“Archimandrite Benedict Ghiuș, an Orthodox of deep moral and spiritual purity”
There [in Balta Mare of Brăila] I had the opportunity to meet and get to know not the miner, as the Party would have liked, but Archimandrite Benedict Ghiuș, an Orthodox of deep moral and spiritual purity, but at the same time a theologian of great finesse and high erudition. To say that he was an improved monk – but how many are not today, especially when adulation becomes a perfidious form of survival, even in the humility of the Church – to say that he was erudite or dignified would be to risk noting trivialities.
Archimandrite Benedict – a name with many meanings (because Benedict is blessed, and Benedictus was the Latin monk who Christianised and settled the barbarians who had invaded or infiltrated Europe; that is why he was also proclaimed the patron saint of Europe), meanings that I saw fulfilled under the remembered and interiorised face of the one with whom, in that winter, as harsh as it was holy, I was cutting down trees and slopes for communion.
For many days I had watched him silently bear his loneliness and solitude as a retreat or as a prayer on the long march from the work colony to the forest. For if in summer we were working on the farm, on the drainage or on the silica dams, in winter it was as if we were in the Siberian tundra, where in the blizzard we were cutting down forests of willows, maples, poplars and birches. He was too reclusive for me to dare the impiety of rousing him to speak. All I did was to shift my position in my walking group to join him. So two prayers went side by side. When I slipped on the ice, he supported me; when he staggered with fatigue, I helped him. A word of thanks was a smile or an affectionate squeeze of the arm. At the head of the path, having reached the water and the forest, we took our places in the group and waited for the brigade leader to indicate the section to be cut. As the icy sun rose to a glassy zenith, we all waited for the second when the creaking of the sledge would announce the arrival of the cauldrons of soup and the boxes in which the porridge, cut into regular chunks, would nestle under the chill of the ice needles crunching between our teeth. We’d get the ladle, but we wouldn’t swallow it, it would upset our stomachs. When the steaming liquor of the bean soup was served, we carried the chunk in our breasts to tame its frost, at the cost of enduring a lump of frost protected by our bellies, sucked in by the fear of the cold as well as hunger. As we worked, the chunk crumbled into pieces, more easily catching a glimpse of our warmth, which it returned to us as we chewed. Archimandrite Benedict did the same, but his way was like a prayer, like communion, because for him the porridge was not given by the Party, nor by the generosity of the working class, of which he always reminded us. The archimandrite considered soup and porridge to be manna sent by God from heaven to the enslaved people, a gift of Providence without which we would not have survived there in the cold.
The receding distance between us was broken on a revelatory day when a tree, toppled by the axe’s bites, fell on me as I struggled to pull a huge white poplar bark, detached from its trunk, out of the swamp and onto dry ground. Like the other men, I heard the terrible roar of another aspen as it came crashing down on us; but the ice that I had to tread in a hurry broke under my boots or cut my knees as I faced it with them. The ice, which I had loved so much in Bucharest in the summer when I was a student, was now the unmistakable echo of the song that had lulled me in Malmaison, “To one shall perish the enemies of the people”, would not let me escape. The huge crown of the poplar caught me under it and embraced me unbendingly, like death. A Y-shaped branch caught my neck under its fork and broke through the ice to the ground, forcing me to stand with my weight on the back of my neck, mouth and nostrils in the water. The shock stunned me, and I had no time to live it lucidly, as I had so often wished, at the moment of death, to be as lucid, as conscious as ever, to repent of the evils of life, to ask a last pardon of merciful love. But the poplar and the ice resisted this intent of mine. I knew no more.
When I came to my senses, I was dry. The woodcutters pulled me out from under the tree. One of them was giving me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, another was untying my shirt and another was trying to pull off my water-soaked fluffy underpants. Then I heard ‘live’ from the one who was blowing into my mouth. Now he was slapping me. He begged me: “Get up, brother! Don’t let yourself die!” At the signs, first my ears woke up, for I could hear but see nothing; I felt myself being pulled and slapped, but everything was a blur. A love held my cheeks in its palms for warmth. But it wasn’t the palms that warmed me, it was the eyes, the eyes of Father Ghiuș, because he had revived me, he had breathed into my physical life and restored my spiritual life.
