Memories of a confessing family: Father Ioan Sabău and the priestess Alexandra
How did I meet this family? By a miracle: it was the Blessed Mother who gave me one of the greatest gifts I have ever received – the love of these special people, whom I am not worthy to thank for all they have done for me. Unfortunately for me, I learned little in the company of these people…
Father John was a man of the spirit, who lived more in heaven than on earth – and to prove this, I will tell you a story. It was around the beginning of July, and Father was called to a funeral in a neighbouring parish (I don’t think he ever turned anyone away, no matter how sick he was, unless his physical condition didn’t allow it, then he refused with grief). That evening at dinner, while we were eating, he suddenly asked me:
“What is the second prayer of St. Athanasius the Athonite?
I was astonished; I took the July service book and read the prayer…. Then I asked him if he always thought of God, because I wanted to do the same. He told me not to covet the gifts of others, lest I lose my own…
I think he was chosen for the priesthood as a child. He tells the story of how he was ordained a priest by his uncle: when he was about 10 years old, there was a celebration at school and Father John was the presider. Then a military officer noticed him and said that a man with such leadership qualities would be very good in the army. But his uncle said, “He’ll be a priest, because soldiers are sinful people!” – and since then Father has been preparing for that.
There were three brothers and Father was the youngest. He had a hard childhood: his father was away in America (he talked little about him), and his mother was a very religious woman – she walked twenty kilometres to Orăștie to sell milk so that she could keep Father in the boarding school (and Father kept for his mother the bread he got every morning at school). I think these childhood lessons helped him a lot during his imprisonment.
He went to university in Cernăuți, where he met Alexandra – whom he married when he was 20. At 21 he was ordained a priest in the Church of the Nativity, together with Father Zosim Oancea (who was ordained a deacon). He liked to joke about it, saying that he was older than Father Zosim because he was ordained first… About Fr. Zosim, he used to say that after the sermon he would check his back to see if it was sweaty – if it was sweaty, it meant the sermon was good.
He was a natural man, very realistic and very aware of the times. He said that in the prison there were peasants and liberals who drew lines on the walls to count the days they spent there, thinking they would get $6 from the Americans for every day they spent in jail – and Father told them they were very naive to think the Americans would come and release them. He said Father Opre Crăciun has the gift of discernment and he has no gift – only that he’s very realistic, he can’t be fooled. But Father had the gift of prayer, and the news of that had gone to the prison.
During the first communist imprisonment, he was held in Deva prison. There, because there were so many of them, small wooden barracks were made in which the prisoners were crammed together. In one such cell there was a gentleman who was very hungry (the first test of the prison was starvation for five days – they received nothing to eat during those days); this man, because he had been a fat man before, had rows of “pretzeles” formed on his belly, and he was very hungry. Then my father pushed an apple and a blanket through the wooden door. Some of the apple peel remained on the door frame and was noticed; the head of the prison, a Major, made an enquiry and angrily asked: “Who dared to do such a thing? The priest readily confessed. When asked why he had done it, he replied: “I am not only a man, I am also a priest”. For this, the Major appreciated him and made an example of him, so that others would admit to other deeds. But at Easter, when all the prisoners began to sing “Christ is risen”, the Major asked angrily: “Who organised all this sabotage?” – Father took all the blame, saying that he had started it, knowing that otherwise at least one prisoner from each cell would be taken out and punished. That Easter day he prayed all day long that only he would be punished and that the others would escape. In the evening he heard the guards: “The devil is dead!” They thought it was Stalin, but then they found out that the Major had died (he had to take some pills and something happened and he died). Since then the news has spread that he had a great prayer and they let him say his prayers every day without disturbing him. He said he had the hardest time memorising the Holy Gospel of John in three weeks. He also told about the New Testament, that Father Stăniloae said: “When I get out of prison and go back to teaching, I’ll make the theology students memorise the whole New Testament, or at least the four Gospels” – because he saw how much it helped the prisoners and how much relief they got from learning the New Testament.
Another prison-related thing was a story that scandalised me when I first heard it. Father told the story that when they first came to prison they were allowed to receive parcels; he also asked for a carton of cigarettes, which surprised me very much and I began to judge Father in my mind – because I thought he was using cigarettes to gain some advantage (I did not consider the fact that he had taken up smoking, I only knew Father!). After a while I found out, also from a story, the real reason why Father asked for cigarettes: it really hurt him that people who were addicted to smoking gave away their food for cigarettes, so he decided to give them cigarettes himself so that they wouldn’t give away their food! He told me how tormented these people were and how, even when they were tied up, they would light up a cigarette – “a great passion”, Father concluded.
