Father Dometie, our spiritual father

Lord Jesus Christ, make me worthy and give me the strength to testify here with my simple words about Father Dometie, our confessor.

In the monastery of Râmeț in the Apuseni Mountains, and especially in the whole of Transylvania, his memory is alive. Through him, God worked and shared peace, peace of mind and forgiveness of sins. Through him, all who sought him and asked for his prayer and advice saw God.

In Romania, too, there is a great thirst for God. Father gave his life, his heart and his mind to our Heavenly Father, entrusted himself into His hands and experienced the joy of depending on Him and belonging to Him with all his love; in the light of this icon of our Father, I speak as a living witness of his life.

Father Dometie, the fourth of twelve children of a peasant family from the county of Buzău, was brought up in the love of God, in respect for honest work and in a sense of responsibility towards his fellow men. After finishing elementary school, he entered the theological seminary, where he proved to be a diligent student, with a great aptitude for books, and from his student days he was noted for his good manners, piety, modesty and love of worship. He was an accomplished singer. Father Arsenie Boca, of the monastery of Sâmbăta de Sus, called him Cucuzel, after the name of a great singer from Mount Athos. He came to Sâmbăta de Sus every summer with other students. Many of them accepted the monastic life.

It was there, in Sâmbăta, that he made the decision to give himself and to consecrate his life, his thoughts and his will to God. There he accepted to be with Jesus all his days and understood the words of the Apostle Matthew: “Master, I will follow you wherever you go” (Matthew 8:19).

Immediately after graduating from the University in 1949, the young graduate went to the Prislop Monastery near Hațeg, where Father Arsenie was then staying, and remained his disciple. There the new monk grew spiritually, purified his soul and became a true disciple of the Lord. There he himself became a skilful, gentle, merciful and loving confessor of the poor, the afflicted and the tempted.

On the occasion of his decision to consecrate himself to the monastic life, he said at a celebration in his native village: “I will go to Transylvania, where I received the call to monasticism, and there I want my bones to remain”.

In Prislop, he served at the Holy Altar with devotion and zeal; he consecrated himself to the faithful with great devotion, by word and counsels. The faithful came to the monastery with many wounds of the soul, and he consoled and encouraged them. He took them out into the countryside, to the hills and glades, delighting them with hymns, sometimes even taking them to the railway station.

In May 1952, Father Dometie was transferred with the same mission to the hermitage of Afteia-Cioara, the foundation of St. Sophrony. He stayed there for a short time, but revived this spiritual settlement, which was situated high in the mountains and difficult to reach. It was on his initiative that the road to the monastery was built; many faithful came to help him with thirty oxen. Father sat down and talked to each one of the faithful, listening to their worries and concerns, giving them words of encouragement and hearing their confessions. They left the hermitage peaceful and at peace.

As for our monastery, which he was to found a little later, he had beautiful and forward-looking thoughts. More than 20 young women from the Sebeș valley had gathered around him, but the enemy was preparing many difficulties for him. More and more often the authorities and the representatives of Deva, Alba and Sebeș threatened him with arrest. Many people came to the hermitage. The Cugir valley was full of believers at every festival, but the problems were many and great.

Stalinism was in full swing. The authorities forced him to leave the diocese. Bishop Andrei Mageru of the Arad diocese understood the reasons for his departure and granted him canonical leave from the diocese. On the feast of the Assumption, after celebrating Holy Liturgy and confessing and receiving communion from everyone, he left.

He slipped down into the valley unseen, and when the people woke up, they began to weep and desperately looked for him, but they could not find him. Father later told us how, on his way to the station, through the woods, he heard voices around him. Not wanting to meet anyone and not wanting to be seen, he stayed close to a big oak tree and after a while he saw some civilians with a police dog. He prayed to the Mother of God, if she would allow him, to cover him as she knew how. He clung to the oak and prayed until they had passed him by. No one saw or felt him. Then we found out that he was wanted by Securitate, just like us.

The next day, as planned, we met Father at the Vinț railway station. He suggested that those of us who wanted to go should go to the diocese of Buzău, where he was well known. We were twelve girls from Pianu, Pianu de Sus, Loman, Laz, Petrești and Săsciori. On the eve of the Feast of the Holy Cross in 1952, Father was waiting for us at the railway station in Ploiesti. With God’s help we arrived safely. Father Dometie retired to the monastery of monks in Ciolanu and we girls to the convent of nuns in Rătești. There we attended the monastic school, where Father was the director, coming from Ciolanu three times a week.

