Father John Boboc was a prince laden with graces
The more you know and understand, the more you are obliged to witness. Like St. John the Baptist, each person “came into the world to bear witness” to something, and especially to someone (cf. Jn 1:6-7). I will never have the time or the strength to bear witness to “all the joys the Lord has given me” (Ps. 115), but I cannot rest until I have given witness, albeit inadequately, to an extraordinary Christian existence that for a time illuminated one of the purest Romanian lands – the subcarpathian hills of Buzău. After many years of deliberate oblivion, the face of one of the greatest Christian mystics, through whom God blessed these “plaiuri”, a spiritual descendant of the great schema monk Vasile de la Poiana Mărului, a contemporary and neighbour of the only great non-clerical mystic – Vasile Voiculescu – must be brought to light.
We pronounce his name, the most Romanian, destined for this chosen Christian nation: Father Ioan Boboc, from Lopătari.
Whoever would be a pilgrim in these places would recognise, as Odobescu once did, the unmistakable appearance of the people of these mountains. He was a prince full of grace, with a tall and delicate stature, with huge eyebrows and black moustaches, such as I have never seen before, with deep and sincere eyes, with an angelic voice and predestined for prayers and psalms, with the most aristocratic gestures, without being studied, with a great knowledge of the human soul, which he ruled with the deepest love. For the age through which he passed, he was the bearer of that mirage, that irresistible charm which all the civilising heroes of the world have had. I am not exaggerating when I say that he not only brought something new, a particular theological culture, a chosen ministry or an exceptional priestly behaviour; he also brought and established, in record time, a new civilisation. Wherever he stayed, for a few weeks or months, he established a fundamentally new life, whose influence encompassed all facets of human and even cosmic existence. He did not just enter the life of an individual or the home of a Christian; he entered the universe of the village and, like an irresistible demiurge, with his only working tool – the word – he transformed the whole of creation. I had the joy and the privilege of meeting a fortunate number of Romanian and foreign priestly personalities. In each of them I admired and desired certain graces. Father John had all of them and, in addition, a lightning power of conversion. Everything he did, with his work, his word and his prayer, had one aim: to reveal the primary meaning of Christian life, to rediscover the Christ dimension of the life of Romanians today. One had the most vivid impression that this figure in our time had descended directly from the pages of the New Testament, a book he knew by heart and mastered in its most authentic spirit. He knew the Socratic mystery of self-revelation for everyone, however simple, and for the first but definitive time, man knew himself and discovered his eternal value. From that moment on, the old man died and the rediscovered man lived and worked only in the perspective of the eternal value that this Christian psychologist had brought to the surface.
It is understandable that such an unusual personality aroused terrible opposition. Many of his fellow priests found themselves before him as before that “stumbling stone” from whose face they were often crushed (cf. Rom 9:33). The conflict ended in exile, to another village, of course, where the indefatigable preacher started all over again, but with enormous results, and the burden he had so laboriously lifted stayed up there, way up there, and he moved another mountain and another burden elsewhere.
Like the signposted road in the story, those who wish to follow the itinerary of their troubled lives will easily discover the mark of their personality. Rarely have I seen Christians more luminous, more lucid, more determined but peaceful than those “born in Christ” of Father John. The churches through which he passed were quickly overcrowded, the order and authenticity of the moments of worship were perfect. Christian happiness, the holy joy that guided all the manifestations of the faithful, was realised in the hearts of all. Under his serene gaze, the life of the parishioners gradually became a continuous Eucharist. The notorious sinners who filled the life of the village with their vices were so suddenly transformed into born-again penitents, completely healed, that people wondered whether it was “they or others like them” (Jn 9:9).
Sacred Scripture, the Paterikon and the Lives of the Saints became the only books on the table under the icon, and no bread was eaten until, with exemplary consistency, one had first read the Sacred Word or sung one of the hundreds of hymns learned from the Father.
Few people were loved as he was. If I had not known and loved this man, along with countless others who were his disciples, I would never have understood the clause of Christian love that the Saviour laid down in the words: “ He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me.” (Mt 10:37). It was not him I loved; there was something or someone so clearly in his feelings that I felt that for the first time and more than ever I was discovering in him not a man but the Man. Any one of us, young or old, would gladly give his life for him, not out of fanaticism but out of devotion. He had hundreds of followers and no fanatics. He enlightened the people, not indoctrinated them; they would have sacrificed themselves for him with the ease with which one tears up a flower of the field and throws it into the water of a clear lake.
But he did not ask for anyone’s sacrifice. He had come to give his life to those who were thirsty for life, and he did not spare his own, but gave it to all without reserve.
His sacrifice was total; the way was the same as that of Christ, Calvary was inevitable. In the years of atheistic persecution that had savagely swept the Stalinist East, a light like his could not remain untouched by the forces of darkness. Mere warnings were followed by threats and framing. But his morality and goodness were unassailable, and there was “nothing wrong with the man”.
