Father Benedict Ghiuș, the spiritual father

I don’t know when, where or under what circumstances my father met Fr. Benedict Ghiuș. I only know that for me he was a living and pregnant presence, who entered my consciousness as a member of the family since my childhood. Why? He was the confessor of the whole family, including my own, and, in full agreement with my father and mother, he took care of my religious education in the spirit of the true faith.

He would often come to our house to have long conversations with my father and their friends, or to eat with my family. I would meet him in the church of the monastery “Antim Ivireanu”, where the liturgical services he presided over were moments of concentration and spiritual joy, even for the unchurched preteen that I was.

He was imposing, dressed in an elegant manner: tall, slender, simple and measured in his movements, he had a direct and all-encompassing gaze, not inquisitive but friendly, self-controlled but not domineering, reserved yet cordial. He impressed me. It was as if he had emerged from the gallery of the famous medieval Knights of the Round Table. And if I made this association in my mind, it was also because people in our house often spoke admiringly of him and of the years he had spent in France, at the University of Strasbourg, where he had completed his theological studies.

In fact, the nobility of his dress – I was to understand this much later – was only partly due to his stay abroad; it was a sign of the authenticity of his spiritual life and a spiritual and physical inheritance from his parents in his former village, the village of the Russians.

In addition to these characteristics, which are obvious to everyone at first glance, Father Benedict was endowed with other special qualities: a serene and disarming smile was always on his face; his speech was sweet and softly whispered but clear; his behaviour was discreet, which made him respected and loved. He never scolded or moralised, whatever the situation I found myself in, more or less appropriate to my age. He exuded a gentleness, an understanding and a desire to reconcile that kept me on the right path without setbacks. His attitude was so comforting that I came to see him as the embodiment of Christ’s call: “Let the children come to me”.

This was the image of Father Benedict that had been formed in my mind since my youth, and I have kept it unchanged until now, as I write these lines, and the years that have passed have not contradicted it, on the contrary, they have fulfilled it in depth.

In the years of my maturity I discovered in him a special understanding of the feelings and weaknesses of the human soul, an understanding which I believe went beyond that of a professional psychiatrist and which he had reached as a result of his countless encounters with people and, above all, by knowing and reliving in himself the stories told in the writings of the Church Fathers and in the Philokalia. His understanding was not cold, indifferent, but attentive and combined with compassion, with a warm love for people. This humane, all-embracing approach was, according to my father, the result of personal and persevering spiritual work and a gift from God. It was expressed in his measured speech, conveyed by the even tone of his voice and, at the same time, by the waves of his clear, calm gaze, which inspired total trust in those who confided in him. Added to this was his exemplary discretion and honesty in his dealings with those around him, which became notorious. He was a well-balanced man: the serenity of his face said it all and his pure gestures, reduced to the minimum, confirmed it, because everything he did came from an inner calm, the calm of one who prays unceasingly and forgives the faults of the wrongdoers.

It is obvious that this portrait has been gradually and gradually fulfilled over the years, but I believe that the complete and definitive form was only realised when I evoked lived moments that illustrate it. Of course, the most eloquent for me were the most recent ones, namely those that took place in the years ‘6o-‘7o, after the release from prison of both him and my father and brother, when, as in a revival, spiritual relations were joyfully renewed. I can still see in my mind’s eye the resumption of Father Benedict’s visits to my parents, in their apartment in Vasile Lascăr street no. 23-25 in Bucharest; He would enter the house with small steps and stop near the entrance door in the corridor leading to the living room, he would make a meditation and a cross, first at the icon “The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus”, where he knew my father prayed his daily prayers, and he had an oil candle which only he took care of, Then he would go to the icon of the Burning Bush of Our Lady on the wall opposite the entrance and say the same prayers, and finally he would pray at length before the glazed icons that my father had placed on the walls and on the counters in the house, and he would end his entrance by blessing all of us in the house. It was a ritual that was repeated on every visit and that brightened our hearts and our home.

The image of Father Benedict becomes more vivid when I recall my visits to the churches where he presided or to the monasteries where he lived. I see him again under the vaults of the Church of Constantine Șerban Basarab on Mitropolia Hill, where I used to look for him whenever I went to the Music School on United Principalities Street, either for the piano lessons I taught there or to take my own children to school. In that church, Father Benedict was a constant presence every day of the week: I would find him surrounded by the faithful, either reading prayers to them, or confessing to them, or praying himself. In the dim light of the church vaults, he was so transparent that he blended in with the icons painted on the walls.

