Archimandrite Father Justin Pârvu shows people the way to salvation

“Let us return, people, to the icon!”

This is the exhortation spoken with firmness and warmth by Father Archimandrite Justin Pârvu, confessor of the Athonite life and of the founding creations that astonish us when we learn and see them.

A monk martyred for 16 years in the cellars of the Securitate, in the Communist dungeons, in the lead mines of Baia Sprie and in the hellish work of Periprava – the Danube Delta, Father Justin is the patient and courageous fighter against the avalanche of aggressors and aggressions against the ancestral Orthodoxy, in whose monasteries and churches we learned to read and write in the unity of the Romanian language, Orthodoxy, which has pulled us out of history by raising our backbone as a nation, by initiating us in the ascent of the mountain of suffering in order to get closer to God and to strengthen our love for Romania and our ancestral land, by strengthening our courage to pass fearlessly and carefully through the forest of wild beasts of untamedness into the swamps of despair, when history challenges us, alas! and restore our faith in the future, in dignity and in cooperation with other nationalities and peoples.

With his heart in the ancestors, saints and martyrs of the Romanian nation, son of the Carpathians of Moldavia, Father Justin is a lover of our national specificity and a resolute guardian of the ever modern tradition, through his virtuous and rigorously selective ability to deal with the avalanche of newness coming from everywhere.

Full of the gentleness, understanding and wisdom of a man who has experienced so many sufferings, trials and tribulations, Father Archimandrite, approaching the age of a century, is the wise guardian of the endless number of pilgrims who come to the monastery complex of Petru Vodă, Neamț, his first foundation, which, through its worthy initiatives and its enthusiastic disciples, has produced and is producing offspring in many places in the country and, in the future, on the continents, because the mother monastery does not limit itself to self-indulgence.

The untiring and fulfilling spirit of the Father Archimandrite grows and multiplies in an apostolic way, being present in the souls of so many faithful who have received and are receiving the light of rebirth from this great confessor.

He had just finished painting the outside of the monastery church when I went to see him again, after years and years since we had been separated from the Suceava penitentiary, from where we had been distributed to different prisons, taking with us the beginning of the years of silence and the conviction that we would carry them out…

In my affective memory, the image of the young, slender, lively seminarian, restrained in his speech, remained, as he passed under the heel of the hell of the KGB security investigations in Roman and through the slaughterhouse of their continuation in the Suceava penitentiary. To all this was added his experience on the anti-Soviet front and the ability to live in prayer, acquired from childhood by his faithful mother. […]

Father Justin knew well the opposites: God and Satan. For the time being, history was on the side of hell. The battle was long, with completely different strategies and weapons, and with unexpected dramatic surprises.

In the penitentiary of Suceava, Father Justin, with his modesty and his exemplary character, had established himself in the great category of those who, armed with patience, were able to turn suffering into a “golden bridge, a high bridge”, as the metaphor goes, passing through the walls of Zarca, towards the cells of Aiud, with the name of the martyred poet Radu Gyr […].

People should know that, even after the sentences of condemnation, we were not exempted from completing the investigations at the Securitate, Internal Affairs and other places of toruture, since we were the ones who participated, in 1946, in the paramilitary camp in the Tarcăului-Neamț Mountains, supported also by Romanians from the monasteries of the Neamț Mountains…

When we were arrested in May 1948, we were subjected to satanic and sadistic interrogations, since the interrogators were usually policemen from Transnistria, in the country before and during the war, who were eager to prove their good faith to the Communists, to gain their trust and to rise as high as possible.

The communists were grateful and sent them all to Făgăraș prison. […]

Father Justin Pârvu, by virtue of the verticality of his character and his capacity for resistance, was placed from the very beginning in this great category of those who lived through suffering, making it an initiatory practice in the process of hardening = living in God, Christian love united these tormentors of terror and torture, the first term having a permanent character and operating primarily in the psyche, and the second term, although it summarises the first, having an intermittent character with emphasis on the physical.

Father Justin Pârvu came to prison with a full soul from which to give advice, encouragement and help to others.

As a child he was taken to the monasteries of Durău, Neamț and the surrounding hermitages, he venerated the miraculous icons and was imbued with the spirit of faith by the visionary and fertile monks, who sensitised the soul of the mountain child, full of exuberance and freedom, which would build his vertical nature like the trees around the village of Petru-Vodă, where he was born, the youngest of five children of the house.

Always close to his mother, he grew up with the love of God, his parents and the whole house, but also with respect for the people of the village and everywhere. He grew up in the love of the mythical and legendary space under Ceahlău and Rarău, with an open heart like the meadows full of hay and flowers and the charm of the stream with its melodies and the trout that passed the flowers on the feet and through the feet of the children bathing, and were caught by the trout with which they competed.

Childhood – our love, which political prisoner, did not caress his wounds, alleviate his hunger, warm his cold, shorten his time meditating at your beauties, above all shortened the time whose moment had the weight of the rock frozen in terror. The years passed, but the moment did not want to pass, it gnawed us with hunger, grinding our teeth and chewing our teeth chewing through the night’s sleep fruits full of vitamins that we lacked and other imaginary “goodies”, as in the Song of Hunger, by the martyred poet and philosopher, Nichifor Crainic […] 

Childhood – our love, you stood with your innocence, your vitality, your daring and your mischief in us, beside us, on the mat with cracks, among our bones that sounded their decay, in the crowded beds of Jilava, and when it was hardest for us, you came with gentleness, and the tears of our mothers on their knees before the icon under the candle, you came with your consolations, and for some with the image of the wives left on the threshold, uniting their tears with those of their children.

Childhood, our love, how many times did you not take us out of the hell of the prison, on your hills and in your plains, returning us with arms full of flowers.

Childhood, our love, only you have made us remain confident, young and God-fearing, because you have always come between the cold walls, with angel’s wings, and remained among them with your eternity.

That is why Father Justin still feels that childhood is a divine gift, a heaven from which no one can expel us, as Blaise Pascal said in his reflections.

(Constantin N. Străchinaru, From the Martyrdom of the Romanian Nation, Vol. III, PIM Publishing House, Iași, 2012, pp. 9-18)