Between life in prison and life in the wilderness
Dear Archimandrite Arsenie, first of all, allow me to wish you a sincere and warm “Happy New Year” on the occasion of your birthday, and also to thank you very much for your love in granting me this interview, and then to ask you: what do you recommend above all to Christians who want to grow in the spiritual life?
I recommend a state of inner, interior joy, in the heart, a state that means unceasing prayer. A state of true joy, detached from the problems of life, from the problems of life’s paths, from one and the other. A state of joy in every way. If it’s sorrow, the devil’s eggs hatch. It’s a state of absence, of darkness. If a person does not die from the position of life, of exaltation, of the standard, all creation suffers. We live in a great unity, all of God’s creation is a unity. If we separate ourselves from the great oneness, we are in a position of cancellation, of self-cancellation. So I recommend a position of life. Because the tragedy of the whole world must be mourned as our own sins. And the state of prayer is a state of presence. As a confessor who spends all day talking to people who need verticality, I do not recommend neediness. I recommend a state of permanent presence, which means recognising the forces of good within you.
Have you known people who had such a state of permanent presence?
P.A.P. – This is a question that cannot be fully answered. People keep their lives hidden. I lived in prisons for 14 years; I lived with all kinds of bad leaders. I also had a certain relationship with Father Dumitru Stăniloae, respecting the proportions, of course, because I was a little boy next to him. At the trial of the Burning Bush – we were both in the same batch – he was a bit shaky. But when he entered the dungeon, when he met there great men who had been in prison for 20 years, who knew the New Testament almost by heart – there were few who did not know all the writings of St. John the Evangelist – Fr. Stăniloae was impressed. Nothing, absolutely nothing, ever happens without God’s will. For the Saviour says: “Not a hair moves without my will”. We are guided by God in everything we do. So we have to be careful. In prison there were people who prayed. I lived with them, with Valeriu Gafencu, with Virgil Maxim… I had Virgil Maxim right in my cell. We lived together, he was close to me like an apprentice. We spent a lot of time together in the cell in Aiud. They kept me there for years. Aiud was a prison within a prison. You can’t imagine! Built by Hungarians for Romanians. I couldn’t see anything. They took us out for ten minutes a month. You can imagine, you were completely isolated from everything! Under these conditions, all these Christians prayed. But it’s hard to judge the intensity of the prayer – to satisfy today’s curious world. I will tell you again: I recommend a state of joy, which means unceasing prayer.
Dear Venerable Father, why is the Holy Mass considered as Heaven coming down to earth?
The Holy Mass renounces any kind of comparison. The Holy Mass is heaven, it is God. In the hand of man, of course. It is the most important, the greatest thing possible. And I often think what an honour it is for man. Because God has created two amazing things that cannot be repeated. He created an exalted woman who gave birth to God, and He created the priesthood that takes Him down from above and gives birth to Him again at the holy table. What do you make of that? That’s not a crust of bread, that’s God, that’s the whole creation! How dare I compare it, to whom, to what prayer, to what holiness? It is God Himself, all on the holy table. And this work is done by man, because man, as Saint Gregory of Nyssa says, is overwhelming, incomprehensible. God still has hidden mysteries about man that even the angels do not know. Man is superior to all creation. Satan’s struggle, which is persistent and even final, is not to recognise that we can be in the image of God. Yes, we are so created. We acknowledge, we don’t acknowledge, that is how we are created. Nobody in creation is like man. Man is the only possible link between God and creation. Man! He has been given the great responsibility of overseeing the whole of creation, he is the master of creation. Man, man, look who you’re sending to hell! You, that is, if you follow the path of damnation. So the liturgy is not a human work, it is above angels and above everything. It is itself. Yes! “I am that I am”, here and now! The resurrection of Jesus Christ has taken place. He is not the only one who has risen. The whole of creation has had a moment of reckoning and resurrection. But all the glory of this amazing event, which we also fear to remember, would not have been so valuable if the Cross had not come first. So the position is: suffering first and then payment. “He who flees from the Cross is fleeing from God,” says St. Theodore the Studite. All I ask is a little awakening. God is not so much angry with us because of certain faults, but because we are careless. Let us not delay our spiritual awakening. In the hierarchy of the Church, it is not the emperor or the patriarch who is the greatest. Whoever is humbler is greater in the Church, in the Kingdom of Heaven. Know that humility is the only way to salvation.
Please explain more about the quote from St. Theodore the Studite.
