Fr. Roman Braga – a man of God

I have learnt over the years that encounters do not happen by chance, that bringing people face to face depends very little on their will, and that a certain patience in waiting can be rewarded, however late, with the sight of the seemingly impossible. When, in the 1970s, the venerable Sister Benedicta Braga spoke to me in her cell in Văratec about Archimandrite Roman Braga, who was then in the United States, Father Braga seemed to me like a character from a hagiographic story. There was so much sorrow in the nun’s words about the terrible sufferings of his younger brother in prison, and then the hard trials he had gone through in Mato Groso, which had seriously shaken his health, that I too was overwhelmed with sadness and infinite compassion for the monk. I imagined him as a mute, pale, weak, crushed by the tortures he had suffered, like an image in a Byzantine icon. And I wanted nothing more than for Mother Benedicta to see her brother once more before her end, to alleviate her pain and grief.

But history, by the changing will of God, by an amazing coincidence of circumstances (in fact, by the works of the Providence), allowed the two brothers to meet and to remain together, both serving our Romanian Orthodoxy, although far from their beloved borders.

As for me, I never imagined that I would ever have the joy of seeing Father Roman in the flesh.

But suddenly, in the summer of 1992, rumours began to circulate around Văratec about an unexpected visit of Father Braga to Romania and even to his house (and that of Sister Benedicta) in Văratec monastery. Rumours came and went, we dared not hope. Mother Euphrosyne, the disciple of Mother Benedicta, was in a state of constant expectation, but she said nothing. Anyway, the boiling was great.

And one day, after a student had been sent by Mother Superior Nazaria to tell us that Father Braga had had lunch at the Priory and would be staying there for the night, but that he would be passing by “home” anyway, the “miracle” happened.

At dusk, in one of those mysterious twilights that only the valley has, while my husband and I were sitting under the old walnut tree in our patio, we saw a monastic figure climbing up the path from the valley. He came quickly, with a youthful stride up the rather numerous steps, unaccompanied. But our nuns came out to meet him with great haste, happy to receive his blessing directly for the first time. Farewells, kisses on the hands, which the Father’s modesty refused, slowed down the rhythm of his ascent. But His Holiness was no less astonished at the sight of the house and its furnishings, built with superhuman effort by Mother Benedicta and her disciples decades ago. He paused, inquiring carefully about each thing, looking around at the tranquillity of the orchard, the hills in the distance and the proud forest at whose foot we stood.

When he reached the top of the stairs, my husband and I greeted him with barely contained excitement. At last we were standing before the one we had thought about and waited for for years and years. And we were speechless with amazement, for the image we had formed of His Holiness was not at all the true one. His face was not grim and scarred with the marks of pain. A warm and luminous joy radiated from the Father’s gentle figure, surrounded by a snow-white beard that seemed to surround an invisible nimbus. He embraced us and blessed us with true love, even though it was the first time he had seen us. We invited him to sit under the old walnut tree. I asked him how long he would stay with us and I could hardly persuade him to stay in His Holiness’s house because he was afraid of going out. But when he finally decided to stay in the settlement, which was all his, we went to the walnut tree. Then I noticed that Father’s gait was a little strange, that he moved quickly, but his feet had a tread that betrayed a lack of something and perhaps a pain.

We sat down and started talking, back and forth. At first it was small talk, polite exchanges. But soon Father’s coolness and openness put us at ease and we began to talk as if we had known each other forever. His Holiness was younger than us, but he was of the same generation. We had lived the same life story, we had common roots of intellect, soul and spirit. We evoked people we had known, circumstances we had all three passed through. We got excited and relived our lives, our youth. And all the time we were fascinated by what Father Braga was saying. With an elegance of surprising simplicity, His Holiness told us about things past and present, giving us a clear picture of what he had experienced. His judgments had a rare objectivity, based on a fair and profound knowledge of the facts. Whether he touched on a subject of history, politics, culture, not to speak of religious matters, he did so from such a true perspective that it seemed as if you were looking at a historian of the most penetrating kind, a politician with a lifetime of experience, a man of culture full of all the knowledge of the world. He spoke little of himself, and even less of the suffering he had endured. In passing, and only in response to a question from my husband, he mentioned Pitești, Țurcanu, and the way in which the latter, beat him with a whip in a way that made blood and pus spurt up to the ceiling. Then he mentioned that he had pulled out his bones (metatarsals), and I understood the reason for his peculiar gait. We looked at him in awe at the hellish tortures he spoke of, and with such a pure smile, such forgiveness, he remembered them, as if prison were a place of pleasant remembrance and the person who had been subjected to those tortures was not His Holiness.

And about no one, no negative word, no grumbling. In our Romanian anthill, teeming with resentment, with merciless criticism of people and actions, with anarchic violence of word, thought and deed, Father Roman showed us an exemplary Christian monk who had eradicated negativity itself from his being. Keeper of all the ordinances of the national institutions, living in his whole being the continuity of the nation, His Holiness looked with a reddened eye of Christian love into the future of Orthodox Romania. Without any ostentation, beyond any ostentation, filled with a humility that we have never seen in such a cultured man, he spoke to us gently, sweetly, as if to brighten the evening that had just begun, with a face that radiated such love and such spiritual warmth. We stayed together until late into the night, feeling uplifted and purified by this encounter. It had indeed been an encounter with a “man of God”.

(Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga – Memories of a human life III. Archimandrite Roman Braga, Doxologia Publishing House, Iași, 2013, pp. 5-11)