Father Dometie – “a perfect spiritual father, perfect in every way”
He worked hard and died in duty on the altar of faith, before he had completed the spiritual mission for which he had prepared himself with love and zeal, being, in my humble opinion, a true Martyr, for he worked without interest in the material side, looking forward to the spiritual life and the satisfaction of serving our Lord Jesus Christ, whom he loved so much, a love that was evident in the services and sermons he gave. For several years I had the opportunity to take part in the services of the Great Week of Easter, to receive the Resurrection, and during the sermons, when he spoke of the life and passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, he would experience those moments and tears would flow down his cheeks. His words were mingled with tears when he spoke of the sufferings of our Lord for humanity.
He dedicated his life, body and soul, to these calls, to these ideals of serving God, following the principle: “Nothing for myself, everything for others, everything for my fellow human beings”. With everything he had, he helped the needy with clothing, food and, above all, spiritual nourishment. There were occasions when he took off his shirt or flannel and gave it to the needy. He ate very little, mostly fast food, worked very hard and slept four hours in 24. Instead, he was always to be found in the church, from 5 a.m. until 9 p.m., celebrating the Eucharist and Vespers, Holy Liturgy and other services requested by the faithful who asked for him. When there was a break of an hour or two between services, instead of resting, he would go to work in the house, fetching wood from the forest, digging in the garden, breaking off the spurs of the rocky pile near the kitchen building, which he rolled down with the force of a sledgehammer. Another time I saw him in the water of the Râmeț, soaked to the waist, struggling, with the help of two believers, to roll 200-300 kg pieces of rock from the road where the IRTA bus was going to pass, and many other works requiring enormous physical effort.
His body was small, but he had a will and an energy pulsating from a big heart, with which he wanted to do everything according to the plan he had made for himself. He was undernourished, he worked hard, but he managed to change the appearance of the outbuildings, which were useful for the life of the whole community.
Great things were achieved by a man small in body but great in soul. He built a presbytery, a school, extensions to existing buildings, a hut, a kitchen building with a proper dining room, carpet workshops, stables, a pilgrims’ house, chapels for nuns, two rectories, introduced electric light, etc. He introduced running water from two springs in the mountain 300 metres away, to which we, the teachers Spânu Gheorghe and Maria, also contributed financially.
All in all, he radically changed the face of this holy monastery. Not only administratively, but also in terms of faith, he managed to mobilise the souls of the faithful around the Church and its servants, to create, I could say, a myth around it, because from all over the country the faithful came to see Father Dometie, to hear him serve and to pray together for the salvation of their souls, because many miracles and many healings of physical and spiritual illnesses were seen through the power of faith, through the power of prayers made in this holy place. The bridge between man and man, between believers, was built by the way of prayer through Father Dometie, a perfect confessor, who, stripped of the clothes of a life full of vanity and luxury, withdrew to this corner of nature given by God, and with great piety, with great humility, directed his prayers to the Lord. Through Father Dometie’s prayers, the Lord’s mercy descended on the suffering man and he was relieved, because the prayers were offered by a pure, faithful, good and upright servant, who was prepared for the life of a confessor, because he was loved by the faithful, it seems that the Lord also heard his prayers, because he was a perfect confessor, perfect in every way.
In addition to the hymns in the church, Father Dometie and the nuns spent 15 to 20 minutes after each meal praising the power and miracles of the Lord, His love and goodness shown to the suffering through the prayers that were done. Such songs could be heard even in the carpet workshop, where work was going on and songs of praise to the Lord were constantly being heard. In addition to the qualities mentioned above, Father Dometie was also an educator, in the sense that when he noticed that a nun was clumsy in understanding some of the rules to be observed, required by the natural laws of a pure faith, he would give an educational lesson to the whole congregation, coming up with quotations from books and showing them how to behave in this monastic life, because once they had entered this path of servants of the faith, they had to leave behind the worries of the outside world, the exaggerated concern for relatives, parents and society, which lives by temptations.
Nothing that could alter the pure faith of the Church should escape him. Through such an education, he was able to form a congregation of nuns who were well-rounded in terms of community life and faith, cultivating all their moral qualities, capable of fully conforming to the dogma of the Church. He did the same with certain people who were ignorant of the faith and who had contradictory discussions with Father on matters of faith. Father Dometie did not give in easily to these unbelievers and occasionally met with them to show them the wrong way and their misunderstanding of our Orthodox Christian faith.
The bride that Father Dometie chose for himself was the Church, it was the monastery to which he had been called since childhood. He renounced the life of human vanities and turned his love to the Lord, whom he loved to the point of sacrifice. With earnest preparation and a chosen purity of soul, and having cast off all human temptations, he formed himself into a new man, as required by the rules of our Church, and with the cross in his hand he walked the path on which the Apostles of the Lord walked, surrounded by the priesthood and his faithful with love, respect and hope in the power of his prayer. I know of many events that I dare to call miracles.
(Gheorghe and Măria Spânu, retired teachers – Father Dometie de la Râmeț, edited by Costion Nicolescu, Byzantine Publishing House, Bucharest, 2001)