Aiud

This is where I stayed the longest… and this is where God’s grace fell upon me. The grace of the Holy Spirit, by the will of the Father and the Son and with the help of the Blessed Virgin, descended upon His unfaithful servant and revealed to me the Kingdom of Heaven. In various fragments, I will present events, phenomena or, to put it more modestly, revelations (if God permits it and if it is not too bold to say so, for which, if I am wrong, I ask Him to forgive me).

Much of what I am about to say was written in a notebook 15 years ago, immediately after my release, but it was confiscated by Securitate[1].

All that I experienced and was revealed to me in prison is still hidden in eternity[2] and can be discovered by others if they have similar experiences to mine. For the gift of seeing was given to me, but it was also taken away from me, for after my release from prison my life descended to the ordinary level of the common people.

I must mention that at that time, in Aiud, a number of poems were passed from mouth to mouth by those who could remember them for posterity. For example, one of the first poems I heard from other prisoners was the poem The Boar with Silver Fangs[3] by Ștefan Augustin Doinaș (1922-2002)[4].

In prison I also listened to poems by Nichifor Crainic (1898-1972) and others by Radu Demetrescu Gyr (1905-1975)[5], admirably conceived and perfectly in stylistic harmony[6].

With the poet Ion Caraion (1923-1986)[7] , whose real name was Ion Diaconescu, I worked side by side in the Cavnic mine in Maramureș, sharing our thoughts and literary intentions.

I recited to him, among other things, my poem Angel. Ion Caraion was a frail man, with a sensitive nature and particularly rebellious towards injustices, from which he suffered greatly. After his release from prison, however, he managed to publish several volumes of poetry of a different nature.

I, on the other hand, gave up all literary activity, waiting for the miracle of a change that would come, however late it might be[8].

Poems, thoughts and news, both in the mine and in Aiud, were transmitted orally, using the Morse alphabet, for which the walls were not an insurmountable obstacle.

In particular, prayers, texts from the Gospels and the Apocalypse, and words and vocabulary from various foreign languages were transmitted from cell to cell. Some parts of the Mass were taught from outside by priests or theological students.

I remember the priest Marcu [Ștefan] from Vranzee, who celebrated Holy Liturgy on Sundays, with all the risks that this entailed, and who had served more than 20 years in prison when he was released in 1964.

I was in the same cell with him and with the late priest Lazarov from Dobrogea.

I cannot forget an assistant priest from the Theological Institute, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, who amazed us with his accumulation of dates and texts, which he knew by years and chapters.

I myself learnt chapters of the Holy Gospel, the Psalms, three Acathists, the Roman Catholic Rosary and dozens of prayers which I repeated almost every day. Above all, however, I was preoccupied with the Isisha prayer, which I repeated incessantly. “Pray without ceasing,” the words of St Paul, were the principle of my life from which I did not deviate.

A professor of physics at the Atomic Institute in Bucharest, who had also been arrested, told me that energy in a closed circuit is conserved and not lost. Consequently, I found the following in the practice of the hesychast prayer, which I did by making the sign of the cross over my heart, from top to bottom and then across, and by saying, as I breathed in air, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,” and on exhaling: ”Have mercy on me, a sinner”. In time, the cross of light that had appeared in the place where I had marked my heart with the sign of the cross and said the prayer, became two circles that crossed each other, keeping the sign of the cross at their point of intersection. Later the circles of divine light became a sphere. It accelerated the way I prayed the prayer and it went from the continuous inhaling and exhaling of the air and saying the prayer in two parts, to the pulse and rhythm of my heart with the sign of the cross sparkling in it.

At first I followed[9] the sphere within which a divine universe was developing. In time, however, the spheres multiplied and became glued together like a honeycomb, and in the spaces between them there was a content of divine heaven which was discovered to be in inner unity with that of the spheres. From then on, I saw the clouds of the creation of divine light in transparent colours, ever more subtle, ever more pure, sometimes emanating a heavenly musical harmony.

Once and only once, while praying to the Blessed Virgin, I heard the voice of the Mother of God singing the Lord’s Prayer in a short divine fragment. 

I saw auroras opening and covering the universe with divine light, I saw the city of the New Jerusalem with its 12 gates. I saw stairs on which angels descended to earth or ascended to heaven, as in Jacob’s ladder.

Many times I have seen the spiritual images of a road that speeds up and stops at a certain point in the Kingdom of Heaven, where I am covered by crowns that rotate, as in Dante’s Paradise[10].

At first I did not know what these crowns meant, but later it was revealed to me that they were made up of angels, some of them, and others of saints.

Their colour, harmony and tranquillity were magnificent…and my feeling was raised to the highest as I saw them pass through my expanded spiritual self, now merged with the background of these divine worlds.

