“About the true prayer, which must never end” – interview with Fr. Roman Braga
Father Archimandrite Roman Braga is a Romanian Orthodox monk, different from all other monks for the simple reason that he did not live the monastic life in a hermitage or a monastery, and he did not know any other cell than the cell of the communist prisons, but above all the “upper cell of the heart”!
And if monasticism means living in Christ, Father Roman lived it to the fullest throughout his life, thanks to the humility, piety and love of God that he always possessed, qualities and virtues that he acquired both from his family and especially from the monks of Condrița Monastery in northern Bessarabia, where he was born and grew up on 2 April 1922. Later he was a resident of the monastery of Căldărușani and then a student seminarian at the monastery of Cernica, near Bucharest, where he was always close to Saint Hierarch Calinic – the spiritual patron of the monastery – which houses his holy relics!
When this school closed, he was transferred to the Central Seminary in Bucharest and spent his last year at the Theological Seminary in Chisinau. Returning to Bucharest, between 1943 and 1947 he attended both the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy and the Theological Institute.
In 1948 he was arrested for helping a legionnaire. Sent to Pitești, he underwent all the horrors of “re-education”, but in the darkness of his cell he found the light of language and reconciliation with God. From Pitești he was sent to the “Canal” camps. There he met the monk Evghenie Hulea, a paternal figure, according to Father Roman’s testimony, who led him to enter monasticism for good. He was released in 1954, but was forced to live in Bucharest, and it was under these conditions that he secretly went to Iași, where the Metropolitan of Moldavia, Sebastian Rusan, ordained him a monk and a deacon, and here – in the Metropolitan Cathedral – he did good work, especially with young people.
In 1959 he was arrested again, investigated for a year and found guilty on imaginary charges, so that he was finally placed in the “Burning Bush” group at the Antim Monastery – where he had been a colleague during his student years with Fathers Sofian Boghiu, Petroniu Tănase, Nicolae Bordașiu and Metropolitan Antonie Plămădeală of Ardeal. This was followed by the Jilava prison, the Balta Brăilei labour colony, the camps in the Danube Delta, with severe restrictions but at the same time with an elite society: Fathers Benedict Ghiuș, Grigorie Băbuș, Sofian Boghiu, Dosoftei Moraru, Țiț Moldovan, Felix Dubneac, the famous professor Tudor Popescu, the man of culture Petre Pandrea and others. Sentenced to 18 years of hard labour, he worked until 1964, when he was released on 31 July on the occasion of the general amnesty for political prisoners.
From then on, the long pilgrimage of the hieromonk Roman Braga began throughout the country, known by all, but also banned by all because “he had a tin hat on his tail”!
It does not follow, however, that all the “inspectors” of the cults were bald. So it was that in 1964, God brought one of the “good ones” to the Bishop of Oradea – Valerian Zaharia – who gave him permission to ordain him a priest, an event that took place with God’s blessing in 1965!…
On 1 January 1985, he was installed as a priest in Negrești – Oaș, where he began an intense pastoral-missionary and catechetical activity, on Sundays at Vespers – with children and young people, so that the people of Oaș surrounded him with love, and even the secret police, for fear of the faithful, did not dare to intervene in his face. Then he was transferred to Sârbi-Bihor and later, in 1968, he was called to the Patriarchate and sent as a missionary to Brazil. In 1972, the Roman Bishop of the USA – Valerian Trifa – called him to the Vatră, where he worked as Abbot and Confessor of the Monastery of the Ascension of the Lord, and from 1988 he retired to the Monastery of the Assumption of the Mother of God in Rives Junction, Michigan, USA.
