Father Adrian Făgețeanu – he died and was resurrected seven times

It’s not easy to meet and talk to Father Adrian Făgețeanu. First of all, you have to get to the “Lainici” monastery, located in the narrow and dusty valley of the Jiu river. Then, after a few hours’ rest, you set off in the morning for the monastery, where the priest had suddenly and unexpectedly retired without explanation. Sick and almost blind, he found in the mountain hut a place for meditation and prayer, and with a single gesture of renunciation he removed all the comforts of Bucharest that he enjoyed in his warm cell at the Antim monastery. (…)

Lost in his long, grey beard, Father seemed even smaller – a handful of a man. With a short and unhesitating gesture, he withdrew his hand. He did not allow us to kiss it. Instead, he blessed us and lovingly stroked the crown of our heads. He searched us for a moment with his barely perceptible gaze and then, a little nervously, he sat down very gracefully on the bedpost. He doesn’t really know who we are or what we want from him. It didn’t matter. Father behaves as if Christ had entered his cell. He flinches only slightly when we ask him why he left Antim monastery. Why, at 92, has he retired to a place he’ll probably never leave again? His old blue eyes search the distance of the wall, unseeing. He knows the answer, but can’t find the right word. “For peace of mind,” he says late at night. “For the soul.” The father’s cell has a beautiful, rustic smell – of quince and incense. The room looks like it too – simple and without superfluous things: a clay stove, a dormeuse, an icon above the window and a table on which a psalter and an akathist book rest. Books are part of the decoration. Every now and then, Father Adrian would reach out and touch their hard, slightly crumpled covers, as if to convince himself that they belonged there. But he never opens them. Even at 92, Father Adrian knows all the prayers by heart.

“God wanted me to go back to where I started,” he says, recalling how, after his release from Aiud prison (20 years of hard imprisonment for being part of the orthodox “Burning Bush” movement), he wanted to join the monastic order at Crasna Gorj, in the very hermitage where Sandu Tudor, the soul and initiator of the “Burning Bush” at Antim, had been arrested. The abbot of Crasna wouldn’t even hear of it. Not only did he refuse to receive him, he threatened him, shouting: “If you don’t leave in five minutes, your head will be on the chopping block”. Sick and weak as a ghost, the priest staggered. Life was a dead end for him, a tunnel with no end. He didn’t know which way to turn. He was crying out to Christ for help when an elderly monk approached him, pulled him aside and whispered in his ear: “Go to the monastery of Lainici. There is the man of God”.

After a day on the train, he arrived. He didn’t have to look for anyone at the monastery. The Man of God came to him as if he had been waiting for him since the beginning of time. It was Abbot Calinic Caravan, a saint and a mountain of humility. Seeing Father Adrian’s face, the abbot asked him nothing. He welcomed him as a brother, with love and trembling. He gave him money for clothes and medicine, he clothed him with his own hands for a year, and then he gave him the lightest work of teaching the young the mysteries of history and languages, literature and grammar. A simple man with only two classes, Calinic Caravan had no philological readings. He simply lived them, he put them into practice. Although he was an abbot, he worked in the garden, he built ovens, he prepared meals, and he rejoiced like a child when his brothers praised his cooking. All the while, he asked the monks to study, to pursue theological studies, giving them money for books or train fares to take their exams in Craiova. “What impressed me about Father Calinic was his boundless kindness and, above all, his unceasing prayer. He prayed always and everywhere, day and night. He prayed for us, for the whole country, for those persecuted for the sake of justice. He even prayed for the enemies seen and unseen, for the communists, saying: “They are all our brothers. Our love will soften their hearts. Pray for them too”. Frankly, I smiled to myself, after all I had suffered at their hands. I would have done anything, but praying for the communists was beyond me. Abbot Calinic didn’t say anything – he just smiled. It wasn’t long before a convoy of black luxury cars pulled up outside the monastery. There was a big, big commotion at the gate and Nicolae Ceaușescu got out of the car. He turned to me and asked: “Are you a priest?… I came with my parents and I would like you to read them some prayers for their health”. Who would have believed it? Trying not to lose my temper, I went into the church with them and fulfilled my priestly duty. I prayed for Ceaușescu and therefore for the Communists. Then I understood Father Calinic’s smile. Father knew everything. He had the gift of foresight.

Seven times declared dead

(…) Seven times Father Calinic was close to death. Seven times he felt its heavy, ugly breath, inexpressible in words. Once he died in the most concrete way. He was five years old and it happened in the refugee camp in Bukovina. He was in a wagon with his parents and all their bourgeois peasant wealth, and he pretended to be on a journey to the fair. Being a child and a fool, he didn’t understand what was going on, what tragedy the family and the people in the neighbouring villages were going through. He wanted to play and, attracted by the sound of the plum tree being trampled by the horses, he leaned over the wagon shed. A moment’s inattention and misfortune struck: “Without realising what was happening, the wheel of the cart ran over my belly,” said the priest. “I died instantly. To my parents’ horror, I stopped breathing. My stomach was ripped open and my intestines were scattered all over the place. My poor mother was distraught. She was crying in pain, while the other refugees, who had stopped their carts in front of us, accused her of not taking care of me. They also advised her not to carry the body, but to bury me in the first village. The village was called Hlinita. So she did. She stopped in front of the church, but as the priest was not there, she left me in the care of a deacon, paid an old woman to wash me and make all the necessary arrangements for the funeral, and went on for fear of missing the convoy of refugees.

In fact, the old woman went about her business according to custom. She washed me, dressed me in clean clothes, sat me down on the table, placed the candle in the form of a quill on my chest and began to read to me from the Psalter. A day had passed, night was falling over the room, and as the old woman continued to read the prayers for the dead, someone said, “Lady, close the window”. The woman wondered. The window was closed, as was the door. “Then why is the candle flickering on the dead man’s chest?” asked the man who was watching the room. As he approached me, he saw that I was breathing.