With his help I got back on my feet. An Orthodox, who of course had never been enslaved by the murderous love of Brother Cain, gave me back my life. Not by magic, as they say, but by a miracle I had recovered. I was suddenly the same as before, full of strength, but without cold. Instead of cold, I felt the warmth of St. Benedict.
While he helped me take off my wet shirt, others stopped to pull my wrinkled trousers over me. My home underwear was also wet, but the prisoners had not taken off my prison underpants, because in winter and in the cold the Party and the government provided underpants! Some of us blew into the fire, which also came to life, and another had the idea of taking a sledge from the back of the oxen and putting it on my back. Archimandrite Benedict took off his warm shirt so that I could put it on. The shirt had a soul. Another took off his puffer and I sat huddled by the fire, protected from the cold, with the bodies of the brothers gathered in a circle around me. The militiaman, too, seemed relieved that I had escaped with my life, that I would not be imputed to him, but he was also astonished at so much compassionate love lived against the fear he was supposed to assure us of; he was working the oxen, the kettles, which had been shaken to the last drop so that they would not be stolen by some enemy of the working class who could appear even in the Baltic from who knows where, for they too were given to us by the Party that thinks “everything”.
We were brought to the Baltic quagmire by the new spirit, which foresees everything and “rightly” expects that we will be set free and that there, through air, sun and activity – but not primarily through food and medicine sent from home, earned through work – we will acquire a face to go out into the world. It was in this spirit that the new working colonies, unlike the “canal” which was designed as an institution of death, mastered the process of the generous liberation of those who had opposed the noble ideals forged by the Party and who, although they were promised liberation, had no right to frost, beatings, curses, sticks and dogs!
Fearing that I would be held responsible for the lack of manpower entrusted to his guard, the militiaman called off work an hour early so that the entire human inventory could be handed over to the next shift. How would his “dossier”, the incriminating document, have looked if it had contained this “party line” negligence for not having organised work safety in the “best possible conditions” and if I had fallen under the fallen tree? But then my dismissal would be blamed on someone else.
But by the time all the scattered people had gathered in the piles, as the sun retreated into the shadows, the cold had sharpened its edge against our bodies. I was left in nothing but my Party underpants, and with them the cold. And Ghiuș, shirtless, was cold. My puffer and wrinkled trousers didn’t have much of a chance to keep me warm. The only solution left to the Samaritan Ghiuș was to warm me himself. He unbuttoned his fleece and, while I was crouching, he leaned over my shoulders and back, pulling a piece of corduroy from the oxen over both of us. The smell of the corduroy reminded me of the child who, in Bethlehem, under Joseph’s guidance and warmed by the oxen, was lying in a manger. I don’t know what warmed me more: the nostalgic memory of the manger as a child or the new Joseph-Benedict. I could feel the warmth between the two overlapping skins – my back and his belly – that gently warmed me.
– Stand up straight! Gather around and fall in! – Move under the sun! the fierce voice of the guard told us.
My friends dressed me quickly. My wellingtons were full of water. Crețu Traian, a young man from Bihor, emptied them and climbed through the trees like a monkey, trying to give them a swing to help them fall. He took off his shoes, put his warm ones on me and pulled on my cold ones. The oxen’s blanket warmed my body. He and Ghiuș took me by the armpits and carried me to the centre of the column. There, apparently, was something warmer: the walking heat generated by the column.
On repeated trips to work, from dawn until night, when we returned to the colony after 14 hours of work and two hours of marching, on the way to work or to the colony, holding each other by the arm, we walked asleep like a drunken column. That is how I was trained. When the dogs accompanied us, we were a little more awake; they would run up to us and grab us by the sleeves or the waistband. We didn’t dare hit them, lest we make them angry. This time the fleas were elsewhere. Luckily the pond was big and the dogs were few and far between! I didn’t wake from my nap until we were approaching the barbed wire of the colony. There, another pleasure. A guard informed his companion that we had an inspection from the Ministry. Another visit or inspection – I said to myself – with the inevitable parade step. But not this time. Or perhaps it’s the vigilance.