However, only the first layer of Father Roman’s life has been highlighted. His spiritual core is to be found in the years of his spiritual formation in the monastery of his childhood in Condrița Basarabia, then in the years of his intellectual formation in the seminaries and in the two prestigious high schools in Bucharest, during his student years, with the elite of the Romanian Christian intelligentsia that belonged to the “Burning Bush” group, but especially during the period of his spiritual development and perfection by his spiritual mentor – the monk Evghenie from “Canal”! …
Any human honour that could be given to the Father for the spirituality of his holiness sounds strange, because his life, totally offered to God, can only be honoured by the blessing of the One for Whom he offered himself!…
This life and this activity are praiseworthy! Thanks to these wonderful people, Christian spirituality has endured. We of today, caught up in the problems and difficulties we face, are not sufficiently aware of the importance of the testimony they gave to Jesus Christ!
It seems to me that for the younger generations, who have not experienced the horrors of communism, these testimonies do not say much. We are convinced that if we still have a serious spirituality today, it is thanks to these good and wonderful elders, among whom Father Archimandrite Roman Braga is one! And in order to make use of Father Roman’s teaching from a spiritual point of view, we have undertaken, with his consent, love and blessing, to carry out a heartfelt interview, for which I thank him in a special way.
In this way, while going through the life, the work, the activity and the biography of this improved Father, I note with amazement and admiration the strength of character and the verticality with which this contemporary of ours was endowed, before whom we are nothing more than men subject to the times of this century!
– Your Holiness Archimandrite Roman Braga, today’s propaganda in favour of the normalisation of certain sins and passions has profoundly negative consequences and effects on the soul and spiritual life of young people, even more than the propaganda of atheism during the communist regime. What measures and solutions do you think should be taken and adopted in order to minimise the number of victims of so-called democracy?
– This is an interesting question, and I have been asked it on other occasions, and as I said then, I will answer you now, that you should ask the state government (where you work) about it. Know that young people are not to be blamed for living in this decadent civilisation and culture. Do not think that the time we are living in now is very different from other times in the history of Christianity and that others were privileged, happy and lucky to have lived in another time and we are very unfortunate to be living in this time. What I can say is, don’t expect anything concrete from the schools. As you know, I live in a country where people educate their children at home until they enter college.
Of course, the regime only allows exams to be given without the teacher seeing the child in class during the school year. In America, many people shy away from public schools. In the state of Michigan, where I live, a quarter of the children don’t go to school until they go to college or university. Who can teach children more and better and who is more interested in their morals than the parents, of course, if they are responsible people. I don’t know, I haven’t heard about this homeschooling system being made official in Romania.
Did you know that in the United States of America there is an association of young people who have vowed to remain virgins until marriage? They wear a badge that says: only my wife or only my husband. They are well organised, they organise conferences and dances or different shows and actions, but they are people who want to show and demonstrate that man is not an animal and that it is possible to live in abstinence and continence.
In other words, if a child is brought up and educated to say no to evil, he will succeed in overcoming spiritual obstacles and temptations. Of course, the tensions and pressures are great, but the compulsion of the devil has always been great. The young person must be taught not to covet what the other has, that is, not to covet the possessions of his neighbour. The other one has a certain computer, I want one too. Well, this kind of thinking destroys man, it cultivates envy and selfishness. The young man must have the strength of mind and the courage to say no. To what? Not to the sin he sees on the street, but to say no to himself.
Because it is much harder to say no to yourself, to your sins, your passions, your selfish and possessive desires. This is the education that needs to be done. It was never done in school. It’s what parents do at home. You don’t impose and you don’t preach, because they’re all tired of preaching and speeches and all that sort of thing. You take him by the hand and take him to church, you kiss the icon, he kisses it, you take him to confession and Communion, you confess and take Communion and then he does the same.
When you have the presence of God in you, you are in a state of prayer. Then man becomes prayer.
– Dear Father Archimandrite, what should we do to love God more, to feel Him closer to us?
– We have to talk to Him constantly. You have to feel God in you, not outside you, on the outside, but inside you, in your heart, because our heart is unlimited, infinite, because Jesus Christ shines in it since Baptism. Man has infinite dimensions of his personality, in depth, in profundity, without limit, in other words, the human person is eternal. In the depths of us there is God, as the holy Apostle Paul often says: “You are the Church of the living God”. So let us not divert or direct our prayer to a corner or in a corner, because God is not material or spatial to put Him in a corner and say: there is God! Go down into yourself and address your prayer to God in your heart and you will feel His presence!
