“That man had a gentleness and a discretion I cannot describe to you.”
Archim. Roman Braga: Before 1953, when I was at Canal, I found a great monk there. Through him, so to speak, God worked my conversion to monasticism. […] And God made me meet, in a brigade there, Father Evghenie Hulea, a simple monk, the abbot of a hermitage, Mușunoaiele, in Vrancea. This monk knew the ladder of St. John the Baptist by heart. I’m not exaggerating. He had read it so much in his life, from the time he was a novie in the monastery until he was so old, that even Catholic priests would come around him, as if at a panorama, to listen to another chapter of the Saint John’s Ladder. The Catholics did not know who St. John of the Ladder was, because they had lost the tradition of the Eastern Holy Fathers, but they could not escape the beauty of the language in which Father Evghenie spoke it. He was my confessor in the Canal. I owe him the final decision to enter the monastery and become a monk. When I was released, I went straight to the monastery.
Dinu Cruga: How did he distinguish you from all the other monks and theologians you knew?
He was not a theologian, he was not an intellectual, once again you can see my aversion to theorising.
I can’t imagine that you were impressed by the fact that he could recite the Ladder of St. John the Baptist by heart!
What impressed me about him was forgiveness, the spirit of forgiveness. This man was tortured because he was a monk. They made him walk like a frog in the mud. You can’t imagine the inventiveness of cruelty! The prisons there are not like here in America. All the guards made fun of him, all the officers; after they carried him through the mud like a pig, he smiled: “God bless you children! Children were for him! All these tyrants, all these murderers, were children to him! His serenity, his peace was never disturbed. He suffered everything with such resignation. But no thought of revenge. When we began to talk about them as if they were monsters, he would say: “Let’s pray better, let’s say a psalm”.
So the teaching of Father Evghenie Hulea was the parable of his life.
The parable! In fact, it is the whole teaching. His eyes, his prayer, the prayers that he prayed in a circle and that were heard by many united priests who came there for evening prayers, which he knew by heart. He knew the whole Pravila by heart. The Akathist of Our Lady, the Paraklesis, he knew them all by heart. And on Sundays, when we didn’t go out to work, to dig, we used to gather in a circle. Around Father Evghenie. He was a great example.
Did he give you any special advice?
He said to me in particular: “God calls us all to something: I think God calls you to be a monk: he doesn’t call you to be a theologian, he doesn’t call you to be a great scholar. God calls us to live with Him, to live for Him, to go to that little church in the hermitage. He invited me to his hermitage. “Come there, we have a beautiful little church with a hermitage, we make our morning and evening meals. Vespers, the Eucharist and we are saved”. For him, salvation was very simple. You say “Lord Jesus Christ…”. You go to vespers in church, you do obedience in the monastery and you are saved. God, how simple it was for him! And I was moved to tears by that simplicity. And the spirit of forgiveness. He told me all this because he found some intellectual clues in me. From the prison came the news that Mother Ionela in Bucharest had the Stigmata of the Saviour; that miracles were happening in Vladimirești. He did not take part in these things. Nor did he listen to them. He simply said: “Let’s say a psalm”. These things didn’t exist for him. For him salvation was very simple: no vision, no miracle, no illusion, none of these things. “Father, obey and you will be saved”. It was incredibly practical and simple: “Say your prayers, Lord Jesus Christ, cut off your will and you will be saved”. […]
What happened to Father Evghenie?
He remained in prison, but was later released. He returned to the Musunoaiele hermitage and died about two years later. I never saw him again. But everyone said that Fr. Evghenie Hulea was a great abbot. I know this from a friend of mine, Dorobanu, who had been a classmate of mine at university and had become a deacon, a monk, with him. And Father Dorobanțu said that once he went with Father Hulea to pray for rain; there was a drought, called by a village, as is the custom; Father Evghenie prayed the prayers, and when they came by horse and cart to the monastery, Father Dorobanțu looked back and saw that in the part where they had prayed it was raining, thundering and lightning. And he cried out: “Father, look, it’s raining where we were praying. “No, Father, it’s not raining, it’s not,” the old man replied, without looking back. “Your brotherhood, be quiet, hold the horses, it’s not raining”. […]
There are people who become monks much later in life, who didn’t have the fascination and attraction you had as a child, who didn’t have a monastery close by. I’m trying to grasp what it is that so overwhelms a being that he goes from being an ordinary man, with his sins, to going to a monastery with his sins.
I couldn’t speak of others, because what attracts a man to monasticism is as personal and unique as his relationship with God. The circumstances, the impulse to give oneself completely to God, works differently for each person. For me it happened in prison. [In Pitești I had a strong fear that I was disappearing as a person. That the divine spark in us would be extinguished. The experiences in Pitești were so terrible that I left there with the thought that I had to get closer to God and live for God, that it made no sense to win the world and lose one’s own person, one’s own image. That was one thing. Then, in Canal, God answered my prayer and I met Father Evghenie Hulea. I told you how the guards used to make fun of him.
And I didn’t have the courage to just jump up and say I’m a monk too. In fact, they weren’t punishing him, they were having fun making fun of him, making him hold a bone in his mouth while he imitated a frog, or while he was singing ‘Here comes, here comes spring’. We felt the chastisement of witnessing the mockery of a spiritual man who knew the Ladder of St John the Baptist by heart and around whom the Greek Catholic priests gathered with their mouths agape to catch a glimpse of spirituality from him. He emerged unscathed from the torture and ridicule to which he was subjected. He continued to pray. He was always praying the prayer of the heart, and that must be why they made fun of him. And when I spoke to him, he was so kind and he said: “They are people too”. He was so forgiving and gentle. He was my confessor at Canal and he told me, if you really want to do something, go to the monastery. […]
Your cell was solitude. As for tomorrow’s worries…
A soup would come, sometimes we didn’t even know when it was coming. When you start a dialogue with God, you don’t want to be disturbed. In the labour camp, when they told me to go to the canal, I kissed the bed. I didn’t want to go. Leave me, I said, I want to stay here. They dragged me to the canal. I think it was a defining experience for me. But God was preparing a spiritual fruit for me, because there I met Father Evghenie Hulea, who was a great monk for me. God rest his soul. This man had a gentleness and discretion that I cannot describe to you. He was only in primary school, but his simplicity had depths unknown to those with a university education. In everything he said, there was a subtlety and a spiritual reasoning that amazed all the intellectuals around him. He did not speak great words, but there was something in his personality that appealed. He spoke two simple words, but he fed you. And what he did for the Catholic priests united in prison, I couldn’t do with all my arguments, starting with the Filioque, purgatory and everything I had learned in theology. Father Hulea didn’t say a word about it. And those priests would go to him for two or three simple peasant words; that he spoke like a Romanian peasant. But he had this finesse that the Spirit had given him, which was like a magnet that attracted us. Today I am convinced that his model attracted me and led me to take my first step in the world, after my liberation, directly to Saint Paraschiva in Iași and to become a monk.
(Dinu Cruga, Spiritual Steps. Interview with Father Archimandrite Roman Braga, 2nd edition, Renașterea Publishing House, Cluj-Napoca, 2016, pp. 67, 70-75, 167-170).