From prison I remembered that he had spent four years on a stretcher, and they used to take him out on a stretcher because he was immobilised. He never told me about his ordeal. When I asked him once, he told me that they hadn’t beaten him, and another time that he hadn’t even told the priestess what he had suffered. Father’s daughter told me how the guards beat him in front of her when she was 12 years old and visited him in prison.
Once she told me how the former Patriarch Theoctist had punished him with two weeks’ service in the Gai monastery for not keeping order in the Church. In fact, once when His Eminence Theoctist came to see the church in the car where Father was serving in Bobâlna, he found the women cleaning, and he got angry; the women told him that they could only clean when Father was away, because otherwise he was in the church all day. This seemed hard to believe, especially at a time when the priest’s missionary activities were so censored by the communist regime. And the priest who went to Arad said to the prelate: “I was beaten to the soles of my feet only for serving the Church”.
Another time, when he went to see the prelate in audience, he said to him: “Be brief, my son, I am busy”. The prelate replied, “I’ll kiss your right hand!” and went out. Shocked by this answer, the Prelate called the secretary to bring the Father back. Dean Cioran was also in the secretariat and he embraced him when he heard what had happened.
Father John was an uncompromising man. I don’t remember when (I think after the 1950s) a list was drawn up of several hundred people to be sent to Argentina to escape the communist persecution. When asked if he wanted to go, he replied: “I am a shepherd, I cannot leave my flock! […]
Father John built seven churches, the most famous of which is the wonderful “cathedral” of Vinerea, dedicated to Saint Nicholas. He had a great devotion to the Mother of God. He used to tell me that he was ashamed to pray to the Saviour, but he had great devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and the Blessed Virgin protected him and his family. Another Saint to whom he had great devotion was St. Nicholas.
When I was with Father, I read in a book by Father Cleopas that it is a sin to cense without incense (i.e. by mimicking only). I told this to Father and he told me what happened to him one day when he was in the church of St. Nicholas (Father had a habit of going to the church to pray every day – this habit he kept until the end; only on days when he was very weak he prayed and made his prayers in bed, in the church he had a pile of names lists). That day he only mimicked censing – he stopped lighting the coal – and suddenly, as he was alone in the church, the icon of St. Nicholas fell from the ikonostasis. And he was very frightened, because he understood that St. Nicholas was there. He never made the same mistake again.
He struggled a lot to build this church. He started in 1937 and finished in 1957. God helped him to get the materials at that time, and he told me with satisfaction that at the meetings of the Communist Party in the county he was held up as an example: “How can the priest build a church and we (the communists) are not able to build something small?” He also made a big fuss about the consecration of the church of Vinerea, where 150 priests were present, and the Communists, to disrupt the consecration, organised games, dances and cut the rope from the bell.
In his home village of Folt, he restored the two churches (including the painting in both). Until the village church was built (or while some repairs were being done, I can’t remember exactly), Father served in the church on the hill. Then, by chance, thieves broke in and stole the pottery, which made him very sad. And Father felt that the Lord no longer wanted him to serve, because He said: “A priest without a chalice cannot exist”. He prayed to the Lord that if it was His will for him to continue to serve, the chalice would be returned. In a few days the chalice was returned…
Regarding the Most Holy Mother (to whom he had great devotion because she had helped him a great deal in his life), he tells the story: when the priestess was dying (and this happened quite often!), Father would place one hand on the priestess and the other on the icon of the Most Holy Mother – and his hope was never disappointed.
“His joy was so great when he spoke to the people!”
He humiliated and reproached himself a lot. I think that’s why both the people and the priests loved him. He was considered “the preacher of Ardeal” (or at least of the counties of Hunedoara and Alba) – that’s what I heard others call him, although he was always humbling himself and considered himself a weak and powerless priest. Once I accompanied Father to Aiud: it was the 14th of September and he had been invited to preach everywhere. There I heard someone talking about him: “Father John is as usual: the essence! His homilies were simple at first glance, but they struck a chord – those who listened to him told me that Father Ioan could bring tears to their eyes. His joy was so great when he spoke to people!
Many times in the last years of his life he would start his homily very slowly, you could hardly hear it, and when he finished it he was a volcano – he would ignite and overwhelm you with his way of presenting the subject. He had a very natural way of looking at things, at life and at faith. He was also very humorous. Together with Father Crăciun he was forming an incomparable tandem.
