A short stay at Father Liviu Brânzaș’s icon
Twelve were chosen to follow Him for three years, once they had been called, sharing with Him labour, hardship, scorn and every kind of privation. And one of them was found to betray Him, hastening His Passion and Crucifixion.
He said to the Apostles: “Take the Holy Spirit; whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; whose sins you retain, they are retained”. And “go and preach My Gospel to all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”… The time will come when everyone who kills you will think he is offering a sacrifice to God…”. “In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”
And here we are today, prey to all the storms, to the doubts, to the hatred of those who cried, “Take Him, take Him, crucify Him! They multiply like weeds. We, frightened, look everywhere, waiting for liberation to come from somewhere.
But through all the filthy dust that now seems to rule the world, there is still, rarely, an angel of God. Here and there a Saint gathers the glittering shards from the mists of all the skies, and gathers the holy, holy gifts of Christ, and lifts them up to heaven, to our joy and the helpless groaning of the minions of hell.
From the treatise on the priesthood of St. John Chrysostom to the happy confessors of our own day, a flood of praise has been written by the ministers of the Holy Mysteries, and it will never cease. But it is hardly harder to speak well of the passing through the world and the living among us of a Saint of God than of the fall of one or another. And this applies to all areas of life.
Therefore, with amazement, humility and joy in our hearts, we will recall in these few lines the life among us of Christ’s chosen one, our father, Liviu Brânzaș.
We also knew him in the hellish halls of the prisons of the enemies of the Lord Jesus. An angel among us, gnawed by hunger, sickness, weakness and despair, we knew the seraphic one, touched by the wings of angels, silent, with a virginal timidity in everything, like a Mary of Bethany, collecting the precious honey that was left in a few chalices here and there among us. Then, having returned to his own, he gave all his energy, dedicating his life to the full service of Christ the Saviour, adding talent after talent to the gifts he had received. Those who had the good fortune to see him serve, to hear him confess the Lord, to read the few lines he wrote in praise of the Cross, could count themselves among the blessed of these dark times.
Like a good shepherd, taking care of his sheep, their stable, protecting them from the wolves that howled around them, our brother, the priest Liviu Brânzaș, sacrificed his peace, his rest, his health, his life, which now needed a little care. Untiringly, like an apostle of our time, he gave an unspeakable beauty to his zeal for the house of the Lord, for the spiritual pasture that he tended.
All that we would say here now pales in comparison with the beauty of his words, of the way of his work, of the one who, with or without time, watched over the life of his flock. Therefore, we will not seek, we will not dwell on his deeds and achievements, which others will surely undertake, but we will pray – this we will do, this we can do – that his name may be remembered up there in the courts of heaven for which he so longed, and through him that we too may be granted the place of those eternal blessings.
(Dr. Nae Nicolau – Rost Magazine, No. 31, September 2005)