Father Arsenios – “When he had something to say, he was unstoppable”
When you sit next to Father Pantelimon, you feel the need to whisper so as not to disturb him. He is neither hard or soft. He is simply ascetic, always withdrawn into himself, with his thoughts and his uninterrupted prayer. He had suffered much, enough for many lifetimes, but everything had disappeared from his long, bony face – the blows, the blows of the crowbar, the tears of humiliation, which he always called “joys”.
The joys of penitence and patience. Now, on the pearly whites of his cheeks, you can read only forgiveness and a silent smile, the smile of a man reconciled with God, with everyone. To get to know the old confessor of Ghighiu, you have to visit the cell where he lives. It is a cell that suits his soul – simple, rustic and austere, with a candle always burning in one corner, a few icons on the wall and somewhere, at the head of the bed, the picture of the great monk Arsenios Boca, tall and immovable as a mountain, dressed in his well-known monk’s habit, white with a belt in the middle. Sitting on the narrow bedpost, Father Pantelimon could not get enough of looking at his confessor. There is something fascinating about the “Saint of Făgăraș” even in the picture. You can feel his inner strength. You feel the unrelenting sharpness of his piercing blue eyes. Words cannot contain him. A seaworthy and upright man. When he had something to say, he was unstoppable. His voice was like thunder and his words were arrows. He saw much and never flinched from the truth. There was nothing you could hide from him.
Often you wouldn’t even open your mouth and he would tell you everything you did and what would happen to you. He would read in the book of each one’s life, out of a desire to save you, to return to the faith as soon as possible. He himself was preparing for the great encounter with God, knowing his end and all the trials he would go through.
In the monastery of Prislop, where he had been unjustly exiled, he cried for three days and three nights, knowing that he would never again be able to celebrate the Holy Mass, that he would be banished from all the monasteries and that he would only put on his priestly vestments when he died.
Father Boca had many graces and everything that is said about him is close to the truth. When he was arrested in Brașov, he withered the hand of a torturer just by saying to him: “From now on you will not be able to lift your hand again”.
In 1989, while the Securitate men were investigating him and kicking him, he prophesied that Ceaușescu would not live to see the end of the year and that many young people would die, sacrificed like lambs. Father Pantelimon has no doubt that Fr. Arsenios Boca had foresight. The old priest will never forget the day he went to see the holy priest Arsenios while he was painting on the Maicilor Skete. He had many things to say and ask him, but his great confessor refused to speak to him. He turned his back on him as never before and ordered him to cut the neck of a bottle with the thin edge of a file, leaving him to work for nothing. It was only later that Father Boca put his hand on his head and stopped him from his foolish and useless work, saying with love and tears in his eyes: “Are you in a hurry? What are you in a hurry for, boy? I know why I made you cut the bottle. Securitate is waiting for you at the station”. And indeed they were. That day, Father Pantelimon was arrested and taken to the security headquarters in Galați.
“If it does not come from the heart, no word enters the soul” Father Pantelimon learned a lot from his confessor, Fr. Arsenios Boca. “For me, he was a light and a pillar of hope. Without his advice and prayers, I would never have left prison alive.
A torture beat me and almost gouged out my eye with an iron bar. I was clinically dead and escaped. They put the cap on my head (the most terrible torture), but I didn’t lose my mind, as the guards wanted. I did not turn away from Christ for a second, even when a general came to arrest me in Galați and tried to convince us, with beautiful words and great skill, that Fr. Arsenios Boca was an impostor and that God did not exist:
“I have been to Germany, I have been to Japan and America. I have been everywhere, but I have not found God. How can you believe in something you cannot see?
The prisoners in the cell with me were silent, but I didn’t give up. Thinking of Father Boca and whispering the name of Christ, a power came to me from above and I found myself speaking:
“General, you have travelled in vain. God is in man, in you, in the brother next to you. You must not go to America, but to the Patriarchate. There you will see and touch with your hands the work of St. Dmitry, who stayed in the water for 200 years and did not rot”.
The general turned his back on me and slammed the door in a rage, and some of my colleagues scolded me, telling me that I had no wisdom, that there was nothing to stop me from saying and doing what the Securitate wanted. They wanted me to shut up, but I couldn’t. What kind of Christian would I have been, saying one thing today and doing another tomorrow? That’s what Father taught me – to preach only the truth and not to be ashamed of God’s Word.
(Testimony of Father Panteleimon – Saint Father Arsenios Boca, pages 76-78)