Memories about Fr. Sofian

The scene I am about to describe was told to my wife by a woman from a village near Neamț-Vânători Monastery. She had recently received a visit from Father Sofian, who brought her news from her daughter, the abbess of a Romanian nunnery where Father Sofian had stayed for a while during his trip to the United States. After accompanying her guest to his departure, she re-entered the house and was surprised by the soft, diffused light surrounding the chair on which Father had been sitting; it had, to use a metaphor, kept the memory. Father Sofian was radiant. Even physically. When I met him, in the distant year of 1951, he was only 39 years old, but because of his hair, which was so blond that it looked white, for a long time I thought he was almost old. And his thick beard was as white as his skin, so that even if it didn’t show, his presence was a bearer of light.

Tall, stout, well-built – by what still mysterious changes of metabolism can people with an ascetic life still look prosperous? – His gestures were always calm and measured, never hurried, and even when he was not officiating there was a certain hieratic aura about him. And his self-control was so complete that there was never a hint of tension or anxiety. He was also remarkable for his strength and endurance. It was only when he was 85 that I sometimes noticed obvious signs of fatigue. I cannot forget the elasticity and speed with which he climbed – and he was more than 70 years old – the trembling steps of the scaffolding, up to the vertiginous heights under the vaults of the spires, in the churches he painted himself. Just a few come to mind: the church of the monastery of Radu Vodă, some paintings and mosaics from the monastery of Antim, the church of Pipirig, the monastery of Deir-el-Harf in Lebanon, the church of Hama in Syria – I think the latter was the church destroyed in the constant unrest there… I was struck by the calmness with which Father told me about this, I would say, misfortune – and the great church of the Dealu monastery. While I was painting the latter, I had the unhoped-for privilege of meeting him on several occasions, and I was amazed at the ease with which, at his venerable age, he moved without hesitation or fear of vertigo on the scaffolding lost in the darkness of the vaults.

His physical appearance was part of his personality, imbued with the overwhelming presence of the Spirit, harmoniously completing his extraordinary being. I felt the same admiration in the evenings during the fasting periods, when I saw him listening to the confessions of the faithful for hours on end, sometimes well past midnight.

I had got into the habit of being the last one there, waiting silently in the half-light of the deserted apse and watching him confess from there. He took his place in front of the door to the left of the altar, sitting on a backless chair… He never began his confession before the end of the evening service.

It was a trial, an asceticism, for those of us who were waiting. But the priest listened, leaning on the mouth and ear of the faithful, without a moment of impatience…

Only from time to time, before the beginning of the confession, would he draw our attention to the fact that we should try to speak only of our own faults and not of what others had done to us. He would also ask those who were going to confession for the first time to come back at a less busy time. I remember how distressed, how saddened he was one evening when he told me how a young man who had come twice for the first time, because of the “crowd” of the faithful, had left angrily and never returned.

He was very sensitive and aware of the seriousness of the sacred act of confession. This was especially evident in the way he spent his time and energy, never turning anyone away.

I also had the opportunity to understand more fully the importance he attached to his role as confessor. I had the idea – correct, but only partly true – that listening to confessions could only be seen by the confessor as a kind of asceticism to be endured with stoicism.

And so I once tried to apologise to him for holding him back with my mischief, to which he replied, in that grave and definitive tone which meant the end of the discussion and the futility of any possible counter-arguments: “Everything you tell us is for us, and a teaching which serves us for a deeper knowledge of the human soul, including our own”.

On his way from the church to the cell, a distance of only a few steps, he was delayed for a long time, being stopped by unfortunate believers or beggars. One day one of them, angry that he had received less than he had asked for, set fire to the chapel through the open window. Fortunately, the fire was quickly extinguished – the priest was not inside – without causing much damage, although both rooms were full of books, photographs and icons.

He had a serenity of spirit that I have never seen in anyone else. I mentioned the serenity with which he heard the news of the demolition of the church he had painted in the Middle East.

God knows how he must have suffered when his younger brother, Father Lucian, whom he looked after like a child, died suddenly. He had received the news when he was in the United States. When I saw him a few weeks later, on his return to the country, there was nothing in his gestures, his expression, of his inner suffering.

Only once, to my great astonishment, did I hear him sigh and utter, from the depths of his great forgetfulness, the words: “God forbid that he should do other sins”. I passed the Church of St. Friday, which had just been demolished by Ceaușescu’s order.

