Sanctified through suffering

As it is clear from the distant memories of the father, from the very beginning his life was centred and shaped by the music of the church and the bells, interrupted for a time by strange music, such as that of bells and chains, and then returning to the melody of childhood…

Together with his four brothers, he spent his holidays in the monasteries, preferring Durău, where he entered as a novice at the age of 17 or 18. From here, after a year and a half, he went to Cernica to enter the seminary.

As the priest humorously recounts, he got there by first passing a shoeshine boy at the Bucharest railway station, who took a lot of money just for polishing his boots, and by spending his last lei on a taxi to the monastery gate, because he couldn’t afford to dust his shoes. At the entrance to Cernica he came face to face with the director of the seminary, who saw him and said: “Where have you come from, Brother? Have you come by car? From Durău? Well, you could only come by car from Durău, because there is nobility there…!”.

After four years, the seminary having been closed, the priest was assigned to the “monastic section” of the seminary of Râmnicu-Vâlcea, from where he was transferred to the seminary of Roman to complete his studies; in the years since he left Cernica, he noticed an involution in his formation.

Imprisoned for his faith

One day in 1948, “two cars of mad luxury” (cars in which Fr. Chivu Stoica drove around the capital – without a licence and without giving an account if he hit a poor passer-by, cars in which the Communist elite drove around Bucharest and from whose tinted windows they watched a house they were going to move into after the owner had been evicted and arrested for “enemy activity”…) stopped in front of the Roman diocese, where Fr. Iustin Pârvu was on his third day of ministry since leaving the seminary. They picked him up and took him to the Roman Securitate police, where he suddenly became an “enemy of the people”, a “bandit”. Arrested for religious propaganda, he was sent to Roman, Suceava, Aiud, Baia Sprie, Gherla and the Periprava labour colony for sixteen years. And all this because he had chosen Christ. When he entered Aiud, in front of the window of his cell “there was a small walnut as thick as a finger”, and when he came out it had become a tree…

Although at first he wanted to be free, he later realised that his suffering was part of God’s plan, so that through his sacrifice and that of others like him in prison, the sins of the nation would be atoned for. This thought made him bear every injustice, every torture, because he was doing it in the name of his nation, in the name of Christ. He was happy when he knew that he was suffering unjustly, he even came to love the torturers, to pray for them. “He beats you and you forgive him. You look at him and you forgive him. That’s Christianity! Not when we’re eating koliva. It’s when he hits you and it doesn’t hurt. (Fr. D. Bejan, The Joys of Suffering). He remembers that he cried many times, but his tears were tears of joy… He learned humility, which enlightens the mind, and through pain he learned patience.

Like the bones of the 11,000 monks and priests killed by the Russian communists in 1919-1920 at the Oranki monastery and around our communist prisons, “when you take the pickaxe, a few centimetres under the ground, you find holy, beautiful, yellow bones. It’s a sign of sanctity, because they are there, in these invisible, unknown cemeteries, through suffering, through sacrifice,” says Father. They are like the first Christians, who were tortured for their faith! This is what Father Justin says: “This is what the communists did not understand, that the soul on the cross wins true freedom, that all their methods of torture, all their methods of spiritual re-education have made more saints than slaves, they have sanctified the land of the country with the blood of the Martyrs.

Easter in the mine-prison

An episode that reveals the state of liturgical joy in this archipelago of pain is that of Holy Easter in Baia Sprie. The priests and some of the inmates were fasting; the prison administration tried to get them to break their fast, tempting them with roast meat, which they refused or saved for after the Resurrection. It was announced that the norm was to be increased – several hundred tonnes were to be extracted and evacuated, an announcement that was received with resignation. They went to confession, and those who worked the night shift experienced moments of exaltation: by striking the mine spindles, they imitated the sound of drums and bells before the service, an altar was set up in a cave, crosses were made from mine beams, and a choir of priests led by Father Valeriu Antal, who wore a white household cloth as his epitrachelion, officiated. In the silence of the underground, the priest shouted: “Come and take the light! The lamps were lit, the Gospel was read and the priest proclaimed the joy that “Christ is risen”. It was, as St. John Chrysostom would say, “a time when the vessels of the Church were of wood and the souls of the ministers were of gold. Now the vessels of the Church are of gold and our souls are of clay!

Pr. Justin recalls how the militiamen used to make fun of the prisoners, a behaviour that even the militiamen of today have not got rid of. But their behaviour was different in that they were more protective of strangers. “In the courting that took place inside, the Hungarians, the Germans were often protected…”, thus proving “this spirit of inferiority towards the stranger…”.

The wagon driver, the farmer, the “bandit” Iustin Pârvu, hoped that his sentence would be reduced because he had worked, but each time the Central Committee came up with sentences that were extended by years… Someone from the Securitate would come and sign: “another 24 months”!

