One question that was constantly put to Fr. Arsenius was whether, given the rich experience of his life, with its heavy years of imprisonment and periods of retreat in the wilderness, a miracle had been worked on him. Father deftly avoided a direct answer, judging the question to be more of curiosity than of use. He did this, of course, out of great humility. Nor, however, did he deny that they existed, putting them down solely to the gift of God. (S.A.)
In an interview in 1993, Father Sorin Dumitrescu replied to the painter Sorin Dumitrescu: “You should know that anyone you ask who has not joked about his prayer – whether in prison, in the desert, in the cell, in the street or, well, in the office – will always be careful not to say that he has seen such and such a thing, even though they exist. For if you only knew how far beyond you there is that supernatural ‘something’ which appears, so that a joy and a hope overtake you, beyond what we are! And the first thing that comes to your mind is to be silent and not to speak’.
Another time, to the same question, he answered thus: “I have been asked, because I have about fourteen years in prison, I have also lived in the woods, if a miracle has been done to me. I said: Yes, it did! What? That none was done.
But the miracle is that no miracle has happened and I am alive, I continue to hope, I have managed in the forest to talk to the trees, to know the voice of the forest, the mystery of the silence of the forest. These majestic trees, with their roots in the ground, as we should be on our feet, but with their tips towards the sky… I was making this comparison and I saw in this tree what we should all understand, that it is worthwhile for everyone to have great wisdom, and wisdom is only one thing: to serve the highest ideals”.
“With this I conquered him”
One of the virtues that worked wonders in the life of Fr. Arsenius, as it can in the life of anyone who acquires it, was his love of his enemies, the marvelous effect of which was the sudden change for the better of the one who persecuted him. In 1938 he was working at the Malaxa armaments factory near Brasov, and a local “outlaw”, feared by all, no more and no less, had set out to kill Anghel (Father Arsenie’s married name), who had been tipped off by others about the plan. He was somewhere at a circus when the man attacked him with a club. “I just dodged a little to one side and he fell”. The sister of the man who had attacked him was Anghel’s subordinate at the factory, enjoying his help. She scolded her brother bitterly when she learned that he had made an attempt on her benefactor’s life, which made him repent of his deed.
Father tells us the end of this story: “Afterwards I met him in the street and asked him: What have you got against me, why did you want to kill me? Then he apologized with tears in his eyes. With that I overcame him, he took me by the arm and people were amazed that I was walking with him on my arm through the city center. I took him to the factory, hired him and took care of him. It was God’s will!”.
Another time, during an election campaign, he was stabbed, more by accident, by a gendarme with a bayonet in the abdomen. Frightened, the gendarme dropped the bayonet, a gesture that could have meant losing his job if Anghel took the bayonet away from him and was disarmed. But Anghel acted completely contrary to his expectations and fears. Wounded as he was, and bleeding, he took the bayonet from below and held it out to him. “Your father is my father, your mother is my mother.” His forgiveness, his conciliatory stance, may have surprised the gendarme, we don’t know, but it certainly saved Anghel a great deal of trouble, so that the wound healed easily, without endangering him.
The priest of St. Parascheva
On the feast of St. Parascheva, the Father used to go to Iași and on the feast days he would stand at the head of the saint, to whom he had great devotion, anointing the faithful who passed by and worshipped the gravestone with her holy relics. Once a desperate woman came to the shrine with her dead child in her arms.
He had probably just died, and the woman, in her despair, thought of St. Parascheva. The priest took the child in his hands and placed him above the holy relics. At that moment the child began to move his hands and feet. He had risen.
Our Lady also protected him during his imprisonment in Aiud from 1958 to 1964. At one time in the same cell with the Father there was a brother of General Moșoiu, a general who had liberated Budapest during the war and had put a opinca on the parliament building (because the Hungarians called us “opincari”). This brother was a captain and had a large leg wound from the war. He was healed in prison by St. Parascheva, to whom he had great devotion and to whom he had prayed on the eve of her feast. In gratitude, he confessed to the father that after his release he wanted to build a convent of nuns dedicated to Our Lady, and he described to the father how he would like the nuns’ vestments to be totally different from the usual ones. “I forbade it because everything we wear has a meaning. It’s a sacred habit, you can’t just change it.” What did he, a military man, know? The priest gave him the example of Ghervasie, a living monk from Cozia who, although he didn’t know any books, kept the right order of the order with sanctity. The captain was not satisfied with Father’s opinion and they parted in this disagreement.
They were moved around the cells and at the time of their release in 1964, when the prison yard was full of inmates, Father learned that the captain was looking for him. When he found Father, the captain fell to the ground in front of him, kissed his feet and begged him to forgive him for having upset him. But what made the captain repent so quickly? One night he had a dream of St. Paraskeva, who scoldingly said to him, “Why did you upset my priest, why didn’t you listen to what he told you?” This made him insistently seek the Father to calm his soul.
“I thought it was unreal.”
If we have shown above how the Father’s love of his enemies changed them in a marvelous way, the same thing happened with those who entrusted themselves to him for his guidance, to bring them out of the depths of sin and trouble. The most amazing example is that of the confession of the poet Daniel Turcea, which Father considered the hardest confession of all his work as a confessor – which was extremely rich, not only in terms of time (sixty years of devotion), but especially in terms of the number of people who were always waiting patiently at the door of the cell, in any conditions, in any place. One of these very many was Daniel Turcea, who one morning in 1974 came to the door of the famous confessor who was then at Cernica.
He was determined, he had told his sister, that if this confessor didn’t answer all his questions, he would leave without a doubt. Daniel Turcea’s questions were not simple. He was a bright, intelligent young man, the author of a well-known volume of poetry, and it was precisely his prodigious mind that had led him from one search to another, through thickets of everything, but without peace, without God, without peace of mind.
