“God sent us to the West to open the doors of the church” – interview with Fr. Roman Braga
He spent more than a decade in communist prisons, but he has no regrets about his imprisonment. He was part of the “Burning Bush” movement, where he met great Orthodox confessors. After his release, he managed to leave the country with the support of Patriarch Justinian and lived in exile, working as an Orthodox priest in Brazil and the United States. For more than two decades, he has been the confessor of the Assumption Monastery in Michigan and one of the most popular Orthodox priests overseas.
With Christ, behind bars
He seemed to be suspended. Between worlds, between words, between silence. His voice broke the silence of the small room, where only the faint flicker of the tape recorder could be heard. He was on a visit to the country, one of the few he had allowed himself since the revolution. Before that, he had never been allowed anywhere near Romania. Not because he didn’t want to, but because he would have been thrown back in prison, from which he had just escaped, thanks to Patriarch Justinian.
He had been arrested as a student when, together with other young theologians, he signed a manifesto calling on all Romanians to fast on Easter Saturday, which at the time fell on 1 May, International Labour Day, one of the great Communist holidays. After an initial five years’ imprisonment, he walked through the gates of the Antim monastery and joined the famous group of resistance through faith and culture, which would become known as “The Burning Bush”. In all, he spent 11 years in communist prisons, the best years of his youth. It always surprised me that he didn’t regret them. Light, prayer, God, love – they came up many times during the interview, even when he was talking about the communist persecution. When the flickering of the tape recorder stopped and silence fell between us, I understood. Father hadn’t really been imprisoned. Never. It was in prison that he found the total freedom of faith in God. With Christ, behind bars.
The ”Burning Bush” movement
“The spiritual fathers I have known in my life and who have influenced me are almost all in the cemetery… Among them, Father Benedict Ghiuș, a lesser known confessor, holds a special place for me because he was a man of rare spiritual intimacy. He did not expose himself. He was elected Bishop of Argeș, more or less against his will, because Nichifor Crainic nominated him. He was the confessor of the “Burning Bush” movement in the monastery of Antim. It was to him that we made our confessions, he gave us the blessing to begin the prayer of the heart. He was much sought after by intellectuals, but he was so modest that he would consult with all the monks, simple as they were. If you sat down with Father Ghiuș for an hour, you came out completely purified, because this man lived the faith on a grand scale. He was not a popular confessor. He was the confessor of the Bucharest intelligentsia. He didn’t witness to the simple world because, in my opinion, people couldn’t understand what he was saying. He was very profound and sophisticated. University professors such as Alexandru Codin Mironescu, Paul Stelian, the doctor and poet Vasile Voiculescu all confessed to Father Benedict Ghiuș. He was a model. You only had to look at him. It was enough for me to see him. Spirituality came naturally from him. It wasn’t an imitation, it wasn’t an effort to be spiritual, because in my opinion, if you want to become a spiritual person, you have to live a natural life. Because you have to become natural in your life with God. Like the Romanian farmer. He is natural. He makes a big cross in the morning and goes to work. He scolds his children, often his wife too, but he believes in God and prays, he is fatherly, he is warm. There is also a spirituality and some people with ‘wings’ so big that they don’t let them fly…”.
“The priesthood is fire, Father!”
“Besides the Burning Bush Fathers, I knew many simple people who were not great theologians, but whom I loved very much. Simple people don’t speak much, but they speak what they have to, and their word is very deep, often in metaphors and parables, because what you can’t express logically – and we can express very little logically – you can express in parables or metaphors, in forms of language that are closer to myth. I believe that just as Greek mythology has given us European culture, this Romanian, peasant mythology has given us some great monks who speak in metaphors about very profound things. And I have always been interested not so much in those who were scholars, but in spiritual people, especially the simple ones, because they have a special depth that scholars cannot understand, because they are much more complicated in their spiritual training. I’m not saying that they have no value. But I was much more impressed by the depth of a priest like Antipa from Cernica, who was also the confessor of many intellectuals in Bucharest, who went to this man who hardly knew how to write because he hadn’t been to school. I remember that when I was a student of theology, I used to go to confession and he would always say to me: “Don’t become a priest, Father.” He, who served at the altar, almost always said: “Don’t become a priest, Father, become a teacher of children”, that is, a teacher, “because the priesthood is fire, it’s fire, Father”.
There were people who vibrated. They approached the Holy Mass with a certain humility, but also with fear, because the Holy Mass is not a simple prayer; it is a miracle that happens, God comes and enters into the matter of bread and wine, which is the same as the matter of the whole universe, and thus sanctifies the whole cosmos. Holy Mass is the liturgical centre of the universe. And we also sanctify ourselves. The grace of the Holy Spirit rains down in the Church. Well, the simple monks did not know this from books, from theology, nobody taught them Eucharistic theology, they knew it from experience”.
“Between the four walls of the cell, we discovered the infinite in ourselves”.
