“I consider him both father and mother of the Romanian people”

– Father Augustin, how did you meet Father Justin Pârvu?

– I was in the eleventh grade of high school, I belonged to the Orthodox Youth League of Botoșani and every year at Christmas we prepared a programme of songs which we presented to the institutions of the city before the holidays, thus collecting money for a trip to the monasteries of Moldova. Obviously, the monastery of Petru-Vodă was the most attractive, because the fame of Father Justin was already well known in the area: a charismatic confessor, very patient with people, who was known to have suffered a lot in the communist prisons.

On this pilgrimage we always wore our national costumes, and we knew that we were bringing Father Justin great joy by wearing them, but also by singing the songs that Father Justin loved so much. That’s when we met him for the first time: he came to the door of his chapel and listened to us, then he rewarded us with all the money we hadn’t collected before the trip. And he urged us to come to the monastery’s work camp during the summer holidays to help build the body of the cells.

Then he stayed alive in my heart, I perceived him as the only father to whom I could open my soul completely and who would seal my future – like any teenager I was troubled by many thoughts and doubts. That is what I felt in my soul at that moment: that he would determine my future. This is what happened a little later.

After graduating from university, I decided to come to the Father to place my soul before his holiness and to have him give me the answer I had been waiting for so long: what to do, whether to follow family life or monastic life… And the Father advised me to choose the monastic life. From that moment until the last moment of his life, he was the charismatic, spiritual and Holy Spirit-filled guide of my soul, and not only mine, but of so many Romanians in this country. I consider him the father and mother of the Romanian people, the one who knew how to lift up every human soul, the one who knew how to listen to every human being, the one who knew how to encourage every human being, the one who knew how to urge us to walk with zeal on this path of salvation and to confess Christ. He is the one who made the link between us and the past of our country, a past of much suffering, which His Holiness lived and from which, through him, we have managed to recover much.

It is our duty from now on to continue what he began to teach us and to fulfil this desire of the Father to proclaim in a special way the holy martyrs of the communist prisons, who today are great miracle-workers and great intercessors before God for the whole Romanian nation and for the whole Orthodox Church everywhere.

“Hey, have you eaten? Come, let’s eat!

– What was Father Justin like as a confessor?

– We can say that Father Justin was a perfect confessor in everything. He knew exactly when to rebuke you and how much to rebuke you, exactly when to guide you or lift you up from your spiritual falls, exactly when to intercede with God – so that through the Sacrament of Confession and through your personal repentance you could approach the Holy Mysteries. All these things Father did with a thoroughness that was extraordinary for me, because I personally experienced these gifts of the Holy Spirit that were in Father Justin’s soul.

The most uplifting moments, for example, were when your soul was very burdened, troubled by many thoughts, even by your personal failings, and you came to Father and poured out your bitterness, as the Romanians say, in front of him. He never interrupted you, never interfered. Most of the time he would even take a book that was next to his holiness and begin to leaf through it, but not in such a way that you would know that he was not paying attention to you, but on the contrary, you would feel the full and even complete presence of the confessor, of Father Justin Pârvu, who was in front of you and to whom you would confess your thoughts and the difficulties of your soul. When you had finished, you wished so much that the peace he had given you would not be interrupted… I often wished that I could just stay with him, because it was more than enough.

Often, with very small and very profound gestures, Father managed to lift you out of any state of mind. This explains the crowds of people who visited him in his chapel and from whom he was inseparable. I remember all the little pilgrimages that Father used to make to the miraculous icon of the Mother of God in the monastery of Rarău. Every year, on his feast day, he would be accompanied by a large retinue of faithful who would spend the day on this little pilgrimage, and some would even say that Father didn’t get rid of people here either! On the contrary, it was a great joy for him to be accompanied by people who understood him and who, moreover, obeyed his holiness.

In monastic life, the relationship with the confessor is very important, and I had that as a gift from God for my soul through Father Justin. He knew how to communicate with each soul, he read you very well, you didn’t have to talk much to him or say much about yourself. You just had to open your mouth a little and he knew you, and if you were also attentive, you placed yourself in his hands to help you when you needed it. There was never a man who came to his holiness with problems and Father just left him like that, in turmoil, or paid no attention to him. He was a Father of extraordinary kindness.

“He sacrificed absolutely everything”

Once there was a situation when it was time for dinner and the parents came and said to him, “Father, bless us for dinner”. And Father: “Lord!” “Father, we are waiting for you!” And Father: “Hey, go ahead!” And at one point the fathers started to get upset, not because Father wasn’t in their midst, but because he was staying up all night. And that’s when Father used another tactic. They would come and call him to the table, and His Holiness, before leaving, would open the door to the cell and ask the people: “Hey, have you eaten? Come and eat! And the whole retinue of people would go to the table, because that’s how the Elder commanded. Then he would continue these spiritual conversations with each soul.