But very rarely did I have the opportunity to see him as if he had actually descended to our earthly world, subject to time. So he was overjoyed to hear that Metropolitan Teoctist of Moldavia had become the country’s patriarch. This was not only because they were old friends and colleagues, but above all because he had full confidence in his diplomatic – so necessary at that time, 1986 – and organisational talents.

Just as he believed that our best Patriarch was Justinian, who – thanks to Gheorghiu-Dej’s gratitude, but also to his great tact and talent for knowing when and where to give in and when and where to resist – managed to protect all the Church’s spiritual activities, which were so important, for the good of the whole country, during the periods of maximum Bolshevik and atheist terror.

“No one thinks any more,” Father told me, “that there were years when the Romanian autocephalous Church was in danger of being banned, as in Albania, where all cults were banned, or of surviving mutilated and ineffective, as in the Soviet Union. But in this way, thanks to some truly providential personalities who willingly took risks – material, spiritual and historical – by the compromises they accepted, they saved the essential functions of the Church”.

I always had the feeling that Father Sofian lived outside of time. Even his judgments and decisions were guided by spiritual criteria and closer to heaven, the threshold to which he wanted to lead us.

On one of his returns from the United States, when I asked him about his impressions, he told me a very vivid aphorism that sheds some light on his faith and his ideas: “I told the people there that they had made such an earthly heaven that they had forgotten the heavenly one. He believed deeply and completely in the presence of this “heavenly heaven”, within reach of each one of us, waiting for us and calling us “with inexpressible sighs”.

In connection with his serenity of soul, which was difficult, if not impossible, to disturb, a brief conversation during his last illness comes to mind: You know,” he said to me one day, with an air of indifference as if he were talking about the weather outside, “I always feel that there is a creature at my feet that wants to harm me. “Father,” I replied, “we know from the Paterikon what the monks may have suffered in the hermitage. Do you think that such phenomena can no longer occur in our time?” Perhaps he didn’t like what I had said, perhaps he didn’t want to delay me any longer with these slippery plans, but the fact is that he interrupted the conversation.

After a while I asked him if he still felt those, I said, evil presences. “Ah, I still feel them,” he replied, “but I don’t give them any more importance… it’s their business, not mine,” and at that moment I realised once more his equality of spirit with the supernatural and inaccessible to us. Not only the destruction of sacred works, not only the death of a younger brother whom he loved and watched over like a son, but also these “cracks in the great wall” through which the malignant influences of the vil forces penetrate towards us, did not succeed in shaking his soul, which had entered the zones of holy tranquillity.

The image of Father Sofian seems to be surrounded by a supernatural light. I think that deep down he really was like that. But in dealing with people, in dealing with the daily events of ordinary life, Father Sofian’s attitude was somewhat different. He often resembled the Fathers of the Paterikon, with practical solutions that contrasted sharply with the theoretical ramblings of the faithful. I remember the advice he gave me during a period of depression: “Eat an apple every morning. You don’t know what good it can do!” Neither the vehicle of sapiential concepts, or spiritual advice, just practical advice.

It should not be forgotten that melon in Greek also means apple and lamb. Suddenly the advice appeared in a completely different light, for it induced the idea of Communion.

Father Sofian had a way of answering and interpreting our words that was vivid, reassuring and, I would say, humbling. By using earthly comparisons, he avoided the tendency of many of us to see ourselves as always in struggle, in crisis, under pressure from beyond the visible life and, implicitly, living in a zone of intense spectacularity, somewhat “on the edge of despair”.

I once asked Father Sofian how he could explain, on the basis of the tenth law of the Decalogue of Moses and the Sermon on the Mount, where an equivalence is made between imagined sin and actual sin, that spiritualists make a clear distinction between these immoral manifestations. And Father Sofian answered as follows: “If you go boating on a lake, it is one thing to be splashed by the movement of the oars and quite another to sink the boat”.

Similarly, when I once spoke to him about the great difficulty of penetrating the invisible wall that separates us from an immediate knowledge of spiritual realities, he said to me: “like looking at things in a shop window through a glass window and not being able to touch them”.

I only saw him rebel once. He was also quick to censor his tendencies towards irony. I regretted this with my secular mind, because he had humour, a lot of humour.

I think that for Father Sofian, humour was also a “technique” to defend himself against the praise, the devotion of some of the faithful. In a certain way, indirectly and unobtrusively, he showed his humility.