With the wisdom of today, Father Justin said: “When you judge history from the distance of a few decades, as you see it, you understand that there was also the will of God, which shakes you to see better the world in which you live”.

Father Justin Pârvu never missed an opportunity to urge people to return to the book, to the written word: “I breathed freedom through books, I saw the world beyond the bars through books”, books that circulated only in fascicles, on pages that “were never so well read, never had the word so much meaning”. There, the only way to resist was through faith and culture. If at least ten per cent of those who came out of this sanctuary of pain that was the prison had built a monastery, the Romanian people would be a saved people today, the priest believes.

Eminescu’s poetry warmed his heart. Perhaps even Eminescu’s prayer, which all the peasants, especially those in Bukovina, know by heart as if it were Holy Scripture: “O Chosen Mother / We kneel and pray to you, / Lift us up, save us / From the wave that haunts us; / Be a shield of strength / And a wall of salvation, / Your adoring gaze / Descends upon us, / O most pure Mother / And ever Virgin, / Mary! “reminded her of her childhood. Father said: “He who writes poetry is a child of God. He who writes poetry with grace…”

Dostoyevsky versus Sadoveanu

Father often refers to Russian writers, especially Dostoyevsky, for whom Sacred Scripture was his book of refuge, both in prison and for the rest of his life. Dostoyevsky knew Christ in prison, where he also penetrated the mystery of man. His work breathes the theme of salvation and the confrontation with the image of Christ and Christianity.

When asked about Romanian politics, Father Dostoyevsky immediately replied: “But do we have politics? Do we have politicians? We have all sorts of adventurers, doers who do not care about their families, but who care about the country, about the nation…”. Paradoxically, these people, like all Romanians, are held together only by enmity. Analysing the current situation in the country, he says that “Romania is a school after the storm”.

During this cruel period, “everyone escaped the official lie in their own way, everyone understood differently what they had experienced. And there was no moment, during and after the revolution, when all the individual histories came together, when they found a common, dynamic motivation”.

Father Justin also refers to “the simplifying discourse of the history teacher, who did not want to balance on a rope of words with multiple connotations”, as is unfortunately the case today, when we should still be discussing in a relaxed way certain people or events that are still shrouded in an aura of mystery.

He also speaks of the betrayal of intellectuals and their inner blindness. They lack elementary spiritual training, they are “too easily detached from the interests and values of Orthodoxy”, their sense of moral responsibility has drastically diminished, they are versatile – like Sadoveanu (who signed death sentences when he was president of the Great National Assembly, or let’s not forget Fr. T. Popa when he was being hunted), Bogza and others…

Father Justin Pârvu is convinced that the time in which we will restore our moral fibre and the country will be on a normal path is equal to the time in which the communist “damage” lasted.

Church in chains

Romanian Orthodoxy is now portrayed in the light of compromise – accused of not putting up the strong resistance it deserves. The “moral holocaust against Orthodoxy” (Antonie Plămădeală), the restrictions imposed on the Church at that time: the abolition of religious education in schools, the removal of theological faculties from universities, the censorship of publications, the placing under state control of episcopal centres and institutions of the Patriarchate of Bucharest, the arbitrary expulsion of monks from monasteries, culminating in the destruction of dozens of churches, are forgotten. No church has suffered as much as the Orthodox Church, a church in chains, but one that has preserved the full virtuality of Christianity from the beginning. The strongest force of resistance was the network of active parishes; no village church was closed. The village church and the cemetery, the martyrs and the invisible saints, and especially monasticism, were the vital forces of Romanian Christianity in those years. There was no Aliturgical Day! Its whole history was a journey of the cross. The Orthodox Church was a Church in a state of vigilance, which neither communism nor other influences changed its liturgical rhythm. If the Church is now, as Father Justin Pârvu says, “in this state of shadow” – the sad fact that some priests are only interested in collecting as much as possible, do not care about the suffering man, and want “to be paid, live well and die retired” – he believes that “it is precisely God’s will that when the time comes, the Church will shine brighter than the sun in the sky”.

Romanian Orthodoxy has great European virtues, being an integrating force for different traditions and cultures. The East gave Christianity to Europe. We must give it back today – believes Fr. Justin.

Adrian Alui Gheorghe’s book is about character, about people with whom you no longer feel the cold or hunger, or the coldness of the chain on the whistle of the foot. It shows, through the memories of the priest, told in a wise tone, all the horrors of an empire of suspicion, of informers, of hatred. Criminals became educators and victims were considered criminals, bandits. “For the enemies of the people there is no mercy, no compassion,” read the inscription on the entrance to the Pitești prison. There was no more concept of time. Time had died. There was no past, no future. Everything was reduced to the terrible present. On the other hand, if “outside” the hope of change had disappeared, inside the prison it had not died, it had ripened.

Living between the cross and hell, faith saved Father Justin from the uchronia of imprisonment.

(Richard Constantinescu – Rost Magazine, no. 33, November 2005, pp. 15-17)