“You have a Saint in your family!… Seek and you will find out”

Dialogue with Ioan Iscu, grandson of Father Gherasim Iscu:

– Professor, why did you give up being a lawyer to become a teacher?

– It was not a deliberate renunciation. There was a period in my life when I was searching for meaning and I wanted to give my life content, and slowly the desire to get closer to God crystallised in my mind. In order to get closer to God, I thought it would be appropriate to attend the Faculty of Theology.

Immediately after the revolution, we were visited by all sorts of people from the neo-Protestant denominations who tried to explain the Bible to us. I was embarrassed to think that I had a law degree and came from a Christian family where I had received a serious Christian education, and now I was being taught about God by Protestants, some of whom I did not trust at all. This made me want to know more about God, to get closer to Him. Besides, I couldn’t imagine reaching the end of my life without knowing the religion I was born into…

– But what was your relationship with God – why did you make this decision?

– My parents were practising Christians. There were days when the whole family would get up at 12 o’clock midnight and we would do Akathists and katismas from the Psalter together. My parents went to church every Sunday. I never heard my father swear. As in any peasant’s home, we had brandy or wine, but it was consumed in moderation. My parents were very strict about fasting. They also kept Monday, and during the four fasts, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, we ate without oil. Other people thought of them as extremists.

Repentance is a condition of the true Christian; you cannot be a Christian unless you are truly repentant of your sins. Repentance means regret for sins committed and at the same time the desire to change, to make a good start. Unfortunately, this term has been hijacked by the neo-Protestant cults. They all see themselves as ‘repentant’. Today, people are looking for miracles, for the sensational, for visionary priests, but they forget that the soul must be cleansed of its sins through repentance. The Holy Fathers said: “Greater than he who works miracles is he who sees his sins”.

– What happened to you after you left home?

– I went to university in the middle of the communist period, when atheism was the dominant ideology. This, together with the fact that I went to a socio-political university, made me not a very practising Christian. Unfortunately, the environment in which I studied didn’t help either – I didn’t meet a single colleague at university who I felt had a relationship with God. I didn’t go to church any more because if I did I would be found out and get into trouble – but I was planning to go to church again after university…

– What can you tell us about Father Gherasim, whose grandson you are?

– I didn’t know him, he died before I was born. But all the people who knew him spoke of him in superlatives. He finished primary school in the Poduri community with an A. In the attic of the house I found papers and theses written by His Holiness. I was surprised that none of them was marked in red. Mine were all corrected and my father used to show me his work. I met a classmate of his who told me that he had great intellectual qualities – not only was he top of his class, but the gap between him and the rest of the class was so wide that he was considered a donkey among sheep. The same thing was later confessed to me by a fellow teacher. He entered the monastery at a very young age – he was in the sixth grade; that says a lot.

What is not known about Father is that after graduating from the Faculty of Theology, he went on to do about three more faculties and spoke about seven languages. My grandmother, his mother, used to tell us that Father was an extraordinarily hardworking man – when he came home he’d exchange a few words and then get down to work. My grandmother was a simple, unschooled woman. I find it extraordinary how she, an illiterate woman, managed to raise such a man. She also took care of us and tried her best to bring us closer to God. She taught us the first prayers, the Creed, the Our Father. My grandmother, after finishing her family duties, that is, raising her children, became a nun. And because it was very difficult to enter the monasteries at that time, she lived the life of a nun in her own parental home – she lived as a hermit in the house where she grew up, doing a lot of prayer and prostations.

In my fourth year of theology, I asked for Father’s file, thinking I would learn more about the life of his holiness. From my experience as a lawyer, the first thing I noticed was that this file had been “whitewashed”, meaning that many aspects of his life were missing, people who had denounced him, people who had tortured him. What I learned from the file was that at the time of his arrest he was the abbot of the Tismana monastery and some members of the “National Resistance Movement” asked him to provide shelter and food for the anti-communist fighters – which Father Gherasim did wholeheartedly. He was arrested and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for “conspiracy against the social order”. During his imprisonment he was held in several prisons: Pitești, Gherla, Aiud, Canal, Târgu-Ocna. Through his sacrifice, Father chose the path that leads to heaven. After reading about the saints of the prisons and learning about the sufferings that Father Gherasim endured in the communist prisons, I thought that he too had joined the ranks of the saints.

It was also an event that somehow strengthened my conviction. In 1993, I was passing by a subway station when I met a monk who, I later learned, led a life of great devotion. Although there were many people around, he came up to me and told me that I had a saint in my family. My first thought was that the saint the priest was talking about was my brother, Mihăiță, who died when he was six months old. My father used to tell us: “Don’t mourn him, don’t grieve for him, he’s a saint!” But this priewst told me that the saint he was talking about was a priest…

– Do you feel that he is protecting you?

– A few years later I had a car accident. I was driving at 175 km/h and I hit a plum tree. The car overturned and was smashed – absolutely nothing could be salvaged from it, they came with a flatbed to lift it. But I was unhurt! Then I had the feeling that Father had interceded with God to get me out alive. […]

(Raluca Tanaseanu – Orthodox Family Magazine, no. 7 (30)/2011, excerpt from an interview with Ioan Iscu, grandson of Father Gherasim Iscu)