Father Benedict – a great Orthodox living man

I had heard about Fr Benedict Ghiuș from Mihai Urzică long before I saw his face for the first time, and he held him in high esteem, as did most of the people involved in the Church. Of all the things Mihai had told us, I remember only two or three that are notorious.

Father had spent many years in political prison under the Communists. For a long time he had been one of the most spiritual and brilliant fathers of the Romanian Patriarchate.

Michael also told us how, at one point after his release from prison, he had considered becoming an Archpriest, he had even had his “dossier” prepared, everything was ready, but external (Securitate!) and internal (guild jealousy!) machinations had spared him this burden. I say “burden” because, having known him, as far as I could know him, I realised that for a man as delicate and, in a way, fragile (in the best sense of the word) as he was, this would have been quite a burden.

There is also a touch of humour in an episode that Father himself once told us. In the period immediately following ’64, after the general release of political prisoners, there was a great scandal concerning the Romanian Church of Saint Jean de Beauvais in Paris, whose “restoration” under the jurisdiction of our Patriarchate was much desired by the Communist power. Since Father Benedict had been a friend of the priest of this church in his youth, and since his moral and spiritual stature, also strengthened by years of communist imprisonment, was extremely impressive, Father Benedict was forced, despite all his attempts to resist, to go to Paris and “act” accordingly. He finally left, determined not to carry out the “mission” entrusted to him. Once there, the local Romanians, for whom the Church was more a bastion of anti-Communist resistance than a meeting with God, people for whom Father Kentenich was unknown and not a landmark, treated him as an emissary of the Communist regime, and it was not long before he was dragged out of the church and harassed. Fortunately, the parish priest, his friend from his youth, took him under his wing, vouched for him and then left him alone. He did not make the slightest gesture to persuade these people to return to the Mother Church, for he quickly realised how things stood and that any further enterprise would have disturbed things. After a month of revelry in Paris, he returned to the country, receiving the predictable reproaches from those who had sent him, but with a conscience as clear as when he left. When he told us this story, he smiled slightly amused, as if he were confessing some youthful whisper. “Back home they had locked me up for being anti-communist, and they wanted to beat me up for being a communist!”

A great orthodox practitioner

He was, it seems, increasingly marginalised and finally forced to retire to Cernica.

I think I went there for the first time in the company of Mihai Urzică, and we knocked on Father’s door together. He lived by the lake, in a small house next to the one where the great Calinic had lived a century before. My heart was so small that I was overcome with emotion. Michael had managed to convey to me all his piety and to make me realise that I was about to meet one of the great figures of Romanian monasticism. I knew that Father Benedict was not only a great living person, but also a very cultured man, who had studied in France, who read a lot – not only theology – which gave him a scholarly reputation among the monks. I realised then that Father had the same love and esteem for Mihai Urzică as he had for His Holiness. He felt that it was he who should seek teaching and advice from Michael and not the other way round.

Several times in my life I have had the opportunity to participate in such “zero degree” spiritual meetings. Things are extremely simple, no big words are spoken, but there is an intensity of soul tension in the air that is hard to bear for the most spiritually weak. The atmosphere is fully “energised” (energies of the uncreated rest and reflect on the high priests). It was a kind of icon of Tabor, with an obvious transfiguration of these people (because Christ was present among them), an immaterial light descending upon them, and all this gave you a definite and intense desire to build huts around them and to spend eternity with them.

Humility stopped your words of use

Father’s face was by no means the classic face of a great confessor. His beard was thin, sparse, very neatly trimmed, and short. His skin was thin, almost transparent, but a very diluted pink tint vaguely brightened the pallor of his cheeks. When I met him, he was already suffering from Parkinson’s. He had to hold one hand with the other to stop himself from shaking. He was very frail and always seemed to be about to collapse.

The look in his eyes was one of infinite gentleness and kindness. Just infinite compassion and understanding love. In front of him you felt completely stripped of all your opportunistic lies, exposed and covered at the same time.

His smile was thin. He laughed more with his eyes, which were occasionally invaded by a light that spilled out. There was always a certain wonder and curiosity in his eyes, a shy welcome, a sincere attempt to discover Christ in you.

We, who had entered the Church at a mature age, had learned one good thing: how to find a confessor, to ask him immediately for words of use. You didn’t learn much from Father. Only when one appeared in the course of the conversation, and then you had to be very careful to remember it. And perhaps we wouldn’t have been so surprised if his intellectual and cultural level hadn’t gone to his head. He was the one who started asking you questions. What else was in town? You’d answer in the same way, but if he asked how you were, you’d sulk. He was interested in events, but mostly in people. I think he was really one of the most modest people I’ve ever met. Father was also a rather shy man. That made it all the more difficult for me to get to know him, because his shyness met my shyness. But you never left him empty-handed. His joy was contagious and you carried it with you for a long time.

Dad was often silent. At first I had the impression that it was because of me, that I was a sinful intruder who disturbed communication. I had a sense of my smallness in every way, but also a state of incomprehensible and unbridled joy. Later I would come across the testimony of people whose spiritual stature I did not doubt, but who experienced much the same feelings and states. That is why it is so difficult to convey what one experienced with Father Benedict. I felt that I was living with him more than I was talking to him, that love was present in the form of an energetic flow rather than a corpuscular word. He spoke little and very briefly. Only those who had been with him for a long time were able to break free from this tension and write down some of his useful words. Father Marc-Antoine Costa de Beauregard was also right when he said that the long and meaningful silences created a spiritual tension so intense that one had the feeling that the whole house was trembling with you and a certain uneasiness accompanied you. For Christianity is not a comfortable chair in which one sits quietly to savour one’s faith and judge the world from a distance.

Beyond the words that were spoken, few and interrupted by long pauses that seemed even longer to us, there remained that sermon, so powerful and subtle, with presence. You left charged and with an immense joy that filled your being, even if you didn’t collect many words.

He suffered for a long time

In the beginning he received us in a special room to the right of the entrance hall. Not once did we have to wait for him because he had someone to confess to in another room. Meanwhile, in silence, we looked at the shelves full of books, many of them in French, on a wide range of cultural subjects. I think I caught a glimpse of a pick-up truck and classical music records in the reception room.

Father was very well looked after and protected by a mother whose name I don’t remember. Sometimes on her own initiative, sometimes at Father’s request, she would bring us a small bowl of bitter cherry jam, the smell and taste of which I have never found anywhere else. And the glass of cold spring water was just as good.

Later, as he became increasingly ill, he would receive us in the room on the left, where he also slept. But not once, when we knocked on his door, did Mother tell us that Father was too weak to receive us. Apparently he had suffered greatly from all sorts of illnesses in recent years. Many of us wondered how such a frail and almost always suffering father could have lasted so long, while others who were more robust went on.

On the desk there were books and papers, some crumpled, some stacked in the corners. He must have received many letters. Later a radio had appeared at the head of the bed, quite a good one for those days, a gift from a spiritual son. It was set to Free Europe.

Most of the time, after leaving it, we felt the need to walk around the monastery and go to the cemetery. We could see him from afar as he took his evening walk in the twilight of Cernica, walking up and down the balcony of the cottage overlooking the lake and the island. He was thinking, praying, contemplating the wonders of God… Sometimes we thought he was watching us with his blessed gaze.

(Costion Nicolescu – Rost Magazine, year V, number 47-48, January-February 2007, pp. 23-25)