Know that the dialogue, the conversation with God creates and brings you this feeling and sense of God’s presence. Tell God when you are hungry, when you are thirsty, tell Him that you are going to Bucharest or Oradea, where you have to work, tell Him something on the way, show God how beautiful the landscape is, how beautiful the flowers or the nature is. Talk to God about anything and everything. God, what should I do, how should I do it? Look, I have to do this and that; I’m hungry, I’m going to eat a piece of bread or drink a glass of water… You still have these things in your mind, they seem childish and childish at first glance, but this conversation with God turns into prayer. For what is prayer? It is a permanent and continuous communication between man and God, in the most natural way.
Think of what St. Paul says in his epistle to the Thessalonians: “Pray without ceasing”. How could he pray without ceasing, without interruption, when he was a very active person? He started so many churches, wrote so many epistles, preached “in season and out of season”, did and had to do so many things all the time. He couldn’t, he couldn’t be on his knees all the time. That’s what he was thinking about: always having a sense of God’s presence in his heart. In fact, the Holy Fathers define prayer in this way: as the feeling of God’s presence. Prayer is not just reading from a book. Young people need to be told this. It’s not just when you pray in the morning and, voila, you’re done. Or you say, “Oh, I haven’t finished my prayer”. Well, prayer is never to be finished.
That’s OK, talk to God childishly, because we are God’s children. And this childish conversation with God brings a sense of God’s familiar, intimate presence in your heart. You know the monastic saying, often quoted by Father Theophilus Paraian, that “if you pray only when you pray, you are not really praying”. If you have the presence of God in you, then you are, you are in a state of prayer. Man becomes a prayer. Man has a state of prayer, not moments of prayer, moments of praying and moments of not praying. That would be terrible and terrifying. So we have to have the feeling of God all the time. When you say “Lord”, be convinced and sure that God is turning towards you and is waiting for you to say something to Him. When you’re busy, pay attention to what you’re doing. If you’re in conversation, think about what you’re saying. But if you have a little time, there, a few minutes, or even in conversation with people, you can say: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!”; “Lord Jesus Christ, look at us, help us!” or “Bless these people, Lord!
God does not need our defence, He needs our love.
– Dear Father Roman, some Orthodox go (also) to Catholics or Protestants, or even to various Monophysite branches, and pray with them. Your Holiness, what do you think, is this right and good?
– Personally, I do not agree with those who go and pray with Catholics or those who, instead of coming to their Church, go to Protestants, Monophysites or other places. The Holy Fathers stop us and forbid us to pray with heretics or schismatics, but we are obliged to pray for them. Let us also pray for the Christianisation of Muslims or Jews. It is even necessary to educate children and young people to pray that they may come to the right faith, that is, to believe in the Holy Trinity, to believe in Jesus Christ the Saviour – as God and Man – and to pray for all those who have strayed from the true faith. We must not hate those of other faiths, we must not go out into the streets and argue with any of them: so it is with you, so it is with us and beyond. A gesture or a fact like that has no effect, no good result. But pray for them. In fact, we do not persuade or force anyone to be a Christian. You see, here we are in America and we baptise many.
In America there is an Evangelical current that is always baptising, and Orthodoxy is growing very much here. Baptists have universities, Methodists have universities, colleges, high schools, they are educated, educated, intelligent people. They read a lot, they respect and venerate the Holy Fathers. One of them, who is now an Orthodox convert, told me: “I have seen the Holy Liturgy described in the Second Apology of St. Justin the Martyr and Philosopher, and I have seen in the Apostolic Constitutions how they talk about the Holy Mysteries, how to do Baptism, Wedding, Marriage, the Unction. Then I asked myself: when exactly did all this disappear from us? We don’t have them. Are we in the Church in this way or not? It’s interesting that this man and many others didn’t stop with the Catholics or anywhere else, but came to us because they found that the primary, apostolic and one Church is here in Orthodoxy.