I don’t know if it was really a miracle, or if the old woman who rubbed me had set my heart beating. All I know is that people sent word through other refugees to find my mother and tell her that her son had risen. I do not want to tell you how happy my parents were. Unable to turn the carriage because of the flood, they returned to Hlinita on foot, took me to Suceava and in the hospital a doctor stitched me up, saying he’d never seen anything like it.

***

Another clinical death awaited Father many years later in Stalingrad. He had volunteered to go to the front and, full of youthful enthusiasm, wanted to recapture Bessarabia. He also volunteered for General Dragalina, offering himself for an action full of dangers. He never returned to his unit. Once again, his life was hanging by a thread. He was badly wounded by a shrapnel explosion. He was covered in blood and his entire lower jaw was barely attached to a piece of cartilage. He was disfigured and could barely breathe from the bleeding. The doctors gave him two or three hours to live. There was no way they could help him. They couldn’t help him. The only chance was a hospital and a skilled surgeon. There, in the open, nothing could be done. Then the miracle happened. There was the sound of a broken engine in the air, and a few seconds later a German fighter plane landed and stopped right next to the father. The plane couldn’t fly. It had a faulty fuel tank. It wasn’t serious because the German crawled under the belly of the plane for a while and the engine started. When a Romanian officer, Ciurea (from Maramureș), saw that he wanted to leave, he asked the pilot to take the wounded man to a hospital. The man refused. No regulation in the world – human or military – could force him to transport a wounded man. It was a two-seater plane (for the pilot and the observer) and every extra kilo was a disaster. Then, without a second thought, Officer Ciurea drew his pistol and pointed it at the pilot’s head. Either he took the priest with him or he’d shoot him. The situation was on a knife-edge. The two Germans separated and conferred. They wanted to get the wounded man into the cockpit, run him a few hundred yards and then throw him out of the way. Sure enough, the wounded man was pushed into the cockpit, the observer curled up in the right seat (only he knew how) and the plane took off. After a few minutes, the parent heard the observer tell the pilot not to leave him in the field. The plane had regained its stability and the engine was running well. The flight was smooth. In two hours, the plane flew 600 kilometres, and the injured man was taken to a hospital, where the operating theatre and all the necessary equipment were waiting. “All the time I was thinking about a lot of things,” the father recalls. “I reviewed my life, I asked myself questions. It wasn’t about fear of death, physical pain or anything else. It was about God. I realised that even if I had been an emperor or a famous head of state, no one could have saved me in the wilderness of the Russian plains. This event changed my life forever. After I was discharged from the hospital, my first trip on leave was to Putna, where I gave my life to God, my Saviour, in front of the altar.”

“Christ is risen!” in prison

Father Adrian has been through a lot. He remembers, but he doesn’t insist. He speaks of suffering and death in passing, like a childhood friend. Arrested in 1958, during his interrogation in Suceava, a guard called Blehan (the son of a church cantor) hit him on the head with his boot, causing irreparable damage to his optic nerve. In Aiud, the guards were not content to punish him by throwing him into prison. Although it was freezing, they poured two buckets of water over his limp body. In a few hours the water froze, turning his skin into a shell, down to the bone. From all of them, Father chose the most beautiful memories: the seraphic figure of Father Sofian, the absolute and incomparable finesse of Father Ghiuș, the moral and impeccable behaviour of the peasant Ilie from Săcele (whom Father still remembers in prayer, together with his wife Păuna and his child Toader), the theological stubbornness of Sandu Tudor, who died murdered in his cell.

“You won’t believe me, brother, but I was closest to God in prison,” says Father Adrian. “There you appreciated all God’s gifts. You cherished the air, which, in an overcrowded cell, you sought for a few seconds, taking turns to put your nose under the crack of the door. You appreciated the bread (two slices through which you could see the sunlight) and the sweetness of a kind word. We were weak, but we helped each other. I gave part of my share to Vasile Voiculescu. Weak and barely holding his own, he had to carry a load heavier than himself. He couldn’t lift it, so the guards punished him by cutting off his food ration… In prison you needed food, but above all you needed the Word of God. Through it we showed our strength. I remember that in Aiud I made a calendar on my fingers using the Gaussian method. I calculated the date of Easter and found that it was that very night. Without thinking of the consequences, I began to cry out, “Christ is risen!” and immediately from all the cells the wonderful song began to echo to heaven: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tombs bestowing life! Aiud responded to the call of hope, to our cry of joy, to the despair of the guards who thought we had started a rebellion. They ran madly around the yard firing warning shots, making phone calls and calling for reinforcements. They were frightened by our gathered voices, by the spiritual power of faith that no barred window could stop.

There are many things no one else can understand. The strength that God gives you would be one of them… When I was arrested, the investigator ripped the cross off my neck and threw it in the dustbin. I took it from there. He beat me badly and threw the cross in the bin again. I didn’t step back. I picked it up again and he trampled me. After 8 or 9 attempts, the policeman gave up. He left me alone. In the torture chamber I said to myself: “Hold on! Don’t embarrass Christ” You may not believe me, brother, but after 60 blows I didn’t feel any pain. It was just my body working against my will, as if it were anaesthetising itself.

In prison you cease to exist, only Christ keeps you alive. When I got out of Aiud, I found out that my poor mother, when she wrote the acatist for the priest, wrote my name to the living and the dead, without knowing anything about me. She was right – in prison I was both alive and dead”.

(Sorin Preda – Excerpts from the article “At the hour of the Resurrection, in the monastery of a great confessor”, published in “Formula AS” magazine, no. 611/2004)