As we entered the colony, no one took any notice of the Ministry team. We made our way to the dormitories. I didn’t go to dinner, but went to bed, hoping for a Sunday when I could recover. Indeed I did recover after a… bitter sleep. The hut had no heating. The radiators or heaters were our own bodies. The Party had given us a blanket for every man, but what was a cold blanket that had been given to a reformatory in some barracks and then classified as “good for prisoners”? The cold in the dormitory forced us to sleep two to a bed, so we were wrapped in two blankets. In the cry of the wind, which, like all good things, came from the east, as a gift from our Sister Mothers, neither two blankets nor our bodies together could beat the frost. Then the undeniable ingenuity of the political prisoner intervened. On one of the blankets we spread out articles from the inventory of effects at our disposal: socks, handkerchiefs, towels, blankets, pullovers, pieces of paper sacks and whatever else we could find. All of this was to form a layer of air under the second blanket we laid on top. But somewhere we needed to lay down and dry our fluffy things, because they wouldn’t fly if we hung them on the headboard until we woke up. The solution was to put them over us too. At night, they produced a thick mist of steam from the water in the zebra and the puffballs, steam through which we could barely make out the light bulb hanging above the door. With this arsenal of heating we hoped to somehow make it through the night. […]
At the time of the morning porridge, Archimandrite Benedict, with a bowl of porridge filled with the gifts of his comrades, greeted me fraternally, priestly: “Christ in our midst!
– Is and will be, I replied, as it should be.
He, whom I had described as taciturn, turned out to be an affable and cheerful interlocutor. He did not let me tire of talking, but made a point of filling the time I had with reminiscences of his youth, with the thoughts that preoccupied him. How luminously he spoke! And how simple and humble!
I understood that he had finished his theological studies in Bucharest, then spent some time in a monastery, from where he was sent to study abroad. He had been in Strasbourg and Paris. He really wanted to go on pilgrimage to Lourdes. He stayed there for two weeks in the “Maison de Saint Thomas”, a hostel for monks and priests. He spent hours in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, the Holy Eucharist, in the great honour of pilgrimages to the grotto. He bathed in the small pools of cold water that flowed from the rock, asking that these waters, sanctified by the Virgin, enlighten his mind and help him to understand the work that God would ask of him. It is a long spiritual journey, marked by many inhibitions, but not by hesitation. I will share some of the thoughts and insights he shared with me.
“Beloved brother, I have followed you since you entered the colony with a name full of meaning for me, “The Garden”, almost a lifetime ago. I hoped it would be for you as it was for me, a mystical garden of thought and sacred growth, seeing you so often praying in silence. But I did not disturb you. I had all the time in the world.
The holy Apostle Philip once said: “Lord, show me the Father”, and he received this consoling answer: “He who has seen Me has seen the Father, for I am in the Father and the Father is in Me”. Saint Paul continues this thought: “Christ is the source of life, for in Him the fullness of the Godhead dwells in the flesh”. Through the human life of Jesus of Nazareth, the transcendent entered into history, eternity into time and the absolute into the precariousness of the human condition. We therefore owe it to all those who live in the midst of relativism and materialism to remember to welcome Jesus into their existence. Whoever meets him and recognises his ever-present presence knows the truth, discovers life and finds the path that leads to divinisation. And we, my dear brother, see him every day in the face of suffering, which hides his face, and we hardly recognise him, although he is there in our suffering, taking our likeness, carrying the cross he gave us so that we might be like him.