– Yes, I understand that they even brought whole communities to Orthodoxy…
– That’s right, whole parishes have come to us. In Chicago we have two parishes that have become Orthodox, with pastors and everything. Two thousand people were baptised in one day. The whole group that worked to educate students in American universities, a group of evangelicals called Campus Ministry, are all Orthodox today. They even made a film called “Come Back Home”, when you see it you start to cry. They all take Holy Communion from the spoon for the first time and tears start running down their cheeks. Love the heterodox. You can’t convince him by talking, only the Holy Spirit can convince him and bring him to the truth. St. John the Theologian shows us that if we love one another, God is among us. Only God can persuade and win someone over. We see that our Lord Jesus Christ did not hate his enemies, He loved them and rebuked them even from the cross. I recommend that in all our individual prayers we pray not only for ourselves and our family, but also for all those who are not Orthodox. The face of God is in all people. Consider the phenomenon and religious revolution in China.
There are, according to the latest statistics, about one hundred and thirty million Christians, so the government cannot control them, it is impossible. Africa is a Christian continent. They are leaving Mohammedanism with all the persecution that is there. Christians are multiplying very fast in Africa. From here, from us in America, a group of students went on a mission to Madagascar. Numerically, we Orthodox are also growing and developing on the island of Madagascar. There is a black metropolitan there, Acunda. Africa has its black metropolitans, bishops, all under the ecclesiastical obedience of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria – the historic Patriarchate, has theological schools and seminaries in Kenya, in Nairobi and in Uganda. So Christians are multiplying here too. Of course, Catholics and Protestants are going in parallel – they are doing very serious missions there, but I want to say that Africa is no longer a wild continent.
There are phenomena in the world that show us that the Holy Spirit is at work. We don’t have to hate anybody, even if some people hate God and the true faith. God does not need our defence, He needs our love. And our love for God goes through the person, even if that person is your enemy or even if he is (also) God’s enemy, he needs even more, all the more, the love of Christians.
Young people must understand that without God’s help, nothing can go well in a family.
– Dear Father, when is the right time for a man to get married? Before or after the age of twenty-five? Many people today say that if they marry too early, they are wasting their youth.
Jesus Christ, the defender of life – It depends on many factors… You get married when you are mature. Some get married at twenty-five, others never. Some are still immature at forty. Marriage is a big responsibility. Today, more than ever, we need to emphasise maturity. I don’t recommend marriage to those who want to continue having fun after marriage and abort their children. Worse still, to take contraceptives and all sorts of other such drugs. At least women who have had one or two abortions can fully confess, but those who take pills don’t even know how many they have killed.
Divorce is also a disaster. When you get married, you make a sacrifice. Marriage is a cross that needs to be embraced. Love is not sex, it is not instinct or physical pleasure, love is what the same holy Apostle Paul says in the 13th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians: it endures all things, it bears all things, it is not jealous, love does not seek its own but the other’s…. Love never falls. This is true love and love that can die for someone. If a young man is not able to die for a girl, she should not marry him.
Priests must take care of the education of young people who are going to marry. Marriages should be announced in church three Sundays before. During these three weeks, the priest should meet the future spouses several times and talk to them about children, the meaning of marriage, the love that should exist between a husband and wife, and other matters related to marriage. The priest knows these things from his own experience, because he too is married, has a wife, children, in a word, a family. In America, if young people don’t announce their marriage a month or two in advance, they don’t even get married. Here, all the denominations have marriage classes. Orthodox marriage classes have their own specificity, they don’t fit in with all the other heterodox teachings. Young people need to understand that things cannot go well in a family without God’s help.
They need to be shown what a Christian family is, that there is a need for abstinence and prayer. These things need to be passed on to young people. If they are ignored or neglected, they can get married at sixteen or thirty, because they are just as unprepared, because no one has taken care of them to teach them, to prepare them. And that’s how divorces and abortions happen. I am glad that in Romania there are organisations and foundations that fight against abortion. In America, millions of people are involved in this struggle. On 22 January, there will be demonstrations against abortion in all the cities of the USA. A million people gathered at the White House, the President came out and spoke to them; whether he agreed with the practice of abortion or not, he had to speak to them.