– Could you tell us about specific cases in which Father Justin helped people?

– Yes. Once a married man came, he had about three children, he was from the area, from Poiana Largului, and his house had caught fire, it had burned down because it was made of wood. The poor man came to Father Justin and asked him to pray for him, to help God to rebuild his house, because he and his whole family were on the road. And the Father gave him exactly what he needed to rebuild his house from the ground up.

There was not only this material help to people, but the most important was the help of the soul. There were even cases of people in need coming to Father in the monastery. I have seen with my own eyes when people possessed by the devil came to Father, I have seen how he behaved with them, in a state of complete silence, I have seen situations where the person tried to say something to Father but failed because of the demon. But the Father was in a very deep prayer for that soul and I realised that the torment that the person was having was precisely because of the prayers that the Father was making for their soul, so that they would be calmed and even delivered from the devil.

There were also people with extraordinary physical sufferings, with locomotor disabilities, who would come to Father in a wheelchair, and Father would receive them with great love. Most of the time these sick people forgot that they were sick when they met Father Justin. His way of dealing with people was very natural, the distance one feels towards a man with a holy life disappeared. He was careful to remain very close to the person who came to his sanctity. That’s why people loved him so much. He was a man who put aside all personal desires for them.

I am reminded now of a situation when some old people who had suffered with Father Justin in the communist prisons came to His Holiness on their birthday, and there was no more room for them in the monastery; and Father left them in his cell, saying to them: “Hey, stay here, I can manage”. He went out, walked around the courtyard for a while, and at some point, after all the priests and people had gone to bed, before the night service began, Father sat down on the bench in front of the cell, his head bowed, preparing for bed. The guard was shocked, because he had not expected this, he knew him from the cell, and said: “Father, what are you doing here? “Well, don’t worry! Shut up!” So he sacrificed everything. There were situations where nuns from different convents would sew clothes for him, scarves or shawls, and fathers who were very close to him in spirit would come and Father would give them these clothes.

Many times it happened to me that I entered the cell with thoughts, with temptations, and he would not say a word, but he would put his hand under the chair, under the table, under the bed, and he would take out a jar of jam, a jar of stewed fruit, a banana, an orange, a bunch of grapes, and he would fill my arm with these gifts. He didn’t theorise with the people, he was just present in their suffering and he was so humble and so close to them that a very personal relationship was born between the people and Father Justin, so that they felt at home.

They really felt him as both a father and a mother. For me, from the moment I entered the monastery, I no longer needed a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a grandfather or a grandmother, because he fulfilled them all in my soul. But he urged each of us in the monastery to remain close to people, to families, because times are hard and they need our spiritual help, as much as we can give it.

We admitted to Father our weaknesses, that we were no longer like those of His Holiness’ generation, but he told us:

“Hey, that’s not the problem, you stand up and be an example for them!”

It was only later, with difficulty, that I personally managed to get over it and accept the close relationship with the people, because Father, in a very subtle way, was just guiding us to work the way His Holiness worked. If Father was so modest as to be so close to people’s suffering, he was also urging us monks to be close to them, not to abandon them when they ask us for help, when they ask us for advice, to always be present and to help them, to lift them out of the sufferings and difficulties that they encounter in this life.

 

Well, there is a lot to be said about this holy need, full of sacrifice for the sufferings of the people, and first of all for the sufferings of the Romanian people, whom he saw going through that historic period of communism and the so-called period of freedom after the revolution of ’89. That is why he was always active in the life of the people, in the life of the Church, to help restore the spirit of the Romanian people.

“The Mother of God and the Holy Martyrs in the prisons will help us”.

– Father Augustin, you spoke very beautifully about Father Justin’s spirit of sacrifice, but how can we, the powerless, the sinners, follow Father Justin in this respect?

– Very often this problem was brought up to Father, even to the point of telling him that we were too weak and would not be able to rise to the level that these challenges of today’s world, which are very great, even greater than those of the communist period, require of us. His Holiness himself said that the period we are going through now is much more difficult than before, because we still have these wounds, these wounds that communism left in the soul of the Romanian people. Nevertheless, Father encouraged us and told us that Our Lady and these Holy Martyrs from the communist prisons will be close to our souls and will help us, will strengthen us to follow the path of salvation, the path of witnessing to Christ – and to succeed, through the mercy of God, through the prayers of Our Lady, through the prayers of the saints, to achieve this ideal of helping our nation to rise from the dead, from the death that communism has brought to our nation, a resurrection that we all need very, very much.

And especially those of us who knew Father have this duty – here, from now on, for the prayers of Father and all the Saints in the communist prisons – to succeed in achieving this ideal of restoring the Romanian nation, in full obedience to the Holy Gospel and the teaching of the Church.

(Hieromonk Augustin Vărvăruc – Orthodox Family Magazine, No. 7 (54), July 2013, pp. 36-40)