Jesus also promised us: “He who believes in Me will do the works that I do, and greater works than these, because I am going to the Father”, and we are to continue His work, the work of Him who has gone to the Father. The saints are our living proof that His promise is fulfilled, they are our encouragement that it is in our power, even in the most difficult circumstances of our lives, but especially then, to be like Him. That is why all Christians are called to this indispensable discernment, so that, ever more holy and united, united with ourselves and with the Godhead, more reconciled within ourselves, we may further the process of accelerating the coming of the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of forgiveness, reconciliation and unity.
We, here in the East, have an iconographic tradition that helps us in our prayer, a tradition in which the icon of the Virgin “Hodighitria”[1], who has shown us the way since our Baptism, is in our souls, and the Mother shows us the way through her Son, always reminding us that her Son is everywhere (therefore also here) and always (therefore also now), the incarnation of the way, the only way, that leads to heaven. Always remember, dear brother, this holy knowledge, for without remembrance there is no hope, we always forget the Lord. Now to hope is to believe, because faith and hope are the sum of love.
From a great teacher of charity, Monsignor Ghika, we have learnt that we can all practise our own liturgy, in which the sacred thing is the neighbour himself. He called it the “liturgy of the neighbour”. You and I, here and everywhere, can do this, convinced that in serving and loving our neighbour we are in fact serving and loving God, God present in them, united with them.
The strange separation between us is a wound that hurts, it is an offence to the world. It is our sacred duty to nourish our lives with the hope of overcoming this estrangement and to denounce the exaggeration of differences; to do this through unceasing prayer and fraternal cooperation for the good of the poor and the marginalised, and above all for the good of those whom so much lack of love between us has plunged into hatred and exclusivism, into a bitter dispute over the right to exist and to be different.
If we examine our consciences, we may understand that we insist too much on a ritualism that is beautiful on the outside but often lacking in content. The proof of this is in the fact that the people we pastor are all too easily robbed of their much poorer content and remain in forms without content, because for centuries it has not been explained to those who practise it: not only the faithful, but often the priests as well. But Christian life is not just a ritual or a formal imitation that we have learned and passed on without the necessary armour. Its armour is internal, it is an armour, it is deeply rooted and clarified doctrine and moral convictions. Perhaps some have developed their religious and spiritual culture, but less the deep life of truth and love, replacing the deep life with the art of copying spiritual models or even imitating holiness. Everything can be copied, but not holiness: “Sancti sunt semper admirandi sed non semper imitandi”[2], said a holy father of the Christian West.
We all want a renewal of life in the Church, but it has not come and it will not come in the present circumstances, because it is not preached by the Apostles, by the living of what they proclaim. Many of these so-called preachers are like party agitators: they know the lesson well – if they know it at all – but they do not live it. That is why someone once said: “Let your oratory be the oratory of action; you do the action, let others do the talking”. We must therefore pay more attention, much attention, to the formation of the conscience of the new apostles; their apostolate must be a true outpouring of the preaching of their minds and souls – as Camile Chautard wished in “The Soul of the Apostolate” – and not the outpouring of a void in the guise of truth. The renewed proclamation of the Gospel is necessary to present the truth and faith in it in all its fullness and beauty.
This is not easy because, not only in the world or in the country, but even in the family, we find so many forms of human diversity that no one has the right to ignore, to despise or to homogenise, thereby crushing the plural splendour of God’s creation. In spirit, the Procrustean bed is soul-killing, it is spiritual genocide, it is the expression of the pride of wanting to be superior to God, foolish dreamers who correct the perfection in diversity of God’s work; we want to be the measure of others. We do not carry within us the goodness of Christ, but the rashness of Stalin. Is this the way Christ wanted us? Why do we not understand that diversity and difference are not a threat to unity but, on the contrary, a sign of the generosity of the Father of us all?
