Aiud again – the last 4 years of the original 12

After the great hunger strike of 1956, Father Justin was sent back to Aiud for another four years.

“And here, my dears, when the moment of death was constantly before your eyes,[1] you were no longer interested in what life was like beyond the walls. For me, here was everything. When I entered Aiud’s cell for the second time, somewhere in the east, there was a small nut tree about the size of a finger, a plant, and when I came out (after four years) it had blocked all the glass and cast shadows on the walls.

For example, when I watched the administrative children’s game, I watched the children with great risk and sadness. All the offices were around the prison walls. When I watched the children’s games, I used to go back years and years, but at the same time I thought: they, how much distance there is between what we should be and what we are. I looked at the big picture. And I saw that our whole presence there is nothing but our sins and the sins of our nation. The Romanian people needed the sacrifice of a generation to strengthen themselves. To lose in the moment in order to gain in the long run. So we were the ones put there to carry the burden of a nation. And the more I went in and accumulated those years, 8-9, 12-14-15,16, the more I didn’t care about anything else. Everything that could intervene was like a gift from God: death or life. One more day was a gift of repentance from God.

All this spiritual preparation gave me a good orientation as to what I wanted to do with my life in the monastery, what was going on and how we should be organised and maintained so that we could really be a light, a unity and a common body against the darkness that rules our times, as the Apostle Paul says.

The cell was my only cell where I could say my monastic prayers in silence. (…)

For about 12 years I wore a cross at my boot. That’s where they found it. When they searched me, they took the boot off my left foot, took the cross and threw it on the doorstep and smashed it with the boot; it was a cross carved in bone. And they punished me for nine days in the cellar. They gave you 200 grams of salt water in the evening and a 100 gram piece of bread”.

(Fr. Justin Pârvu – Fr. Justin Pârvu and the Richness of a Life Given to Christ, Vol. I, edited by Hieromonk Teognost, Credința Strămoșească Publishing House, Iași, 2006, pp. 166-168)

[1] St. Basil the Great says that the greatest wisdom that protects man from all sin is the contemplation of death, and Saint Augustine teaches that “since we do not know the time and place where death awaits us, we shall expect it at any time and in any place”. (Saint Augustine)