“Here is the greatest confessor of Sihăstria!”

Father Cleopa Ilie received the blessing that in winter and on days when the weather was bad, he would retire and stay in one of the small cells of the beehive. He would bring in a massive wooden table and his most useful spiritual books. Father Mark lived next door. And since the old confessor was very happy to have such an invaluable adviser and helper, they set to work on the books together.

Father Cleopa’s books were typed and then multiplied: Sermons for Monks, Sermons on Sundays, Sermons on Feast Days and Saints, Journey in the Orthodox Faith, On Dreams and Visions, The Wonders of God in the created world, and others.

Fr. Mark also made use of this work, wishing to gather together some of the things of great use that had been revealed to him or that he had learned. These were the teachings on the Beatitudes, on Psalm 50 and Psalm 142, the Spiritual Histories, and several compilations of the Holy Fathers: the Word for Repentance (Sweet Counsel) and the General Confession, a small treatise on the spiritual life, collected from the Philokalia, and others.

His presence in the hermitage was used by all who knew him, imposing himself with silence, humility and justice.

He continued his life of devotion in the monastery, attending all the evening services and the morning Liturgy, day after day, until 1994-95, when he could no longer make the effort to come to the daily services. From then on, he made it a habit to pray the prayers of the Church in his cell, in addition to the Psalter, which he read all in one day. Unlike Father Cleopas, who spent ten hours a day in the prayers of the cell, Father Mark, who lived a quiet life, spent 13 hours a day in prayer. And the rest of the day and night he spent in the prayer of the mind and in the toils of a beekeeper (especially in summer).

Every two hours he would recite a few hundred Psalter name lists, about a quarter of all the name lists in the Sihăstria. These included the names of Christians (and not only, for there were often heretics, Catholics, Protestants, sectarians, atheists and even pagans) who could not be mentioned at the Liturgy. The Church, through the voice of the Fathers, teaches us that those who live in mortal sins (fornication, abortion, murder, blasphemy, unbelief – atheism, unorthodox or humanistic doctrines and practices such as dowsing, bio-energy, yoga and the like, which by their work lead to apostasy or take away the gift of the Holy Spirit on the spot) cannot be mentioned by priests at Holy Liturgy, but only the private prayer of each one of us, our love and sacrifice for them, can bring them back to the Truth, because salvation, or eternal communion with Christ through the Divine Gift, is given only to those who have received Orthodox Baptism and live in blessedness before God. Fr. Mark commemorated these few hundred name lists every two hours. And this fact also tells us something about his sleep schedule, namely that he never slept more than one hour.

And we should not be surprised that he did not sleep, because all the holy Fathers teach that whoever does not want to lose the prayer of the heart should not sleep more than one or two hours a day.

If you asked anyone in the monastery about Fr. Mark, not many would have been able to give you a precise answer, because his presence always created a very special atmosphere, which left many of the monks and brothers at a loss as to what to say about the old man next to them. But the best and most honest answer is that the evil spirits had no power near his monastery. He sanctified the place where he lived, or where he appeared, by his very presence. And I have not often encountered this wonderful state. I beg the reader to believe that I had to make an effort to think something evil in his presence.

It sometimes happened in winter that he could not come to the services because of the snow, and he was handicapped by the rheumatism he had acquired in prison. I remember that in his cell he always had, if not a stove, at least a hot water heater or an electric heater. So it was in January 1990, when he stayed in the cell for several days, and because he had the gift of knowing what was going to happen before it happened, after he had not been to church for ten days, he asked about the communist leadership of the country. And then one of the fathers who had come to see him exclaimed: “Blessed are you, Father Mark, that you have neither heard nor seen anything of what is happening! Look, ten days have passed since Ceaușescu and the Communist Party fell!”

He told me, when I asked him about seeing God, that the Saviour Christ had appeared to him three times in his life. And this does not surprise me, because among his daily spiritual labours, purity of mind was one of the greatest. Towards the end of his talk he also told me about this dream vision of October-November 1998:

“I don’t remember what danger I was in, but I know that I was being chased by several dozen enemies, about 50-60, and I was in the church, on the right side, where I usually sat, near the icon of the Saviour, under the window. These evil spirits also came into the church and sat on the pew of the singers on the left, about to the right of the Proskomidiary. I was afraid of them and began to do poklons. And so on and on, still afraid, they disappeared one by one until they all melted away. Even after they had all disappeared, I was still afraid, because there were black spots where they had been sitting, on the wall, upstairs. While I was still looking there, the Saviour appeared beside me without saying a word to me; I could only see Him with my eyes. He made me understand that I should not be afraid because He was with me. And still with the Saviour beside me, in the middle of the church, where the Apostle was reading, there appeared the icon of the Virgin Mary with the Child in her arms, an icon about 70 by 80 centimetres, and another smaller one beside it. And so my fear disappeared. That’s how I woke up. The next day I went by car to Father Cleopa and told him the dream, and that was my last confession to His Holiness before he left us”.