Father Dometie had asked Father Antim of Buzău, since our arrival, that our group of girls learn the true Orthodox monastic tradition and, after we were strengthened in this tradition, to agree to return to Ardeal where we would found a convent of nuns. We were tempted to give up on returning to Transylvania, but Father Dometie’s word was law for us, and so we set off for Râmeț. Father could not come with us from the beginning. On 2 June 1957 he ordained seven of us monks. In 1959, Bishop Teofil of Cluj appointed him abbot of the Râmeț monastery.

The monastery, one of the oldest Orthodox monastic settlements in Transylvania, is located in the valley carved out by the Geoagiu River in the Trascăului Mountains. The road to the monastery reveals to the faithful and travellers a unique historical monument from the 15th century. Its history has been a hard one, with frequent “damages” and expulsions of monks. In 1762 it fell victim to the cannon of the Habsburg general Bukow. On the yellowed pages of a Service book, a monk wrote: “I, the monk Sylvester, wrote when the infidels destroyed the monastery of Râmeț and that of Geoagiu, in 1762, on 20 August, a Saturday, to their demise”.

New storms raged. In 1785, the foreign rule punished the monks and believers from Râmeț, who had participated in the Horea, Cloșca and Crișan uprisings, with another “ruin”. The same monk wrote bitterly in another church book: “I wrote this with sorrow, true, when they ruined the monasteries, those of Geoagiu and Râmeț, the first ruin was the number of years 1762 and the second ruin was 1785, the month of December in 23 days, on a Tuesday. I, the monk Sylvester, have written it”.

In 1792, the Court of Vienna issued a decree allowing the church to be repaired, but only as a myrrh church. Although the monastery was thus abolished, the faithful considered it a monastery church and called it the “mother” of the seven churches of the Râmeț Valley. Monastic life was restored only in 1940, with a few monks, and was transformed into a nunnery by the decision of the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church on 30 October 1955.

When Father Dometie and the nuns arrived in Râmeț, the place was almost deserted. Only the old church was left. It was difficult to get there. There was no road for 18 kilometres.

The river had to be crossed twenty-two times through the valley. The place was poor; there were no stoves in the cells and no electricity. We nuns hadn’t even thought about where we would end up. We didn’t know the harshness and desolation of Râmeț. Only Father Dometie and Father Varsanufie knew. When we sat down, we said to Father Dometie, who continued to encourage us: “Oh, Father, you have brought us here behind God’s back! It was hard, but we were happy and enthusiastic about everything we did. Father urged us to be patient, to pray and to have hope. But new trials were to come for the monastery. In 1959-1960, during the communist regime, many nuns were expelled from the monasteries and sent to civilian life. The most difficult moment came on 26 October 1959, when Father and Mother Abbess Lavrentia were called to Cluj. There they were told to let us go home, and “if we make a disturbance, he will pay with his head and his life, and the sunlight will never see him again”.

When they arrived home in the evening, we, a few nuns, went to meet them in a place called Precup, down in the valley, not knowing what news they would bring. The father began to cry and said to us: “This is how Satan wanted to sieve you. Now you must be strong and show your unwavering determination to serve God for life.”

We returned to the monastery. No one slept that night: Father gathered us in the church and spoke to us. The choir had always been united, but now more than ever. We left the monastery in the spring of 1960, on the 13th of May. It was the most painful day of our lives. Young and old, we had to take off our monastic robes and set out to wander the world. We understood that we had to resign ourselves so as not to cause any disturbance, so that Father could remain free and we could still have him among us. On the morning of the 13th Father celebrated Holy Liturgy and the whole choir received Holy Communion. Then we gathered in the courtyard to go to Teiuș. Then old Groza, almost 90 years old (he lived above the monastery), came and said to Father: “Father Dometie, let me ring the bells of the convent so that none of the nuns will perish in the waves of the world, because we rang these bells during the First World War and none of our boys from Râmeț perished, but they returned home safely”.

What weeping there was then, Lord! There was so much grief that Father didn’t know which one to appease. To ease our pain, he accompanied us on foot to Teiuș.

Returning to our homes for a while, we gathered those of us who were in nearby villages, and a year later, in 1961, we built the parish house in Râmeț with Father in just three months, with the intention of returning here and working as civilians making carpets.

