duhovnicesc pour un frate de cross, 2nd edition, Antim Publishing House, Bucharest, 2002, p. 333)