Now, when darkness seems to be invading the whole earth, giving life to a culture of death, of the denial of all that is different, it is time to ask ourselves if humanity is not living the darkness that gripped the earth on the night when the Word was crucified on the cross. It is the darkness in which the evil one works best, when men, carrying the night in their souls, grope and wander, when the devil makes them believe that lies are truth, that evil is good, that lustful vice is the supreme manifestation of the freedom to which man is entitled, when the thirst for power replaces the call to love, when enmity destroys the solidarity and communion which we replace with hatred and the challenge to the right to freedom and otherness which, by the very nature of creation, we all have. From the depths of this night of the spirit, Nietzsche could cry out, “There is no more God, for we have killed Him!” because every man who sins manifests his will to eliminate God and to challenge Him, to replace Him, because he arrogates to himself the right to be his own master, the right to replace love with hatred, hatred that replaces communion with man and with God, creating a climate of enmity and general mutual confrontation.
The deep reason for Jesus’ motivation and acceptance of his crucifixion is our lack of love, the hatred between us, and his will to reconcile us with ourselves and with the Blessed Trinity – the essence of unity and love between us. Only reconciliation between us will restore to us the crucified Lord, the source of peace. Only through His presence in us, as the holy criterion of freedom and unity, will we find a way and a means of communion, for He is love. Only in love can the desired dialogue be born. In the dia-logos, differences do not become conflicts; the relationship between them becomes the space in which the “Logos” intervenes, and the Logos himself is the Son of God made flesh out of love.
I am telling you this, dear brother, because I wish with all my heart that between us there would no longer be “us” and “you”, that we would all melt together in love, deepening the reality that differences, in concord, enhance the beauty of unity. The unconditional sublimation of legitimate differences will lead us to enrich our capacity to know Christ and to be his image in the world. Then we will be justified in believing that the wish we unconsciously make to ourselves every Easter will become a living reality, that is, the presence of the Risen One in us.
In order to make this presence transparent and to give Jesus Christ supreme credibility in the world, we are called to no longer question ourselves, but to affirm in reciprocity, in natural and supernatural justice, the beauty of the legitimacy of each particularity, a partial expression of the infinite wealth of beauties that dwell in the Godhead”.
– Dear Father, you speak like a Catholic…
– No, my dear, I am Orthodox and I speak only from Orthodoxy, but to be Orthodox is to be Catholic, and you will only become truly Catholic as an Orthodox.
– This is what Monsignor Ghika, my soul father, told me years ago: “A good Orthodox is very close to us; a true Orthodox is a true Catholic. I became a Catholic in order to become a better Orthodox”. If we all realise and live this, then Christ’s wish “that all may be one” will be realised.
– This was his faith and his hope. And if it was Jesus’ will that we should be united, in the name of that freedom which he won for us in the battle with Satan, it only remains for us to understand whom disunity serves, whom unity serves. But we, driven by the whip of the generator of strife, eagerly seek and produce only what can satisfy the lust of disunity. We will only overcome this sad state that pains Christ if we are in synergy with the forces of love. This will require a renunciation, a shedding of that which is the thorny covering that prevents embrace. Only by cultivating the capacity to transform and renew ourselves through grace, based on repentance, will we acquire the knowledge of the nothingness into which pride has led us. Only then will we acquire the gift of self-knowledge and be able to pass from the realm of “difference” to that of “likeness”, as Bernard of Clairvaux once taught, which you Catholics and we Orthodox seem to have forgotten, as some of us who have not learned the three steps of the “ascent to God”, as Evagrius called it, the purifying path, the illuminating path and the unifying path, which St. John of the Ladder took up again. John of the Cross in the form of the “via purgativa”, the “via illuminativa” and the “via unitiva”. We long to discover what distinguishes us and not what unites us, what we have in common and even what identifies us. Let us recognise in this attitude the evidence of pride, the will to recognise ourselves in the one next to me and not in God, as if God were my image and likeness.
(Tertullian Langa – Crossing the Threshold of Silence. A Documentary Book, 3rd revised and supplemented edition, Galaxia Gutenberg Publishing House, Târgu-Lăpuș, 2010, pp. 406-417)
[1] Name given to the iconographic type in which the Virgin Mary holds the Child in her left arm and points to Him with her right hand, signifying She who teaches, who shows the way, the path (ed.).
[2] Saints are always to be admired, but not always to be imitated.