Probably on that occasion, on his way back to the cell, Father Cleopa, passing Father Mark by a few steps, said to those present, to humiliate him, as it was a habit of the old confessor, “Do you see him? There he is, the greatest confessor in the Sihăstria!”

I went to him as often as I could. But, for my sins, this “as often as possible” was far from frequent, because I did not give myself to my needs, as the divine gift that guided me in the first days of my monastic life urged me to do; if I had done so, the need for guidance (unchecked by any of the spirits of this world) and understanding of the changes taking place in my soul would not have let me leave depart his feet. One day I thought of trying to do what St. Simeon the New Theologian had done, which was to confess all the thoughts and worries of the day to His Holiness, who was a simple monk. In doing so, Father Mark truly showed his great and wonderful measure and blessed me with answers and explanations of what was in my mind, giving them to me immediately and with power. But I, the rascal, did not know how to put things together to make use of such a treasure, but was ashamed that the confessor I had should learn of such spiritual works without the blessing of His Holiness, who was a priest, and be troubled. And out of foolishness I did not use the hand that the Elder extended to me as to a beloved disciple. So… I was only a foolish listener of words which, long after, and perhaps too little, have come to bear in my soul.

If someone asks me how I remember Father Mark, the first thing I can say is that I never found this saint, day or night, on the lawn of the cell or among the beehives in front of the house, in the cell commemorating ames or reading his prayers, without tears in his eyes. Every time I came, I saw his face light up, he blessed me and then, with a discreet gesture, he wiped the tears from his cheeks.

On 2 December 1998, the great confessor of Sihăstria, the pillar of the Church, the one who kept the faith alive in the country with his life and words during the last half century, Father Archimandrite Cleopa Ilie, went to the Lord about two hours after midnight. At about six in the morning, a tearful priest knocked on our cell door and told us. We ran to Father Cleopa’s chapel where the parents were taking his body to church.

The wonderful thing was that we had been with Hieromonk Amfilohie from Diaconești in the evening, and as we were going up to the beehive, passing in front of Father Cleopa’s chapel, Father Amfilohie had this thought from above to stop us for a blessing. “Who knows when the Elder will leave, and then we’ll be sorry we didn’t see him!…” And we went in to see him, just as a priest from Piatra Neamș was leaving. And after he had received us and blessed us, we went to see Father Marcu. I remembered that Father Cleopa’s eyes were a little blurred, that he spoke very little and didn’t have the liveliness he used to have.

And now, in the morning, after I had burried the Great Confessor, I went to Father Mark to tell him about his confessor. But… I think he already knew, because although I was the first to tell him that Father Cleopas had gone to the Lord, he was not surprised at all, but just made a big cross and said with great humility and reconciliation: “God forgive him! And I wondered then if he knew what I was telling him, and I say to myself today, with determination, this time, that yes, he knew of his confessor’s departure, because I did not see a twitch in his face, he did not seem surprised. So I went then, and so I go now, thinking of the Paterikon Fathers who, in other wildernesses, saw the needy taken by angels to heaven, and marked the hour of their departure. After I had finished writing what he had dictated to me in mid-February 1999, he asked me one evening: ‘You know, they say that a monk, if he is saved, up to his seventh generation is saved. But I don’t remember finding any proof of this. Could your brotherhood look for it?” And when I said yes, I came to him after a few days and told him that the only word I could find in the Holy Scriptures (although it is mentioned only once in the Holy Scriptures) was the word from the Old Law, from Exodus 20:4-6: “You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.” Then I saw his face light up. And when I asked him if he wanted me to search further in the books I had, he said no, this word was enough for him. I later understood that somehow the day of his departure from this world had been announced to him from above and that he wanted to know what he could do for all those whom he had remembered all his life. From the words of St. Paisius of Neamț and others of the Divine Fathers, we know that God does not forsake His servants and all those who share in the Divine, but gives them early warning of the hour of His departure from this world. And the Church, through the Fathers, laments those who do not know the hour of their departure. Who, alas, are far too many. Thus, when St. Simeon from the Wonderful Mountain, wondered if there were many whom the angels would meet when they left their bodies, he received an answer from above, saying “One in ten thousand, Simeon”.

(Confession of a Christian. Father Mark of Sihăstria, edited by monk Filoteu Bălan, Petru Vodă Publishing House, 2007, pp. 75-83)