This does not mean that he was not condemned, just as all the great and true of the nation were condemned for their “Christian innocence”. Indeed, this has been the main offence in all anti-Christian condemnations from Christ to the present day. For the fundamental inconvenience of being true and good (Mt 5:10), he and all those mentioned by the Saviour in the eighth beatitude also went through the bloody gulag of the haunting decades of the 1950s and 1960s. His physical strength and the strength of his faith helped him to get out alive, but once he was free, he started all over again, because that was why he had come into the world – to preach. In everything he did, he understood that he had to go all the way, and in spite of the great suffering he had endured in prison (he had tuberculosis of the lungs and was treated with special herbs), his fight for a living and shining Christianity continued with even greater vehemence. Prison had not weakened him, on the contrary.
A very telling detail could paint a more authentic picture of the good Christian shepherd. On his way to the place of his doom, he met a brother priest, younger but just as desirous as himself (whom, incidentally, the bishops had promoted – a year or two later), who asked him to take care of his flock, to give them Communion every three weeks, as he had trained them, and to replace him until his return. And when he went to his death, he was not thinking of himself, but of his beloved Christians.
Of course, it has to be said that Father John Boboc will remain in the history of contemporary Christianity as one of the most powerful personalities who adorned and led the movement known as the Lord’s Army. I personally knew him from the inside, growing up in the bosom of this world and in close proximity to Father until my teenage years. He combined in the most successful way two great forces: the specific zeal of the Oasis and the fullness of Orthodoxy, while preserving the undiminished health of authentic Christian life and the balance of the Romanian soul. In this way, the area in which he worked has remained to this day the purest and most luminous Orthodox life, with heresies and sects still inactive and no “soldier” broken away from the Church. The first thing he impressed upon the souls of the faithful was the consciousness of the unity of the priesthood and of the unity of the Church; no one spoke more beautifully and gloriously of priests than he did, and we who listened to him respected every priest as we respected Christ.
He fought tirelessly to purify Christian worship from all the additions and formalisms that made religious life less than orthodox. In the many pages written by his hand with untiring diligence, and which most believers keep faithfully in a pocket close to their heart, one can decipher the almost haunting idea of early Christian life. It emphasised purity of heart, serious confession and Communion for the worthy at least once every three weeks, but it loved no less those who did not keep to this brisk, eschatological rhythm of early Christianity. It was with him that I first encountered this “Holy Mass after Holy Mass”, in the sense that the life of the true Christian, when lived in the Church, should not differ too much from that lived at home and in the world. For him there were not two worlds, but only one in which Christ must reign ceaselessly and truly.
He prayed unceasingly, day and night, and taught “in season and out of season”, urging everyone to read the New Testament, the Catechism, the Lives of the Saints, the Salvation of Sinners, etc., until many of us knew much of this doctrinal treasury almost by heart. Lent was joyfully observed by all, young and old, and the whole village, with very few exceptions, came to Holy Communion. The people were so beautiful in those sublime moments, and from the Holy Communion came a heavenly light that shone on everyone’s face, like the sun shining in the window in the morning. I did not know what the ugly man was until life had banished me from that world that Father John had created in a continuous work of which Saint Paul speaks (Gal 4:19). The longing of my soul for those times will always remain without relief, and the first name I mention in the Proskomidie, on liturgical mornings, is his, as in countless homilies in the country, where “John the Priest” is the beginning of those mentioned in the Holy Sacrifice.
It was very difficult for Father Ioan to be defeated by someone who, like the ravens, could not stand the pleasant smell of truth. When imprisonment did not produce the desired results, another weapon was used, more diabolical and subtle, a kind of white torture: neuropsychiatry. The most beautiful man in the world, who had cured many of the absolute and deadly disease of sin (Rom 5:10), was kept for years in the demonic clinics of that infernal century, where he never for a moment ceased to make patients of the very people who were forced to “treat” him according to the instructions they had received.
In the end, the Christian volcano was subdued, and all that remained on his suffering face was a boundless smile and a single formula that he repeated to everyone who met him: “God bless you!”
I can assure those who survived this heinous crime (and are probably living well) that not only did they not make a victim of him, they made a great sacrifice to this Christian nation. They did not make him an enemy because he did not know how to hate, but he is for them, on the throne of the supreme judgement, an incomparable defender and mediator, because, in the space of Christian paradoxical logic, the real victim is not Abel but Cain.
The last Christian gesture for the great martyr was made by the priest Grigorescu Ioan from Poinărei – Vâlcea (probably a spiritual fruit of the Father who, I believe, managed to attract the greatest number of young people to the priesthood – more recently bishops – I personally know about thirty or forty priests in the Buzău area alone). The latter, who took him into his home, cared for him until he entrusted his spirit into the hands of the Heavenly Father. There, at the foot of the mountains, in the wing of the church, rests the one who knew no rest on earth, and who sanctified the heart of the Romanian land, just as he sanctified its face while he was alive, by being a celestial light.
(Pr. Ioan Buga – Unde a fost Biserica, St. George the Elder Publishing House, Bucharest, 2001, pp. 148-153)