Ștefan: “I came to the understanding that we have so many saints I didn’t know about, so many confessors!”
About how God has changed me and set me on the right path to boldly work His commandments and through Him glorify the Holy Confessors who suffered and endured persecutions and the fires of hell, hoping and believing in the One God, the Triune God, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen!
My testimony and story begins one winter, a year ago. While I was at work, I had the opportunity and often the free time to get to know God and understand His holy will by reading spiritual books. Since I am a Romanian from the right bank of the Prut River, there are very few books of this kind here, and the world and even the bookshops do not know the fearless confessors of Christ who have suffered for the Romanian people and for the faith.
In this way, I had downloaded several spiritual books in PDF format on my mobile phone, including the book “From the Dungeons to the Synaxarium”, through which I later came to know those who, as Martyrs, sanctified this land with their blood. It was the first book I downloaded and began to read with attention and diligence. I had become unable to work when I needed to or to concentrate more because I was so immersed in this book that my whole mind and heart was there in the cells sanctified by these victors over demons and warriors of Christ.
I came to the understanding that we have so many saints that I did not know about, so many confessors who suffered in communist prisons for our Orthodox faith and for our Romanian nation, and who for nothing renounced Christ and the Orthodox faith, but by confessing Christ at the cost of their lives, they shared our Romanian nation, as Radu Gyr says so powerfully and beautifully in the poem “Hymn of the Dead”:
Dear graves, living light,
increased year after year,
we hear you flowing beneath the glen,
like an underground stream!
You illuminated with holy sacrifices
the earth to its foundations,
for the land burns with graves,
as the sky burns with candles.
Hidden in clay, like a treasure,
old graves, new graves,
…that you are lost in the land,
we always find you in us!
When flowers and crosses are torn from you
and if we don’t know your place,
our thought still brings you,
…prostrations of a cherubim.
Holy dead in dungeons and prisons,
…holy dead in battles and storms..,
we have made icons of you,
and we wear on your foreheads crowns.
We weep not tears of blood,
but we are proud of so many heroes.
No! Our nation does not mourn you,
but rejoice in you.
We understood that God was with them in prison, we understood that the Mother of God strengthened them, we understood that for the faith and for Christ we must always be ready to suffer, to be wronged, to be persecuted, to die. Because the soul and the faith in Christ is what is most precious to each one of us. As our Saviour Jesus Christ said, “For behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:21). The soul is the most precious gift each of us has and for which we must fight the invisible enemy lest he rob us of our sins, darkness and hell. We must nourish our souls with prayer and by reading the Holy Scriptures, the Lives of the Saints, the Philokalia or other spiritual books. Let us water it with good works, with hope in God and with much patience, and we shall succeed.
I also say, from all that I have understood in this life, do not think that I am teaching you because I am only a sinner, a trash, I am only sharing with you, dear readers, the words of my heart. Many times I cried bitterly when I read the book that changed me so much, “From the Dungeons to the Synaxarium”. And I always had to wipe my cheeks so that people would not see my feelings and states of mind, because I worked as a salesman in a university and had time to read during classes or even during breaks. Reading and living the imaginative and little felt experience of this book and the events in it warmed my heart so much that when I finished reading it, I used to tell everyone about the prison saints, that they were very close to my soul and that others should know what treasures we have hidden from Satan’s servants.
I told everyone to pray to the confessors, to pay homage to them, to go to the relics and to venerate them. This is how I would like to end the enlightened part of my life, thanks to the knowledge and help of the holy Romanian confessors in the communist dungeons, but not before telling you the main lesson I learned from reading this book: On the prayer of the spirit, or the prayer of Jesus. It is the prayer with which those who were beaten, tortured and even killed resisted, with the help of the Holy Spirit, and with which they were granted the prepared heaven and the high seats for the martyrs on earth. Since then I have been asking myself what this prayer is, what it means, how much it means, and what you have to do, how you have to say: “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner.”
These questions troubled me for a long time, then I forgot about them for a while and one day, through an acquaintance, I came across the book “The Russian Pilgrim”, which describes and explains very well how, when and in what circumstances to begin this prayer with which one reaches perfection. I understood what I needed to understand and set to work. I don’t want to say that I have progressed or that I have reached the prayer of the spirit by going beyond the spoken prayer, but what I want to say is that this prayer is indeed very powerful. To get to the quality, you have to say it in quantity, with the mind turned to these words: “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner.” The best thing to do is to learn it and work it out with the help of a living confessor of this prayer.
That’s all I had to say, I’m too small and insignificant in this world, I’ve just shared with you the experiences, feelings and changes that the saints of the prisoners have made through God to me, the sinner. May God help us!
With love, Ștefan Timuță.
Basarabia, Chișinău
27 October 2013.