Akathist threads at a tearful meeting
Years ago, in an early spring, in one of the villages of Hunedoara, forgotten by the world (but not by its vicissitudes), I met a priest. A servant of Christ, in the truest sense of the word. I had heard people speak of Father Crăciun Opre with great suspicion and respect. I had noticed him, very discreetly and until then, on various spiritual occasions, serving or retiring somewhere to pray in silence… Now I was looking for him to tell me something about his development, what he was hiding behind his always disarming serenity and joy.
He was reluctant to talk. Especially when the subject of his years in prison came up. For a few hours, we drove around the winding hills of Cinciș, we spent some time praying and singing in the village church, he took me to ancient dwellings, to the fairytale lands of the Dacians and Romans, to ancient customs and traditions that he had also discovered here and there during his years as a shepherd in these settlements steeped in history. In the church, for a while, he dressed himself in the priestly robes that he had inherited from generations, white robes like tears, with Dacian motifs and incrusted with national and spiritual ethnicity. In those moments Father was truly transfigured, he was the undeniable transparency of Christ among men!
It was late in the evening when we returned home and Father – who was “only 19 years old, as he confessed to me with overwhelming cheerfulness” – began to tell me stories… Some he asked me to forget. Others I’d rather use after he’d gone to be with the Lord. […]
This man of God spent almost ten years of his life in communist prisons, undergoing the most terrible tortures, the most terrible trials, for the sake of confessing Christ. He was one of the few survivors of the “Pitești experiment”, the diabolical formula of mutual extermination of prisoners, guinea pigs of sick minds, thirsty for blood and death. Listening to him, I wondered – and still wonder – how many such fates had to be brought to their knees, what hellish torment had to be exorcised, so that we could listen to their stories today. However stumbling their ascent, these people have stored up torrents of love, if they can now look at the world around them with open hearts and clear eyes, if they have been able to forgive enough to survive the world to which they have been returned at a rather late stage…
Father Crăciun gave me the altar of the Romanian saints in prison at the end of the meeting, after a discussion that lasted several hours and continued into the sunset. A priest and an akathist. Or a priest and an akathist. An akathist and a martyr of the prisons, commemorated in this akathist… Prayer and prayer. With a face full of emotion, he told me about a colleague of his who, after many years in prison, after having been subjected to countless tortures, each more inhuman than the last, was called in by the investigators and, in the presence of his wife, whom he had not seen for so long, was offered release. The only condition for his release was that he stop going to church. The prisoner thanked them for their intention to release him and asked to be returned to his cell. For him, freedom could not be outside the church. He was trampled on, beaten all over and returned to his cell.
Fragments of an akathist testimony of a people who seem to be increasingly forgetting how to exercise their freedom. And, at the same time, the noose of God’s love for this nation.
As long as people of his stature remain among us, God is still waiting in our midst! God still wants to dine “in this house” of our nation, called to the dawn of eternity. But on one condition: that we do not once again bury our ancestors in oblivion. In our daily insensitivity and ignorance, in the daily prayer of our daily instability.
(Romeo Petrașciuc – Father Christmas Opre. Confessor with a name of celebration, Agnos Publishing House, 2014)