I can also see him in the little house on the shore of Lake Cernica, in the monastic settlement of the same name. I had known about Father Benedict’s house for a long time. My father and Ștefan Todirașcu had often spoken to me about it, and both of them had stayed there when they went on retreats at the monastery. Of course, I also knew them from the visits I used to make to talk to Father, to ask for advice or to go to confession. Two rooms opened from a small entrance hall: a small room on the right and a large room on the left, both with windows overlooking the lake. The room on the right was simply furnished: a monk’s bed, a library filled to the brim with books on theology, philosophy, history and various books with dedications from their authors, and authentic painted icons on the walls. This room also served as a waiting room – at least for me and my family – when we went to confession with the whole family. The room on the left gave the priest the space he needed to organise his working furniture: a desk with a few books, sheets of paper, manuscripts, a pad of white paper, pens, pencils, a large table full of books, some open, some closed, but with index cards and signs of reprinting, a bookcase also full of books, a few chairs and, of course, a lighted candle and icons. This was where the priest received visitors, heard confessions and worked. I remember that when he was preparing the text of the Prologues for a new edition, the room was full of open books with signs between the pages, boxes full of note cards, so that there was hardly room for the cup of coffee or the bowl of jam that Father served us. Although “at home” and in poor health, Father Benedict was, whenever we visited him, in his monk’s habit, closed up to his neck, his head covered with the monastic head piece.

Father Benedict was a special man, not only for us, the Mironescu family, but also for the monastic community. And I would like to illustrate this fact with the following memory. I had got into the habit that whenever I went to visit him in the monastery of Cernica, I would first look for Father Nicodim Bujor, just before entering the church to pray. In my family, Father Nicodemus was particularly appreciated for his spiritual and human qualities: a man attentive to the needs of others, generous to the point of total self-denial, a tried and tested supplicant. It was he who, decades ago, had directed my father to Father John the Stranger (Ivan Kulaghin). Father Nicodemus’ cell was in the building between the north side of the church and the main entrance to the monastery, so it was on my way to the church and then to Father Benedict’s cottage. If the configuration of this path made it easy to reach Father Nicodemus’ cell, the lively and consoling joy with which he welcomed me took me out of the world of my thoughts and prepared me spiritually for the visits to come. I would usually find him in the chapel tent, and when he was not there, I would look for him at the coffin with the relics of St. Calinic, where he prayed on his knees for hours every day, in a state of concentration, I think, close to ecstasy. Father Nicodemus was a gentle and dreamy man, who lived withdrawn in prayer and in the spiritual company of the great deceased of our national history, whom he invoked tirelessly for the salvation of our nation and the protection of the Orthodox Church. When I arrived at the holy coffin, the monks of the Church knew whom I was looking for, and out of kindness to me and understanding of Father Nicodemus, they gently brought him back to the present. He smiled like a child when he saw us, and his love for us showed on his face. He was eager to share his thoughts with us. He began to speak to us, but after a while he stopped, blessed us and ended our meeting with the same exhortation: “Children of the great Alexandru Codin, do not forget Father Benedict! Go to him for confession and let him read you a prayer! God’s grace is upon him!

Father Benedict did confession in a different way from other priests I knew: there was no question-and-answer dialogue, no questioning about the observance of divine and ecclesiastical commandments. And no verification of knowledge and struggle against all categories of sin. It was a lively conversation that he led. He urged me to talk to him about my problems, grievances, misunderstandings and shortcomings. Then he would comment on what I had told him before, guiding me step by step towards a path of salvation, making me understand what I had failed to achieve in my relationships with people and in my communion with God. I could say that confession with Father Benedict was, to use a common expression today, a session of psychoanalysis carried out under God’s protection, in which the thoughts that had separated me from people, distorted my mind and turned me into a sinner, were dispelled by the power of confession and his prayer. At other times our conversation took on a cultural character, seeming to go beyond the sphere of my strictly personal life, but still reflecting me. He would ask me to tell him about an event that had impressed me, or a book I had recently read, or what I thought of a performance, concert or exhibition I had recently attended. I remember with emotion one such discussion about Tarkovsky’s films. I was really surprised that he had seen “Rubliov” and “Ivan’s Childhood” and that he had deciphered, beyond their subject matter and images, a history of human suffering and their Christian message. But I was even more impressed by his commentary on the film with the strange title “Stalker”, which I did not see until many years later in Switzerland, stimulated by the explanation he gave at the time. Father Benedict saw in this Tarkovsky film a parable of the Christian essence, about the difficulties of the path that leads to true faith and also about the need to have a guide, about the idea that one needs a guide for any path one wants to take but does not know, all the more so for that path that is full of spiritual values but also full of pitfalls, mortal dangers, failures, damage, ruins. He saw this film as an illustration of the teachings of the “Paterikon” and the “Philokalia of St John of the Ladder”.

His tact in conducting a discussion in the spirit of the right faith, his rich general culture, never ostentatiously displayed, but which shone through in every word, and above all his natural, measured and condescending way of speaking, made him respected not only by me and the faithful who visited him, but even by ecclesiastical forums. The proof for me was that, towards the end of the 1960s, they wanted to make the most of his gifts as an interlocutor in the dialogue they had begun with the Romanian Churches in the diaspora. With a political courage unusual for the time, they appointed Father Benedict, recently released from prison, as their envoy to Western Europe.