The militia got wind of this, took our identity cards and evicted us from the parish house. We then tried to get permission to work at the carpet factory in Teiuș. They replied that there was no place for us nuns except in a stable in Ursu. This solution was given to us by the party secretary, who was to have a great misfortune: the only daughter he had went mad.

Father Dometie advised us to accept. We cleaned out the stable, wiped out the spiders and arranged the room as best we could. We made a room for the carpet workshop, a bedroom and a kitchen, installed electricity, made terracotta and gave the stable a new face. The militia would come by at night and check us out: they would look under the blankets and often in the pots of food on the stove. We didn’t know what they thought of us, but we were being watched every step of the way. During the seven months we lived in the stable, poor Father would come at night, with his bag on his back, so as not to be seen and reported to Securitate. He would bring us his word, his blessing and his food. He would bring us communion, milk, cottage cheese and eggs. He never took money from people, neither for work nor for sympathy, but if people gave him food, he would get it for us. Almost every week he would walk from the monastery, and in the middle of the night, when only the roosters were awake and crowing, Father would come along the riverbed, tied with a brooch on his head to hide his beard, with his cloak tucked into his belt so as not to show that he was a monk, and he would come through the bottom of the garden to our new home in the stable at Teiuș.

We didn’t manage to stay here either until 13 March 1962, when we were forced to leave Teiuș so that we wouldn’t gather again and rebuild the monastery. We then decided to go to Aiud, where the carpet cooperative was based. Father Dometie advised us to take with us the other nuns who had worked with us before the monastery was closed. He gave us travel money and we went through the Sebeș Mountains, through the communities where the nuns were scattered. We took them all with us and managed to reorganise the carpet section. The local authorities seemed happy with us; we didn’t cause them any trouble. We did our job and exceeded the production plan every month. All we knew was to work and pray. For nine years, while I was in Aiud, Father Dometie stayed in Aiud as a missionary priest in four churches, among the Mocani, in the mountain villages. He bought us clothes and helped us with whatever he had. When he visited us every week, we would gather in the house he had bought for us, we would eat together, we would pray together, he would shake his pockets for the last penny, and when he had to leave, he would say to us: “Sisters, be good and give me five lei for the journey”. This was his life, this was his sacrifice, and we will never forget him.

“Pray without ceasing,” Father said to us. “When you have Christ in your prayers, you drive out Satan. Only in this way will the Kingdom of God be established in you, as St. Cassian teaches us”. Through prayer we felt our eyes lifted up to God’s light. We were wandering, we were scattered, but through prayer we were together. We never stopped praying for our return to the monastery. Father made us understand and live the meaning of the Apostle’s words: “But when you pray, go into your closet, and when you have shut the door, pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you”. (Matthew 6:6).

We stayed in Aiud from the 13th of March 1962 until the spring of 1969, when we were allowed to return to the convent, in civilian clothes, with the request to organise a carpet section, to which we would bring the local women, the women of the Mocanis, so that they would have a source of livelihood.

The Lord had answered our prayer. We returned home after much wandering and much anxiety and soul-searching, but there were still many hardships because the convent had been taken by force by the state and a hut and a buffet had been set up there. We were like tenants, living with the tourists. I couldn’t stand that kind of hell in the monastery. We had no rest and went begging everywhere.

Back at the monastery, we resumed our work. The old chapel had to be rebuilt. We worked for a year to make it fit for purpose. During Lent, for the first time since the suppression, Father celebrated Liturgy in the chapel, and we were surprised by the county secretary, who had come with a delegation to see how we were doing. As they entered the corridor and opened the door of the old chapel, seeing it in its new guise, they addressed us with scorn: “What have you done here! What did you promise when you were allowed to come here?”

With fear and trembling, but with strong faith in God, we answered them that we had done nothing but what we had to do, that this church should not be a den of robbers and a house of debauchery, as they had given it its destination, but a house of prayer. They replied: “You may make yourselves martyrs; we do not want to make ourselves martyrs. We have wives and children”. They were stunned when they entered the church and saw Father in his vestments. I promised them that they would not suffer because of us.

They left and we remained determined to continue what we had started, God willing. We built a large carpet workshop. We managed to convince them that the cabin that had been operating in the monastery was no longer needed and we undertook to build another cabin with our own hands, outside the monastery, which we built in 1973. We built a one-room school above the workshops for the children of the village in the monastery valley. We built it in a single month, in October 1972, when Father brought a bulldozer from the valley to cut a bank out of the hills where the school still stands. How much Father wanted to build this school! When the monastery was destroyed during the Habsburg era, the children of the surrounding villagers were left without a place to learn to read and write. The villagers of Râmeți and Ponor complained to the authorities about the plight of their children: “We, Râmețians and Ponors, since these two villages, we there (at the monastery) have been thought to have a school and teachers and children to teach; and if this too is not taken away, we remain without schooling amenities, like beasts”.

