The prayer from prison

I must say that most of the conversations I had about prayer — the ones that laid the very foundation of my spiritual life — took place in prison.

It was there that I spoke with people whose long years of imprisonment had opened within them a deeper and more personal relationship with our Saviour, Jesus Christ. These were not necessarily clerics or monks, but men who, through suffering and profound self-examination, had reached a spiritual depth close to that of the great fathers of the Church. Gafencu, Oprișan, Virgil Maxim, and so many others became for us models of holiness — enduring points of reference for all of us who were imprisoned and had either known them personally or heard of their witness.

I remember my second imprisonment. I had been ordained a priest in 1972. In 1978, I was expelled from the school, removed from teaching, and cast out of the Church. In other words, I was handed over to the Securitate, stripped of every form of ecclesiastical protection. I had no parish, no position, no support. No archpriest dared take responsibility for me, and I felt utterly lost. Then I was arrested and sent to prison once more.

Before my arrest, I had been praying regularly with my seminarians. In the evenings we gathered, read a passage from the Bible, and prayed together. If God placed a word of understanding in someone’s heart — an interpretation of the text we had read — that person would share it; if not, we would each return home and meditate on what had been revealed. I came to believe that I truly knew how to pray.

But when I entered prison, I realised that I did not know how to pray at all. I found myself living in an atmosphere of fear. Anxiety ruled my every thought. Whenever I began to pray, the guards would mock me, disturb me, or even beat me to stop. I could not find peace within myself; I could not enter into true prayer. I tried to repeat the Jesus Prayer — “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner” — but even that became impossible. A kind of resistance, a stubborn heaviness, took hold of me.

Then I remembered what Saint Maximus the Confessor said about prayer. So I persisted, struggling toward a deeper, more interior prayer — one that would cleanse my mind of all evil, of all inner corruption, and of every darkness coming from outside. I reached a point where everything around me vanished, and before me opened a chasm — a terrible abyss. I did not know what it was; fear seized me, and I drew back.

Until finally, I threw myself into that abyss. And just as the devil tempted Jesus in the desert — saying that God would send His angels to bear Him up, quoting the Psalms — so it was with me. God sent His angel, and my foot did not strike the stone.

(Fr. Gheorghe Calciu Dumitreasa – Living Words. “Serving Christ Means Suffering”)