I went to a monastery where Father John was much loved by Father Crăciun. There, among many discussions, the hieromonk told Father John about the temptations he had with the people around the monastery (it was a monastery on the edge of the village and they wanted to buy the land from the locals). He told him how one of the locals threatened him that if he didn’t give him 6,000 euros for a piece of land, he would sell it to a businessman from Bucharest who would build a place of entertainment, and how he had to fight to get the money. Father John said to him, “You made a mistake. You should have let him sell the land to the businessman and told him that you would convert him and he would give you the land, because you can’t tempt the priest!”
He was much loved by the monks and would have liked to spend the rest of his life in a monastery, but the Lord ordained otherwise.
There were some extraordinary testimonies at the priest’s funeral. I’ll tell you a few things about it.
Father Crăciun said that the Mother Priestess was holding a black fast on Wednesdays and Fridays. She had a degree in French from Cernăuți and came from a family with several brothers. She met Father John in Cernăuți when he was a student, then they married and she moved with him to Transylvania. Her younger sister, the only survivor, was deported with her parents to Siberia, where they spent twelve years. The father of the priestess, whose name was Gheorghe, was then shown in a dream by the Holy Great Martyr Gheorghe and told that neither he nor his wife, but only the girl would survive. And so it was: the parents died in Siberia and the sister of the priestess returned home…
He loved the priestess very much. He said that in a priest the priestess is 50%, but for him the priestess was 90%. By the grace of God, I arrived at Father Sabău’s house on the eve of the death of the priestess, whom I considered a saint, and then I saw a side of Father that I had never seen before. How much he suffered from this loss! She was a great comfort to him, this woman. He said in a talk that wherever he went, she would say to him: “Mommy (that’s how he called her), pray!” – and the prayer of the priestess helped him a lot. He also said in a sermon that the most painful thing for a prisoner was not the beatings, the torture, the hunger, but when the Communists came with the signed divorce decree – that was what broke most of them.
Mrs. Cecilia Sabău, daughter of Father Ioan: “My mother was like a burning bush in Father’s shadow.”
My mother never made a fuss, never raised her voice, she was very gentle. It was as if you didn’t even feel her, she was like a breath, like a spirit. After she gave birth to my sister, she couldn’t have any more children because of cervical cancer and it was a great pain for her because she loved children very much. Then she lost the sight in her left eye because of a blood clot. She also lost her breast to breast cancer. But she never complained, she never said she couldn’t cope anymore, she never showed any pain on her face.
My mother stood in Father’s shadow like a burning bush. She had tremendous faith in the Most Holy Mother of God. In 1940, she was in a clinic in Cluj for treatment and she dreamed that she was at the bottom of a pit and she was trying to get out and she couldn’t. Then a woman came and he said, “I recognised her, she was the Mother of God. And she said to me, ‘Hold on to this thread,’ and she gave me a blade of grass, ‘that you may succeed. “How can I hold on to a blade of grass?” But I grabbed the blade of grass and I came up”.
There were many wonderful events with my mother, events that were “not by chance” but directed by the One Above. When my father came back from prison, after eight years, my mother got cervical cancer again and she didn’t want to go for an operation. Finally, I persuaded her to go to Professor Chiricuță, a surgeon, the son of a priest. But he didn’t want to operate on her, he said he wouldn’t risk it because he wouldn’t give her a chance. Then my father went to him and said: “I ask you in the name of Father Chirircuță, your father, whom I knew very well, to operate on her – because where you can’t, God can”. So the professor agreed to operate. And God let my mother live for another twenty years. And in the meantime, the teacher died, but she survived!
She died peacefully, without showing any signs of going, one fine morning, a month after her 90th birthday. Basically, my mother was held all her life by the Most Holy Mother of God, in whom she had enormous faith.
“When Father was in prison, we didn’t know if he was still alive. And he was in Aiud, in the bathhouse… He was there for two weeks, isolated in the ‘neagra’, and when they took him out he was almost dead. Then, when spring came, they took him out to work in the garden, where the dirty water of the city was drained, and before they released him from prison, they made them give statements that they would give information to the militia. But my father said, “I will not go. If you put this condition on me, I’d rather stay here. That is why he was the last one to leave Aiud, after him the gate was closed”.
(Testimony of Fr. Cristian, spiritual son of Fr. Ioan; and of Mrs. Cecilia Sabău, physical daughter; grouped by Radu Hagiu – Orthodox Family Magazine No. 2(49)/2013, pp. 11-14 and No. 3(50)/2013, pp. 9-11)