At the beginning of January 1972, after years of hard trials, the monastery was authorised by people chosen and granted from above, and monastic life resumed normally.

The small choir of that time, together with Father Dometie, rebuilt the chapel, added the archdeaconry, the presbytery, the refectory; the chapels were enlarged, a museum collection was organised with old documents related to the history of the monastery, old service books, icons on wood, icons on glass and ethnographic objects. A new bell tower was built, a bridge over the river, electric lighting and central heating were installed and many other works were carried out for the good management of the monastery. We hurried on with holy haste. We wanted to do what we had not been able to do for many years. Everything was done with our prayers, with our souls and palms, with our blood. I remember Father Dometie how, with his hands full of blood, he took his stockings off his feet and put them on his hands in order to resist the complete unloading of a wagon with building blocks and tiles from Teiuș. Father Dometie and Father Varsanufie dug up the stones with sledgehammers, and the nuns carried stones and earth in buckets from hand to hand.

Father took on the hardest work, working tirelessly all day long, without forgetting the sacred services. He taught us to trust in our own strength, but not to forget that our Father is with us and helps us. He said to the faithful: “It is you who plough, sow and cultivate the earth, but God gives the fruit of the earth through His care”.

In July 1975, the monastery was hit by floods. The water came in high, beat against the walls, and in some places overtopped them. On Sunday 6th July the water receded. After celebrating Holy Liturgy, Father Dometie and some of the young nuns walked to Geoagiu, through the forest, because it was impossible to go downhill because of the damage caused by the water. They wanted to get food from the monastery’s car, which had been trapped by the water. The nuns who accompanied him told us that Father was desperate, but he kept his courage up. On the way they sang “The shepherd has lost his sheep”. From Geoagiu to the monastery, they shared their weight according to their strength. Each with his cloak on his back, they made their way back. The father stayed to take the bread baskets, because they were the heaviest. The nuns saw the weariness that had come over him and gave him a lighter weight. There was a sadness in their faces that they could not explain.

There were still miles to go. Father was even more tired, he was out of breath. The nuns were left behind. When they reached the parish church, they had to cross a precipice. Father guided them carefully. But at that moment, without a word, he laied down. He looked at them all and then he was gone. He died a Christian death, painless, as the just die. The monastery was in a state of mourning and weeping. It was a moment of great trial and only with the mercy of God and the help of Our Lady could we get through it. It remained for us to continue what he had taught and instructed us. We had a lot to do, especially to fulfil Father’s dearest wish: to build a new church here, next to the old 15th century church, to accommodate the crowds of faithful who came to the monastery. Sometimes he would say to us: “Nuns, how I would love to build a cathedral here in the middle of the courtyard! But they don’t let me…”

God wanted us to lay the foundations of the new church seven years after his death, and a few years later, on 29 June 1992, it was consecrated by His Beatitude Patriarch Theoctist and the Hierarchs of our Church, in the presence of tens of thousands of faithful from all over the country.

Everyone who knew Father Dometie and sought his teaching and advice will remember him with gratitude. He was a confessor and a friend to all. He was a pure soul, a man of action and example, a man of prayer. He had much spiritual teaching which he knew how to give to others. He always had a useful word for people. Serving God, he served each one of us. Small in stature and simple as he was, so great was his heart. He was so merciful that he gave away all his clothes. Often he would come without his shirt and shoes, and when he had nothing else to wear, he would go to the nuns in the chapels and take a pyjama top and the shoes that fit him, without asking or telling anyone. When the nun that noticed the missing items would ask at the table if anyone knew what had gone missing, Father Dometie would smile and happily tell us that he wanted to ensure our entry into heaven. There was never a poor man or woman in need who entered the monastery gates without Father Dometie greeting them with open arms and a beaming face. I often saw him in winter taking off his boots and shoes and giving them to the poor and needy. We nuns used to make him a sheepskin coat for the winter, but it didn’t last more than a few days and we would wake up to find Father without his coat. We didn’t dare ask him where his clothes were or what he had done with them. He would tell us: “The Lord has come to me and I have borrowed it to prepare the way for you and me to enter His Kingdom. In the 28 years that he was my confessor, I never saw him wearing luxurious clothes. He lived very modestly, but very cleanly. He was an open and happy person, without any concealment. He sang to us in church, at services, sang to us at meals, sang to us on the hard roads we travelled. He couldn’t bear to see us crying, upset or sad. “May God protect us from despair, which is a great sin,” Father said. “A bride of God cannot be sad because the Bridegroom is always with her. We must give glory to God and thank Him day and night for giving us this pure, beautiful, angelic life,” he said, wanting the whole choir to sing in the pews and him to sing at the altar. His gift was so great that I hardly felt the days go by, even though I had many difficulties. Father got us through them almost unnoticed. He was for each mother individually and for all together, making no distinction between mother and father, brother and sister. He never gave us orders. He was the first to do everything, and if he couldn’t do it himself, he asked us to help. He’d go into the forest with us to get wood and we’d bring it back. We didn’t find anything difficult. We were happy and confident that God was with us and watching over us.