Praying to the Apostle Paul, I had the revelation of vaults of light blue, like the vaults of churches, multiplying, enlarging and expanding, encompassing the universe.

Praying to St. George[11] I had a vision of a temple never before seen, meticulously crafted and adorned, of light red.

The colour of the temple of St. Dumitru[12] was light green.

One Friday, holding a black fast and praying to St. Paraschiva[13], I saw nuns dressed in black, but their faces and hands were white as snow. At first I was afraid that this vision might be demonic… But in time I became convinced of its truth, because it had repeated itself on other Fridays, and it had uplifted me.

With difficulty I learned to distinguish, even on my own, what was of a divine nature and what was of a negative, demonic nature. I knew them by their fruits. Anything that made me feel uncomfortable, or that had a milky, impure colour, even if it looked white but was not evil, was of a negative nature.

In this way, I was later able to distinguish between the blood beast and the grey beast of human intelligence.

I return to the presentation of the framework aspects… I fought a constant battle with the demonic forces, which first came upon me to strike me down, and on the other hand I fought incessantly to obtain more divine light, more grace to flood me.

And in the end, my Lord Jesus Christ made His altar and His throne and His kingdom out of my heart and my being.

I confess that in the end, through the purity of my heart, through virginity, the Blessed Virgin, to whom I was colder, came closer to me and brought me even closer to Her Son, whom I had always loved and for whom I could weep and truly love Him, there, in prison, in Aiud, and for whom I wanted to die glorifying Him, as the crowning of my love for Him.

I tended to receive light and the possibility of entering spiritually into the Kingdom of Heaven, which finally descended into my heart, with me in it and it in me.

We too can live, in our heart, in the Kingdom of Heaven, when our body and soul become an altar to Jesus Christ our God.

I have felt and seen spiritually, in the divine light, through my boundless love for the Son, and to this end and for this purpose I have daily directed my power, my will, to interrupt the course of the imagination, the flow of thoughts and reflections, of my sensibility, except those directed towards the light of the world, to achieve the so-called death of the will, but the awakening of the heart in Jesus Christ, to strip myself of all that is human, worldly, and to remain in the love of Christ and in the pure, divine light, a living mirror without content or form, a pure spiritual presence of the Self beyond thought and imagination.

And I came to live and to feel, to see how it springs forth, how a new existence emerges out of itself, a point, a zone of reception. I found that this spiritual self could be wounded, distracted, darkened by the slightest mistake or slip into thoughts and other feelings.

I usually thought and interpreted what was revealed to me without any intervention on my part, only after the visionary state, the ecstatic state, had ceased.

Then[14] I was tempted by the nature of human nature to investigate what I saw, to search for meanings, meanings according to my human, historical mentality, to which we are organically linked by belonging to the universal creation.

For when our purified ego has made contact with the Infinite and the Spiritual Eternal, our thinking and our spiritual being are constantly diversifying and multiplying, tending towards the Infinite.

The living spirit is in constant change and elevation, striving towards perfection, i.e. towards the Divine, and it ceases only in joy and complete silence, which dissolves time, space and form, becoming itself creative and above them, master of is and is not[15].

For God alone is master of the existential state. I am not speaking now of matter and nothingness in the order of universal material existence, but of nothingness and existence in the spiritual order, of Master over Being and Non-Being, as God is.

(The complete writings of Blessed Elijah the Seer of God and his life, commented by his disciple and son in the Lord, Pr. Dr Dorin Octavian Picioruș. Vol. I, Theology for Today, Bucharest, 2010, pp. 292-297)

[1] Manuscript about which we know nothing.

[2] That is to say, they are eternal realities of divine light and not purely subjective experiences, i.e. non-realistic from an ecstatic point of view.

[3] You can find it here online: http://www.romanianvoice.com/poezii/poezii/mistretul.php.

[4] See: http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Etefan_Augustin_Doina%C5%9F

[5] Idem: http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radu_Gyr

[6] Poems by Radu Gyr: http://www.romanianvoice.com/poezii/poeti/gyr.php and here poems by Nichifor Crainic: http://www.romanianvoice.com/poezii/poeti/crainic.php

[7] See: http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Caraion. His poems can be found here: http://www.versuri-si-creatii.ro/poezii/c/ion-caraion-6zuhosd/

[8] That is, these lines were written before 1989.

[9] I concentrated in prayer on her, because the sphere of divine light appeared within her heart and she saw it with the eyes of her heart.

[10] As I also read in Dante. More about Dante Alighieri here: http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri.

[11] St. George the Great (April 23).

[12] Saint Great Martyr Dimitrios (26 October).

[13] Most Holy Paraskeva (14 October).

[14] Post-extatic.

[15] Master of his existence and not a being subject to existence.