Here is the young poet’s testimony: “When I opened the door, I was struck by the light shining from Father’s eyes. I thought it was unreal! Gentleness and goodness incarnate! Because I was determined to find out, I took courage. No matter what I said, he answered promptly and anticipated questions and terms I hadn’t even thought of. He wasn’t fazed by any of my questions. I don’t think there’s a man with that kind of culture! After having demolished, brick by brick, the whole edifice of the pride of my knowledge and the pride of my mind, which were about to lose me altogether, he confessed me. I think he was praying for me, I remembered my childhood sins. I, who didn’t know how to confess my sins, encouraged by the Father, told everything I had done”.
Here is how the Father recounted the same moment: “When Brother Daniel came through the door, his eyes so bright and sincerely wanting to know the truth, I fell in love with him immediately and said to myself: ‘Arsenie, let me see you now! This sincere boy is being questioned, what are you going to do?
He wants to know, don’t lose him! If you convince him, you’ve won him!” I said to myself: Lord, you said, “When you are asked, do not consider what you will answer, for at that hour the Holy Spirit will give you the word…”. So I crossed myself and answered him. Father, great is the power of the Holy Cross. The questions came like an avalanche, in complicated and weighty terms, you had to be knowledgeable to understand them, but the answers were also in proportion. In prison I confessed to all kinds of scholars, but the hardest confession of my life was that of Brother Daniil. When he began to confess, I couldn’t stop him from crying to understand what he was telling me, because he was choking with hiccups; but with the mercy of the good Lord, I understood him perfectly. When I untied him, I never saw a happier man.
Daniel Turcea’s life has changed completely since his confession. Two years later, he entered the Faculty of Theology, but then was diagnosed with leukemia. In the hospital, on his sickbed, he was an ardent preacher of the faith, he wrote religious poems, he turned heretics to Orthodoxy.
“What greater miracle than that I am alive?”
His years in prison, fourteen in number, were years of intense spiritual training; like gold in a smelter, so those who bore a particularly heavy cross in the prisons of the communist period were enlightened.
As the Father testified, the only way to remove the “thorn” of unimaginable suffering was prayer, uninterrupted contact with God. He was only twenty-five years old, and his prayer was of a depth and strength that disturbed the opposing spirits. “I retired to the attic and prayed deeply… and the devil tortured me terribly. He appeared before me several times and there I wrestled with him. Yes, I wrestled with him for hours.”
In the winter of 1963, Father Arsenie Papacioc was imprisoned as a political prisoner in Aiud prison, where Colonel Gheorghe Crăciun was in command. It was an experience he could not explain. “What greater miracle than that I am alive?” his confessor often said. Considered a dangerous element for his unshakeable faith in God, Father Arsenie was always proposed for solitary confinement: either because he had not buttoned his coat (three days in solitary), or because he was found lying with one leg in the bed (ten days in solitary), or even sleeping against the side of the bed (ten days in solitary), or because he was making religious propaganda in the cell (also ten days). “They tried very hard to destroy me. They put me in the cooler for days. Extraordinary things happened to me there. There was so much suffering and pain that you didn’t even think you were going to get out alive,” the Father said.
On December 24, 1963, on Christmas Eve, Father Arsenie Papacioc received ten days of solitary confinement under a strict regime. He was guilty of speaking so loudly about God that he could be heard perfectly well in the corridor and neighboring cells. It was bitterly cold outside, and after three days, Father was so weak that he could not stand it any longer and lay down on the cold cement floor of the cell, which meant certain death. “I had gotten to such a point that I was waiting to see my soul leave my body. I was conscious until the last moment. Then something happened that cannot be put into words,” Father recounted. He felt “Someone” pulling him by the legs and saying: “Get up, Arsenie, if you don’t want to die! No sleeping here! Your time has not yet come”. With a superhuman effort, Father climbed up on the edge of the curtain, the only “furniture” of the punishment cell, and remained like that in the dark, suffering his fate.
It was a deep night, and the prisoners in solitary confinement were struggling to stay alive. The wife of Colonel Christmas, the commander of Aiud prison, had a nightmare. She woke from her sleep and said to her husband: “Go and do something about the people you’re guarding, I don’t know, me or them, but we’ll freeze to death.” The colonel left in a daze for the barracks. He opened the doors of the punishment cells, and in the first one he found two young men dressed only in their shirts, shivering with cold.
There was Arsenie Papacioc and a fellow sufferer, Marin Naidim, whom the guards had put in his cell. The colonel ordered the inmates from solitary confinement to be sent to the cells. Christmas had not been allowed by God to commit such a crime, and on the holy night whose name he bore.
“The hole they always put me in was a prison within a prison. One year, at Christmas, they put me in solitary confinement, in a cell with nothing on the floor, no bed, in the terrible cold. And I found a moldy little pot of mardonnaise and I ate it. It was Christmas, and I said, “That’s the muffin I was given.” It may be hard to believe, but I was happy. Because I knew what I was suffering for. I wasn’t there for nothing, but for the name of God I was suffering”, Father would tell his disciples.
These were a few fragments of the secret experiences of Father Arsenios, a few of the experiences that “escaped” from Father Arsenios to strengthen us, to understand him, as much as possible, in his true spiritual stature. In fact, the miracles that we hunt for in the Fathers with a holy life are nothing more than their freshness, the freshness of their lives lived at the height of the Gospel, of the commandments of God; they are nothing more than a foretaste of the Kingdom of God, which is being realized in this life.
From Sorin Alpetri, “Between Time and Eternity. The Life of Father Arsenie Papacioc” (Ed. Accent Print, 2015)