Father also told us what to prepare for the meal. When he saw buses of faithful arriving and knew we didn’t have enough food, he would urge us to put the pots on the fire and bless the preparation of the soup. He would go into the church for confession, for the vigil or for Liturgy, as the time came, and at the end he would call all the people to the table, and it never happened that there was not enough food; it was as if God was multiplying it.

When he was at the table and he saw a believer in the courtyard, he would go out and call him and if there was no more room, he would sit him down at the table. I saw him do this hundreds of times. He wanted to set an example for us so that we would learn to do the same.

His joy was to do good, to help, to give. He was ready to refuse any comfort, to give up anything that belonged to him. Many times, on great feast days, when every corner of the monastery courtyard was occupied by the faithful, we would leave Father after a night of sleeping on a chair in the Holy Altar, because he had given up his cell to some of the faithful who he felt needed a roof over their heads; in his daily behaviour we could see the fulfilment of the words of Saint Gregory the Theologian: “There is nothing more that man can do in order to grow in likeness to God except to do good”.

He was a great peacemaker. When he was called to make peace in a family, no matter how far away, he did not hesitate to go. He would go to confession for three or four days at a time, often sitting in the confessional chair until midnight. He never let anyone leave without a complaint. He often told us: “If we take one step towards God, He will take ten towards us”.

Father Dometie’s spiritual concern was to sanctify the thoughts and feelings of each believer: “The acquisition of the Kingdom of Heaven can be achieved by purity of soul, by purity of heart and self-giving, by confession of sins and by breaking away from passions. He spoke to us of the fullness of life in Christ and the radiance of His image in us. He told us the words of the Apostle Paul: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

The holiness of his preaching was matched by the holiness of his example. He spoke with simplicity and behaved with humility. It was as St. Nicodemus the Aghiorite says: “Remember, brother, that Jesus Christ, Who was born, came into the world to conquer with His humility”. Because of his love for people, his gift of mercy and his goodness of heart, he became known throughout the country as a spiritual father to whom Romanians flocked from all corners of the country. For Father’s funeral, thousands of faithful walked to the monastery, despite the floods. They were all crying: “Our Father, to whom do you leave us and who opens his arms to us when we come to the monastery?”

The image of Father Dometie remained vivid in the soul of each of the nuns in Râmeți. He brought us up in the spirit of holiness, self-denial, renunciation, awakening, prayer and work. He told us: “If you only pray on your knees, you will not go far; if you do not forgive your offenders from your heart, your prayer will only reach the ceiling of the room. Your prayer must be unceasing. Pray for every person in need and for every temptation that threatens you. Pray to the Lord, thanking Him for His gifts, for the spiritual joys that are yours. Through prayer, that tree will grow in you of which the Holy Gospel speaks, “to which the birds of the air come and make their home in its branches”. (Matthew 13:32)

When I was a young man, I asked him what was the point of building so many walls and whether it would not be better to sit in the church and pray. Father said: “We must always pray as if we were leaving this world tomorrow, and we must work as if we were going to live forever.”

The memory of his deeds has long gone beyond the walls of the monastery. Many of his deeds are known only to God and those who enjoyed them. We, the nuns of Râmeți, constantly feel the presence and the prayers of our confessor. From where he is watching us, we wish that he would enjoy us.

(Mother Ierusalima, abbess of the Râmeți Monastery – Father Dometie de la Râmeți, edited by Costion Nicolescu, Byzantine Publishing House, Bucharest, 2001)