I was arrested about 44 times, and in the Burning Bush I was sentenced to 40 years. Vasile Voiculescu, Dumitru Stăniloae, Alexandru Mironescu and all the others got 15 years each. They gave me 40 years. Of course I had fun when they sentenced me, but it cost me. They treated me like a big criminal everywhere. Even in Jilava, a captain asked me while he was undressing me and cutting my hair: “What have you done?” “I didn’t do anything, man!” I said. “If you hadn’t done anything, he would have sentenced you to 10-15 years, but 40 years…” You see, if I hadn’t done anything, he would still have given me 10-15 years. He showed his copper, you know. That’s who I was dealing with. That’s who stripped you, that’s who killed you… The important thing is that you have a position of presence. They didn’t kill me, although they chased me, they put me in the cooler, in the cold store. In three days you were dead, according to their calculations. I didn’t die in three days. They gave me five. I didn’t die in five days. They gave me seven, I didn’t die. God didn’t want me to. But it was hard. The important thing is to be where you are. And whatever it is, from now on. I’m a man, a straw in the wind. Never mind death, parents. Death was salvation! But there is a spirit, a line, a ray of life in man that will not yield. And we have no other ideal than that God should grant us the happiness of dying tormented and sizzling for the spark of truth that we know we have in us, for the defence of which we will engage the masters of the powers of darkness to life and death. This is the motto of every Christian. If not, then “mortua est”! In my youth I was the only one in the village who went to church. No old woman, no old man, no nothing, just me. And the priest said: “I have someone who comes to church, but he doesn’t stay until the end. I didn’t know, I was a child. When the sermon started, I thought it was over. I didn’t know anything about Mass, I was a child. From then on, I never left the church until the priest came out to make sure it was over. I’m Macedonian after my father. My grandfather’s father was a priest in Macedonia, hence the name Papacioc. Originally we were called Albu. Finally… no colleges, no academies, nothing shapes you like a state of permanent presence: like prisons, like suffering. It’s a big mistake to ignore it. When the Saviour was on Lake Gennesaret with the Apostles, he said: “Let’s go to the other side”. He lay down in the boat – at that time the waves were rising. “Lord, Lord, wake up or we will perish!” the apostles cried. “You will see yourselves at the bottom of the sea with me and all of them! I mean, “Didn’t I say, all right, let’s go to the other side? Did you not want waves? Do you want no trials?” Well, it can’t be. Because basically all this melts your heart more towards the great powers, towards God.
In other words, Your Beatitude, whoever runs away from the Cross runs away from God!
All the Holy Fathers say this. So do not ignore suffering, do not refuse it. Do not seek the cross, but when it comes, embrace it! Christ the Redeemer did not want the Cross, but when it was given to Him, He did not deny it. He did not yield at all. They flayed Him, but He did not yield. He did not say what his enemies wanted him to say. So it is only through the cross that we can reach the resurrection. In conclusion, you have to know how to die and rise every day. Because life is always death.
Dear Father Arsenios, what can you tell us about the years you spent in the desert?
Life in the desert is so suspended that you can’t see anything with your feet on the ground, so no one from the outside can understand what is happening in the desert. There is a whole presence and creation in the heart and movement of the hermit. I was also afraid in those years, but God helped me to keep my presence. The wolves were very brave. I was not afraid of bears, but of wolves. Because wolves are hungry and they attack in packs. In the forest it’s easier for you because the wolf doesn’t have a flexible neck to look left and right. It looks straight ahead. In the forest, the trees fool him, he thinks they’re people. And he is afraid. I’ve seen that all animals are afraid of people. They are afraid of death. Either I made a move to chase the bears or I made a move to chase the wolves, but they were all afraid. Even the bad wolves. Yes, it wasn’t a difficult problem. But it kept you present. You looked everywhere, but without question I must admit – I don’t know how much you can understand me – that we were held by the power of God. It was a life in suspension, detached also from words and from the understanding of people who did not live their lives with great devotion. It’s hard to talk about such sublime things… You were no longer alive. And yet you were alive. I remember a lot: snow, once it snowed for fourteen days, day and night. It covered every path. There was a spring about two hundred metres from the hut where we were staying. There were even wolves at the spring, stalking the deer that came to drink. But I was still a goat, you know? I still needed the spring. In winter it wasn’t a problem because it snowed and it melted. Sometimes when it melted, you’d get pine needles stuck in your throat. And it was so unbearable! There are lots of things! How do you illustrate it, how do you materialise it? I gained great benefit. But I wasn’t a man of the wild. If you don’t have a state of humility, wherever you are in life, but especially in prison and in the wilderness, you will not prevail.
Where do you think it was harder, in the desert or in prison?
Well, you know, in prison they didn’t believe in God, the bloody guards. And they were very wild, hardened. In Aiud I had a chief guard in the barracks, his name was Biro. In Hungarian it means mayor. He was a bad man. Let me come back to the prisoners: they didn’t believe in God. And they were dangerous. In the desert you fight with the devil. The devil believed in God. He feared Him. You could keep the devil at bay, so I wasn’t afraid. That he would pull you, pull the cloak from under you, a leather cloak that you lay on at night. A lot of things happened. But it wasn’t dangerous. I was still free. And people don’t appreciate the life of freedom. More than that, they don’t value breath and life, which also come from God. God is not so much angry with us because of our sins, but because we are carelessness. This must be preached to everyone. And I say to you now. Make your presence known to God: “Lord, you made me, you take me. He created us for Himself alone, not for the devil. We are not playing with the time of our lives. I have often had the opportunity to be called to the bedside of the dead. In five years I will be a hundred years old on this earth. I have lived a truly wholesome life: a prison life, an intense life, a life that measured breath by breath, day by day, even moment by moment. So it forces you to take an attitude. Because you couldn’t give in: it was the test of belief or disbelief. You weren’t playing. But I didn’t use myself like that, to the contemplative depths of things, like at the bedside of the dead. Screaming… human feelings… the dying saw devils as we know they come. They saw sins as they committed them, not as they confessed them. And they wanted to confess them, but they couldn’t… They couldn’t go back, because that had come, death. Death doesn’t come to make coffee. Do you realise what a horror it was, that there were souls awakened now, before death, and they were going into the unknown, and everything began to appear as it is shown to us in the divine Scriptures. So says a Holy Father: “I want you to understand: if the tortures of hell are equal to the tortures of the Day of Death, that is enough.” It is terrible. And look, everyone wanted to live another day. And we who bathe in years say: “What do you do in a day?” Not in a day, in a moment you can do a lot! That God doesn’t need our words, He needs our hearts. And we can give it to Him in a moment. […]
(Interview conducted by Stelian Gomboș. The dialogue can be read in full in the magazine World of Faith)