When my father spoke to us about the mission entrusted to Father Benedict, he did so with a certain caution. Despite his boundless confidence in Father Benedict’s ability, and because of his love for him, my father confessed his firm conviction that he had been given the difficult task of reconciling the irreconcilable. My reaction to my father’s remark was immediate, and I told him firmly that my father must refuse so as not to compromise himself. My father’s reply was also prompt, but long and explanatory; he opened my eyes to the spiritual dimension of the task given to Father and insisted at length on his constant attitude of honesty and devotion to the Orthodox Church. “DON’T forget”, my father reminded me at that time, “Father is a monk and under obedience”. And he also told me: “He has a moral duty, a great and heavy duty, that out of love for God he obeys every command he receives from his superiors”. And he added: “Father knows very well that the Church is the Body of Jesus Christ on earth, and She cannot be blamed for the weaknesses of people who temporarily represent Her in one place or another. And something else, Father Benedict believes that dialogue in the name of this Church can be beneficial”.

When I read these words of my father’s, now that I am writing them after so many years, I realised that the comparison I had made long ago between Father Benedict Ghiuș and the knights of the “Round Table” in the famous medieval literary work was a happy intuition of my youth. Father was truly a senior of the Orthodox Church, a knight of pure soul and at the same time a model of monastic virtue, who dedicated his life to the service of the Church of Jesus on Romanian soil.

But I still have a vivid and inspiring memory of Father Benedict’s wisdom, a memory that was reawakened in 2004, in circumstances that, like the memory, I will present below.

On the eve of the publication of a volume of articles written by my father during more than two decades of journalistic activity, from the 1930s to the 1950s, I received a phone call from Virgil Cândea, a good friend of my family, who asked me to write “a preface” for this volume. Since he was helping me to edit the book and was therefore in the best position to know what I had to write for the preface, he suggested the subject of the “word”, namely to tell the readers what made me sacrifice time, money, my own family and professional interests in order to make a good part of Alexandru Mironescu’s philosophical and literary work available to the public for more than 15 years. And he added then, as a conclusion to his appeal, that this “word before” written by me will also be a good example of filial devotion, worthy of being told in a world dominated by egos and hungry for material goods and advantages.

I was very surprised by the theme proposed and the pedagogical objective. For me, the word devotion meant dedicating one’s life, one’s strengths and one’s essential interests to a cause or a person outside the family, not to relatives. I knew of the sacrifice of heroes on the battlefield, the devotion of ‘penniless’ doctors to the sick, or the self-sacrifice of the great hermits in the service of God. We did not know about the devotion of parents to their children and the devotion of children to their parents; in our house we did not talk about it, because caring for one another was a Christian moral duty and a proof of our love. Now, everything I had done for the publication of my father’s work was in the natural order of normal relations between parents and children in a Christian family. Since I did not see myself in a heroic position of filial devotion, I then told Virgil Cândea that I would accept his theme for the preface on the condition that he would also accept that I write the story of my true motivation for publishing my father, Al. Mironescu. Here it is, almost exactly as I told it to him on the phone. But I have to say that, unfortunately, my story, once written, was never published, my editorial project failed. So here is my motivation, which has its origin in my last personal conversation with my confessor, Father Benedict.

A year before he died, my father gave me a large packet of typescripts and manuscripts of his unpublished works. He gave them to me to keep, while expressing his firm conviction that the political situation of that time would change sooner or later, and that we young people of that time would know better times, when his writings entrusted to me could be printed, not for his posthumous glory, but as a true testimony of a generation that, despite the vicissitudes of the circumstances of its existence, remained faithful to the Christian faith and the Romanian spiritual tradition. My father died in 1973 and his written spiritual legacy, which was entrusted to me, lay dormant for almost 20 years before I was able to entrust it to the press, little by little and partially.

However, before I left the country in 1980, I visited Father Benedict Ghiuș, my and my family’s confessor, at the Cernica monastery to receive his farewell blessing. On that occasion I spoke to him about my father’s works and asked him what he thought I should do with them. Father Benedict answered me with his gentle words that true Christians, like my father, are like candles burning towards the High One and the enlightenment of our fellow men, through their prayers and righteous deeds. And if I want to keep the word of the Gospel that “light is not kept under a bushel”, I must do my best to keep it up, for the time being, and then, when the times are clear, to print it, and the good Lord will help me, for my father’s thought was, and through what he wrote remains, without the slightest doubt, a light for our fellow men.

Father Benedict’s words have been decisive in everything I have done to make my father’s work known. Could I not have respected them? And, to stay within the framework of the comparison made by Father Benedict, would I have had the right, as a true Christian, to extinguish a candle lit in the Church of God’s righteous faith?

(Ileana Mironescu – Around Alexandru Mironescu, edited by hierom. Benedict Vesa, Renaissance Publishing House, Cluj-Napoca, 2015, pp. 53-68)