“At “Canal” I had as my confessor Father Evghenie, also a simple man. He led me to become a monk. That’s why I became close to him. But what kind of simple man? He knew the “ladder” of St. John by heart. Catholic priests and monks came to see him. They all admired him. He had no studies, but he recited the Holy Fathers. He had an extraordinary memory. He influenced me the most. Once he said to me: “You should know that God has put you in prison for a reason. Like every man, when I arrived in prison, I asked myself in certain difficult moments: “Why, Lord? Why me?” I was also like the robber on the left of the cross who asked: “Why should I suffer and not others? If you are the Son of God, do something! But God put some people on my path who made me realise that God had put me there for a purpose. And that purpose became clear to me during my second imprisonment (I was imprisoned twice). Then I was isolated. The priests went through a year or two of solitary confinement, alone in their cells, because they wanted them to become beasts, like animals; I won’t tell you that in 11 years of imprisonment no political prisoner saw a paper, a pencil or a book. This was the “treatment of intellectuals”… They educated the common criminals to give them back to the communist society, but they took away all means of information from us and we didn’t see a newspaper, pencil, paper, nothing! In the end, it was very good, because instead of turning us into animals, as they probably wanted, they turned us on ourselves, to ask the question: “What are we? Because I tell you: when you sit in the four walls of your cell and you have no horizon, no perspective to look at, you turn in on yourself. That’s where we discovered infinity within us… We discovered that the human being is infinite, that God made him that way – He breathed on him and gave him that inner something that never dies. That the depth within us, which, according to the Holy Fathers, is also the place of prayer, where God dwells, is a place that can never be exhausted. In this depth within us is the temple of the living God, as Saint Paul says. It was then, in that isolated situation, alone for almost two years, that I understood the words of the Scripture that I had once memorised: “You are the church of the living God, and the Spirit of God dwells in you”. Then I understood why the Saviour said, “The kingdom of God is within you. God is not material or spatial to be put in a corner somewhere. To find him, we have to turn inwards, to explore the universe within us. This is an experience to be had. There is a saying of St. Seraphim of Sarov that says: “The exit from oneself is the exit from paradise. It is a great and lonely adventure in human life. There is something extraordinary in us, God is there!
“You cannot know God without knowing yourself”.
– After prison you went to America, where you still live in an Orthodox monastery. How did you find capitalist society after your communist experience?
– Yes, after the prison, Patriarch Justinian did his best to get me out of the country, God forgive him! He was a great patriarch who understood very well those who suffered. Despite the fact that some people in the press criticise him and His Beatitude Theoctist, you should know that they were great understanders of human suffering. Coming back to American society, I would like to tell you not to judge American capitalism too harshly. You should know that the American is not capitalist in the way you imagine, because there is a kind of socialism based on trust. If you’re a worker at Ford, for example, you get a car from Ford every two years in addition to your salary, and you also get clothes from Ford, because Ford doesn’t just make cars. They also have shops with everything, and they try to keep people in that system. What can I tell you, almost all of them are shareholders. I mean, a worker says “my factory”, he doesn’t say “Ford’s factory”. So it’s not early 19th century capitalism, there’s a social side to it.
The main question I asked myself there was: how can you live in this capitalist society and still be concerned with the salvation of the soul? I don’t think they are contradictory. We must enjoy all that God has created, but at the same time God created us to produce, to work, to live from our work.
We, as Orthodox in America, have a mission: to change the direction of knowledge, because the West, of which America is a part, is outward looking. Westerners explore the universe outside themselves. The mission of Orthodoxy is to turn man’s attention inwards, to tell him that there is an inner dimension. We do not despise cosmological knowledge, knowledge outside ourselves, because within us are the fingerprints of God as Creator, but to know ourselves and God we must turn within, and this knowledge of God is a personal experience. You cannot know God without knowing yourself. Modern man has no time to know himself because he is too busy knowing himself. And from the point of view of the moral life, young people in particular cannot bear the adventure of going inside themselves, and as a kind of escape they cultivate noisy things.
And I’ll give you an example: we have children’s camps in the summer, religious camps, you call them, we bring them here to learn religion. Because in America they don’t teach religion in public schools. It has never been taught. Not because the American is not religious or against the church, but because there are 1200 sects and then you don’t know what kind of religion to teach in school. And the state, which actually respects the church (we don’t pay taxes, we don’t pay property taxes, we don’t pay taxes on anything), has refused to put religion in school because they don’t know what kind of religion to teach. So, going back, we had a children’s camp and we had a little girl who was constantly listening to two radios: one on the right, one on the left, with two headphones, one in the left ear, one in the right ear, probably two programmes: one sports and one music. And I said, “Turn them off!” And you know what he said? “Father, if I turn them off, I’ll go mad!” What a tragedy for a 14-year-old girl to say that! “But can’t you sit on that bench? Just sit there for an hour!” “But what can I do? “Do nothing, sit and be quiet, maybe God wants to speak to you!
You see, this is the role of Orthodoxy in Western culture. Not to let the world know us. We are often proud, we have Christians in France, in Germany, in America. So what? That’s not why God sent us there. He sent us there to open the doors of true knowledge, to open the doors of the Church.
“For me, New York is the best desert in which a Holy Father can realise himself”.
– Father, how do you think these two concerns can be reconciled: a life that has to make use of the capitalist economy, which is the economy of most countries in the world today, and on the other hand, the concern for an interior life that needs time and silence.
– The outside does not prevent you from living with God, in relationship with Him, and enjoying all that He has created. And to develop and multiply them through your work. Because that is what God created man for: to create. One thing to remember: in whatever situation you find yourself, do not forget God! I have seen that in Romania the trams are loud, the cars, the sirens of the factory, all this industrial noise in which we live. Well, look at New York! For me, New York is the best desert in which to realise a Holy Father. That nobody knows you. There are so many people on the street, it’s like an anthill, nobody cares about you. You can put on a cap, you can go barefoot, you can put on a ponytail, nobody looks at you! Because they don’t care. That’s why New York has some saints, you know. It’s got fathers, it’s got monks… It’s possible because that’s the dimension of coming down into ourselves that we were talking about before, exploring the universe within us. And then, in spite of all the noise outside, there can be stillness and peace of mind and soul. There may be just as much noise outside, but if you have peace inside, you are very happy. Jesus said, “I give you My peace. He is the peace of the world. So if we have Jesus in us, we should not be afraid. Do not be afraid of the noise outside. If we have peace in us, there will be peace outside. It depends on the perspective from which you look at it.
(Interview by Cristian Curte – Formula AS magazine, year 2013, issue 1059)