Without spiritual freedom, you can’t taste external freedom.
– Dear Father Roman Braga, in a different order of ideas, during communism you were imprisoned because you belonged to the “Burning Bush” spiritual movement, which you once said frightened the communist rulers more than all the resistance centres in the Carpathians. What were the most difficult and painful moments of your prison life? But also the most beautiful and most uplifting?
– Looking back now, I can say that prison was a blessing. Of course there were hard times. But we will never have the moments of intimacy with God that we had in prison. When they wanted to spur us on Good Friday, which was a general rule in Romanian prisons, they gave us cane to eat and we refused, we gave them back the mesh tins, untouched, full. It was a very beautiful moment for us. On Easter night and Easter day they gave us sour cabbage with water, because they were very cynical, they wanted to make fun of us and our faith. When they put you in prison for three days for singing a carol, you felt happy.
We didn’t have those good moments in freedom. Of course there were all kinds of people in prison. Whoever was good on the outside was good in prison. And vice versa. Prison brought some people closer to God, gave them a better heart. There, if you had God in your heart and inside you, you didn’t suffer, you weren’t affected or compromised. There I saw intellectuals who had fallen, poor people who had compromised themselves definitively and irrevocably; I also saw simple peasants who did not even know how to repent, but who had an incredible beauty of soul and strength of character. I understood then and there what true, authentic culture is and what it is, I understood that it is not made up of this formal information.
You know, there were very beautiful moments in prison. The tragedy came when I saw our intellectuals fall. In Jilava, I sat with some ministers and I thought how these people could lead the country, with such smallness of soul and character, that there, poor people, they put brass on their faces, they told everything. I saw a general who stole onions from a peasant’s head because he couldn’t stand the hunger. Prison was an extraordinary school, a spiritual school. Physical suffering didn’t matter, even in Pitești, although here we all wanted to die, just to escape the torture of re-education. But they didn’t even allow us to die, they took everything away from us, all the instruments with which we could harm ourselves. Because their idea was that you don’t die until you get dirty, until you tell them, you don’t die until you compromise yourself. And once you’ve compromised yourself, you can die, it’s all the same.
This phenomenon, unfortunately, was not only in prison, but is still present today outside of prisons, in the post-communist world, in Romania and in America. Because the devil wants us to compromise ourselves, to become spiritually defiled, and then we can die, all together. In communist prisons they used to tell us: ‘We won’t let you go home until you compromise yourself. That when you come out you will not be heroes, but cowards, and then people will spit you out into the street”. It’s the same in society today. The person who sins does not feel good about himself, and under these conditions he wants to draw others into sin and passion, as a kind of justification and pretext for his conscience, which rebukes him.
– How did you feel when you were deprived of your freedom in prison?
– It must be emphasised and supported that the truly free person is the one whom our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ sets free. Because physical, external freedom does not matter; you cannot (re)feel this external freedom if you do not have the internal, inner freedom. All the time you were in prison, praying and talking to God, you didn’t even feel the walls. Remember that true freedom is spiritual freedom. Without spiritual freedom, and I want to emphasise this fact, you cannot taste outer freedom. If you are not free from sin, if you are the slave of your passions, your sins, the slave of sexuality, of greed, of the love of silver, of pride and envy or selfishness, if you are the slave of fleshly pleasures, you can have as much external freedom as you want, but you will remain a slave forever. That is why we must worship all our lives in spirit and in truth, that is, the Saviour Jesus Christ – the Lord and the Truth, who will make us free forever and ever, because He is the Way, the Truth and the Life!
– Dear Father Abbot, thank you for everything, and please remember us all in your prayers!
– May God help us! With much joy!…
(Stelian Gomboș – Basarabian personalities)