“Father Sofian has been an Elder since he was a child”
I first met Fr Sofian at the seminary. He was six years ahead of me. I saw him from time to time, I knew he was Brother Serghie Boghiu. He was very good-natured and in his place and cheerful – he was never sad, that was his nature.
And know that this is the nature of the spiritual man, because it is a sin to be sad when God is with us. It cannot be, sadness is a sin! That’s what I say – maybe that’s why God has helped me to live so long. I also tell the sisters, and here I have left a kind of legacy: the sisters in our convent are cheerful. I don’t think God made us just to walk with our eyes in the ground. God made us to enjoy the whole of his creation. We are in this great garden of God, with so many beautiful planets and so many stars and trees and forests and flowers and beautiful children – to rejoice! Let us rejoice spiritually, because everything God has made is good, and sadness is the result of sin. Lent, even the Great Lent, is full of joy. Sure, today we ate well, and we eat well, and tomorrow we fast to have the Holy Mass – but we must fast with joy. Let us thank God that we also have a day to think about the negative parts of ourselves, but let us never lose hope in God!
“He never contradicted himself, he was equal to himself”.
Father Sofian – and this is his characteristic – Father Sofian never contradicted himself. He was equal to himself, from childhood. He was always cheerful, silent, he spoke only the right words. It was almost said that he was mute; everyone else would make bad jokes, but Father Sofian would smile and be silent. That’s how he was until the end of his life. When you went to Antim monastery, even when he was old, he would sit with his head down, smiling and listening to you. Father Sofian didn’t argue.
He had been old since he was a child. He was called “the old child”. Quiet, clean, silent, obedient, but obedient to a fault. He did what his elders told him to do. He never contradicted himself, he was equal to himself. This is evidence of an innate spiritual maturity which he did not acquire through effort, as we do, but which God gave him through the Holy Spirit. It is an inspiration. He was obedient, the monastery depended on him for its administration, the others only for the commandments. Vasile Vasilache didn’t even know what was going on in Antim monastery. Father Sofian was in charge of everything: the food, the organisation, the external relations, everything. He was so virtuous in everything that he inspired the admiration of so many intellectuals from the University of Bucharest, who flocked to Antim monastery. The monastery had an elite of believers: Anton Dumitriu, Alexandru Mironescu, who read in the pew, were very faithful – all intellectuals from the University of Bucharest, who came there thanks to Father Sofian.
Later, there was the event of the “Burning Bush”, where Sandu Tudor stayed for two years. Father Sofian served with faith, with joy. He celebrated the Holy Mass with joy, with great joy and at the same time with great seriousness. I remember once he reprimanded a deacon, a professor of theology, who was sitting and serving with him in Antim, he reprimanded him for talking to a priest during the Holy Mass – that’s where he found himself talking! Yes, he would rebuke them with a seriousness: “It’s the Holy Mass! You have time afterwards. There’s the Holy Spirit!”
He was very serious, but at the same time he was good-hearted, very good-hearted. That’s another thing about him.
After that, I think the second great characteristic of Fr. Sofian’s spirituality is that he was a practical spiritualist, not a meditative spiritualist. Don’t imagine Father Sofian as a man taking a bath and doing the prayer of the heart. Father Sofian was practical: he put his hand in his pocket and gave. That’s why beggars followed him in droves. Sometimes he would approach them, because they would come to the door and go into the house – you know how Gypsies are – but he never refused anyone.
He was a practical confessor. He had a list of everyone he knew: widows who stayed at home in bed, who couldn’t go to church, who had nothing to eat, poor people in flats in Bucharest – he had the address, the number, the flat they lived in, everything. Especially now, after the revolution, when he was the only abbot in Antim, he used to go to these rich people after the revolution, to all the secretaries who opened import-export companies and all sorts of things, and: “Look, I don’t care, I won’t criticise you in the newspapers as the journalists criticise you, where you got the money from and what you did. It’s good that you opened the door, but look at this list of poor people: this flat, this number”.
And they’d watch and execute. He’d say to them all: “Don’t forget this list! They don’t have anything to eat – God gave it to you, but He didn’t give it to you for nothing!
They were impressed, he won them all over. It was his practical spirituality. He wasn’t a man to sit idly by, so Patriarch Justinian loved him enormously – and Teoctist… And he also had a good influence on those two patriarchs.
Patriarch Justinian also used him as a teacher at the School of Byzantine Painting in the Romanian Patriarchate there, and as an abbot in Antim, and as a parish priest in Antim, all the time. He didn’t have time to sit somewhere and do the prayer of the heart, to say that he was a contemplative confessor and a saint who sat and prayed all day and all night – he didn’t even have time to finish his prayers! He read them, he didn’t read them, maybe at night, God knows!
“Always with a smile on his face”.
We slept in his room for a few nights when we came from America, until they put us up in the Patriarchate building, which is now a hostel. Yes, he preferred me to sleep with him and he would leave me in the room and I would look at his books, his prayer books. He didn’t have time. He’d come in a flash, pass the room and say: “I’m disturbing you a bit, but I don’t have time to stay, I have to go, the Patriarch is calling me!
He would also stay in the church, he would make time for confession until 2 o’clock in the morning. That’s how I saw him when I came from America.
He was quiet, cheerful, but of an inner cheerfulness – that’s why he was always smiling. He would sit and listen and smile. Spirituality was innate in him, but he reached out, helped where he thought it was appropriate, was a good and obedient administrator. Obedient to two patriarchs who were very impressed and influenced by him. Patriarch Theoctist also confessed to Father Sofian.
Sofian was silent, but he enjoyed everything. He enjoyed everything. As St. Paul says: “Rejoice always” (1 Thessalonians 5:16).
The same in prison. In prison he, with his painting and his knowledge of painting, together with Father Felix, did not work as hard as we did – shovelling the wheelbarrows and building dikes day and night so that the arms of the Danube would not flood, and in the summer growing beets. Those communists gave the Brăila and Ialomița basins to cultivation, but there was also the Siberia of Romania, with a few dozen colonies… I spent two years in one of the colonies. I was older there at the beginning, but he came from Aiud with Father Felix (Dubneac), and we found ourselves in a corner of a large dormitory, a large, very cold hut – in one corner there were eight monks. It was a whole monastery!
I don’t remember anything else about the prison except this: his innate cheerfulness, his quiet spirituality. He helped whoever he could – if there was an old man who couldn’t do anything, he was the only one who jumped in to help him.
That was what Father Sofian was all about: helping others, because he was convinced that we exist as long as we help others. As long as we do it for ourselves, we don’t exist, we don’t live. The life of a Christian is “What can I do for you? Maybe you need something, maybe I can help someone! That’s what made Father’s life meaningful. As long as you are doing that and making a case for yourself, “Yes, what about me? What, I wasn’t…? Mine! Mine! That’s what I did! If it wasn’t me…”.
If you keep saying that, you don’t exist as a person, you exist as an individual. Or the individual in Greek is atomos – the word means complete isolation; hence atom. If you are in community, you live in community and you need others and you help each other in this practical love, then you are a person. So the Christian life is meaningful as long as you do something for others. That was Father Sofian. He never thought of himself.
(Material by Hieromonk Teofan Popescu – Orthodox Family Magazine no. 9 (56)/September 2013, pp. 11-13)