Father told me: “One day the son of an old man, a student at the Faculty of Fine Arts, came to me and asked me: “Father, have you ever thought of changing the style of the frescoes you paint, which, between you and me, are rather monotonous and outdated? “And how would you feel about that?” I asked him. And what do you think, he replied? “You should try Van Gogh’s style! A lot of nonsense goes through the minds of the young historians”. And his eyes laughed.

Father was already ill. When I found him asleep, I waited in the next room, with the narrow, hard bed – on which either Fr. Cyprian “the elder” slept; or later, Fr. Irenaeus – with the shelves full of books and photos of groups of monks taken during Fr. Sofian’s many pilgrimages (the United States, Italy, the Holy Land, Germany, Mount Athos and Greece, Syria, Lebanon), with the small table where he ate and other small tables full of books. Then I noticed a new object, an ergometric bicycle. After a while, hearing noises in the other room, I went in and found him awake, but tired as usual. He was smiling at me, though, with that transparent, happy smile. I kissed his hand and he blessed me as usual, with that light pressure of his hand on my head, in which I felt the penetration of a power from above. When I asked him about the new machine, the priest thought it was a real bicycle, and so began the following dialogue:

Me: “No, Father, it’s just an ergometric bike, designed to make your muscles move”. He, with that twinkle of amusement in his eye: “I thought I could ride it around the church”.

Allow me to bring up two other moments, told to me by my daughter Mihaela. During a sermon, the young priest was telling the story of how two hunters had caught Abbot Anthony the Great just as he was making his disciples laugh. And the priest said: “Then one of the hunters shouted: Avvo, but this is not allowed!” But when he saw the somewhat questioning look of Mihaela, who was standing right in front of him, he added: “In his Egyptian language”.

Another time, a person with extreme reactions, in her great affection for Father, had the bizarre idea of writing “Father Sofian’s Akathist”, which he gave to her. Father, in front of a group of people, asked himself: “What should I do with it? Should I worship myself?”

I must mention the impressive way in which he celebrated and presided at the Holy Mass. Everything contributed to the impression of a mystery given to us by a heavenly grace: his silent figure, illuminated by the divine meaning of the moment, his measured gestures, neither too fast nor too slow, his seeming total abstraction from the world of “fickleness”. At no time was there a hint of movement or a glance that would indicate an interruption in the experience of the mystery of the ceremony.

It was as if the man, body and soul, in those moments of evocation of the mysteries beyond the human realm, melted into the function he was meant to fulfil.

And Father Sofian, with his silent and hieratic movements, in those moments of the Great Entrance, went through the whole church full of kneeling or bowed heads of the faithful, touching the Holy Chalice to the forehead of each one, thus establishing an invisible connection and an invisible but felt equality between all those beings who, consciously or unconsciously, lived covered by the same grace.

And all the time, without a tremor in his arm or in his voice, with his unmistakable, full, baritone, harmonious voice – a voice which, from the first moment I heard it, I considered to be a “spiritual” voice par excellence, like no other I know – he spoke in memory of the founders, the viceroys and archbishops, the monks and nuns, the priests, the martyred heroes and all those who are dormant in the hope of the Resurrection.

The last time I saw him serve – and I will never forget that moment – was at Vespers on Easter Day 2000. He wasn’t really serving. He was simply reading the Gospel at the beginning and end of all the fragments in different languages. It was a festive atmosphere, full of joy and light, and the surprise of seeing him as I had known him for half a century, filled with the gravity of the sacred act. In spite of his tiredness, he was also the first in the line of priests who carried icons to wish the faithful the promise, repeated year after year, of the salvation of all, to the incessant sound of the Resurrection hymns.

But when he preached, his attitude changed. He became much more “human”, closer to all those who listened to him. He did not have what is called a rhetorical gift. And the emotion he felt gave him an additional participation, a spontaneity. Not infrequently, and especially when he spoke about or quoted from the Gospel of Saint John, the Word of God, his voice would tremble, slightly hoarse, the words would come out with a slight delay, as if to conceal his inner turmoil, and his eyes would narrow.

And just as he did not allow himself to be distracted, so he expected the same behaviour from the laymen, at their level of understanding.

I have not forgotten the cold and disapproving look he gave me when, on the very rare occasions when I wanted to receive Holy Communion, I hesitated to move the candle from my right hand to my left, thus shaking the chalice at the risk of spilling its contents. And I will never forget his indignant and painful voice telling me how, at the same sacred moment of Communion, he witnessed a quarrel between two women, each trying to get ahead of the other; the one who was behind blew out the candle of the one who was ahead, saying through her teeth: “May you live in darkness!” And she commented: “In what way this unfortunate human mind is designed that the supreme importance of such an act as the Holy Communion can be obscured by such a meaningless competition! But as it often happens, the more holy the moment, the more the devil tries to thwart it”.

He had different criteria for claims… I noticed this even more clearly when, during a discussion in which I was dissatisfied with some of my own failings, let’s say of an ascetic nature – how many there were, and if there were any – the priest interrupted me authoritatively and said: “Doctor, you are not a monk, so you are not obliged to do this. You will be judged as a layman for the medical work you have done and for your behaviour in society and in the family. It is not good to mix the criteria. We monks will be held accountable for more.

When I went through the books that he had recommended to me at one time or another, I soon realised that they all had something to do with my state of mind and the problems that I had at one time or another. I once heard him answer some doubts by saying: “The reading of religious texts, from the Bible and the writings of the Fathers, and their re-reading, to the exegeses of modern theologians, can have a spiritual value equal to that of prayer”.

He strongly disapproved of “translating” the date of a feast to a nearby Sunday. To my counter-arguments, he gave me the following reply: “The heavenly mass of the angels takes place on the day appointed from above and cannot be influenced by any changes caused by earthly conditions. The spiritual value of the Mass is based both on the mystery of the epiklesis and the sanctification of all the faithful, and on their simultaneous celebration on the angelic planes, closer to God”. The words are mine, but this is the meaning of his words.

Several times he spoke to me of “dignity”. At first I was a little surprised, thinking that this “dignity” was close to vanity, to pride, and far from humility. Later, I think I was able to explain this insistence better. The evil spirits are always attacking us. Far from being hypocritical, not to proclaim all personal wrongdoing, as the Christians of Carthage did in Tertullian’s time, is a very useful demonstration of prudence, in order to avoid the offence of “the little ones”.

In 1999, after a long evening of confessions, the first major sickness occurred. A few months after the first minor stroke, Father expressed the wish that I be his doctor. I can say that his suffering was great. I suspected it more because he never complained. He had an air of detachment when he spoke of it, as if it did not concern him. But my fear and anxiety were due to the thought of his intellect deteriorating, which fortunately did not happen. He was able to finish his book about St. Antim and the monastery, he continued to hear confessions and to greet those who had the joy of visiting him with the same gentle, fatherly and sometimes even playful smile. And I am convinced that his desire to treat and heal himself was above all due to his love for his fellow human beings, to the thought of continuing to be useful to them.

In the hospital, I watched Father Sofian with concern, fear and pain. But also with hope, listening to him as he retreated into the unknown depths of his soul, completely removed from the contingent world. All he had left was prayer, spoken aloud and not only in his mind and heart.

At the beginning of August I found him calm, in good spirits, sitting at his desk and writing. With his usual gentle irony, he called me “Father Doctor”. I left him satisfied, not realising that this was the last time I would see him as I had known him for more than half a century.

A few days later I learned that he had been admitted to the hospital “for tests”. Within two or three weeks his health had deteriorated. The last time I saw him in hospital I was with Mihaela, my daughter, who had come from abroad to visit him, which made him very happy. But he looked tired and longed to be taken home. I wanted to do the same, convinced that the environment of the cell – the icons, the books, the loudspeaker through which he listened to the services, the devoted people who cared for him, the peace, even if relative, the strict diet – would have done him good. He was taken away, but much too late, when he was already in a state of extreme weakness.

I managed to get into his room, where I found him surrounded by doctors and priests. He saw me, waved, smiled and that was it. Then he quickly fell into a coma. And on the Feast of the Ascension of the Holy Cross, his soul left us to meet his Beloved Father.

For a long time I had noticed that it was enough for me just to sit by his side, that his presence was enough both to calm my thoughts and to give me the pleasant sensation of an indescribable spiritual uplift.

(Alexandru Târpa – Father Sofian, 2nd edition revised and completed by Constanța Costea and Ioana Iancovescu, Byzantine Publishing House, Bucharest, 2012, pp. 244-255)