It’s not easy to meet him and talk to Father Adrian Făgeţeanu. You must first get to the Lainici Monastery on the narrow and sloping valley of Jiu. Then, after a few hours of rest, you start from morning to sihastria, where the father suddenly withdrew, unexpectedly, without further explanation. Sick and almost blind, he found a place of meditation and prayer in the hut of the mountain, leaving with one gesture of renunciation all the comfort of Bucharest he enjoyed in his warm cell from Antim Monastery. (…)

Lost in his broad and gray race, the parent seems even smaller – a man’s hand. With a short, hesitant gesture he withdrew his hand. She does not allow us to kiss her. Instead, he blesses us and loves us with great love on the crown. He searches for a moment, his gaze barely visible, and a little excitedly he sits down on the bed. He does not know well who we are and what we want from him. It does not matter. The Father behaves as if he had entered Christ. It only glows slightly when we ask why he left Antim. Why, at 92, he retired to a place where he would never leave him any more? His blue and elderly eyes seek indefinitely in the distance of the wall. He knows the answer well, but he does not find the right word. “For peace,” he says lately. “For soul.” In the parent’s palace he smells beautiful, he laughs – he also trumps and incense. The same is the case of the room – simple and unnecessary: ​​a clay stove with a cousin, a sleeping, an icon over the window and a table resting on a Psalter, an Acatistier. Books are part of the decor. When and when, Father Adrian stretches his hand, he touches his thick, lightweight cloaks, as if he wants to convince himself that he is in their place. It never opens them. Even at 92, the father knows all the prayers by heart.

“That’s what God wanted – to go back from where I left,” says the father, remembering how, released from Aiud’s prison (20 years of heavy prison because he was part of the Orthodox movement “Hot Rug”), he wanted to enter the monastic community of Crasna Gorj, even the hermitage where Sandu Tudor was arrested, the soul and initiator of Antim’s “Firing Ruffle”. Elder Crasne did not even want to hear. He not only did not want to receive it, but threatened him, shouting, “If you do not leave in five minutes, you will remain your head on the chopper.” Ill and weak as a lion, the father shrank. Life was for him a dead end, an endless tunnel. He did not know where to get it. Christ’s help shouted, when an older monk approached him and, pulling him aside, he whispered in his ear: “Go to Lainici Monastery. There is the man of God. “

After a day on the train, he arrived. At the monastery he did not have to look for anyone. The man of God went into his path, as if he had been waiting for him since the world. He was the abbot Calinic Caravan – a saint and a mountain of humility. Seeing Father Adrian as he looks, the abbot did not ask him anything. He received him as a brother, with love and earthquake. He gave him money for clothes and medicine, wrapped it with his hand for a year, then put it in the lightest work, teach young people the secrets of history and languages, literature and grammar. A simple man with just two classes, Calinic Caravan had no philocalic readings. He only lived them, he put them into action. Although he was an abbot, he worked in the garden, he was building stoves, preparing the table, enjoying himself as a child when the brethren were praising his dishes. All the while, they asked the monks to learn, to follow theological studies, giving them money for books or train money to support their exams in Craiova. “What impressed me with Father Calinic was boundless goodness and, above all, unceasing prayer. He prayed always, anywhere, day and night. He prays for us, for all the land, for those persecuted for righteousness. He even prayed for the visible and unseen enemies for the Communists, saying, “All of us are our brethren. Our love will soften their hearts. Pray for them too. ” Frankly, I smiled at myself as I had suffered from them. I would have done anything, but to pray for the Communists it was over my powers. Elder Calinic said nothing – just smiled. It has not been long before and in front of the monastery stopped a few black and luxurious cars. It was great agitation, great, at the gate and from the car came down Nicolae Ceausescu. As he headed for me, he asked, “Are you a priest? … I came with my parents and I want you to read some prayers for health.” Who could have thought so? Seeking not to lose my temper, I entered the church with them and I became my priest. I prayed for Ceausescu and, therefore, for the Communists. Then I understood the smile of Father Calinic. Father knew everything. He had a praying dream. “

Seven times declared dead

(…) Seven times the father passed by to death. He felt his heavy, ugly breathlessness in his words seven times. Once, he died as convincingly as possible. He was five years old and was during the retreat in Bucovina. Suit in a wagon with their parents and all their possessions of middle-class peasants, they behaved as if they were going to the fair, on a trip. Child and mindless, he did not understand what was going on, what a tragedy the family and the people in the neighboring villages were living. He liked to play and, attracted by the noise of the ground on which the horses were riding, leaned more over the wagon’s coffin. A moment of inattention and misfortune occurred: “Without realizing what is happening, the wheel of the carriage has passed over my stomach,” says the father. “I died on the spot. To the horror of my parents, I do not breathe anymore. I had my abdomen broken and my intestines were scattered on the plinth. My mother, poor, was desperate. She wept lamenting for pain, while the other refugees, stopping the carts in our own right, accused her of everything that had happened because of her fault that she had not cared for me. They also advised her not to carry her body, but to bury me in the first village. The village was called Hlinita. That’s what he did. With pain, he stopped in front of the church, but because the parish priest there was gone, he left me to a deacon and paid a grandmother to wash me, to do all she needed for the funeral, she went on, for fear not to lose the convoy of refugees.

Indeed, the old lady started to do business. He washed me, dressed me in clean clothes, sat down on the table, put on his chest candle and started reading from the Psalter. One day had passed, the night was rushing over the room, and as the old man continued to read prayers for the dead, someone said, “Grandma, close the window.” The woman was surprised. The window was closed, the door, the same. “Then why is the candle flashing on the dead man’s chest?” Asked the man who was watching the room. As he approached me, he saw that we were breathing.

I do not know whether it was really a miracle or that the dick, rubbing me tight, put my heart on the move. All I know is that people sent word to other refugees to find her mother and to tell her that her boyfriend had risen. Let me not tell you how happy my parents lived. Because they could not turn the cart because of the puff coming from behind, they returned to Hlinita on foot, they went to Suceava, and in the hospital, a doctor sewed me, saying that in his life he had never seen it before. “

***

Another clinical death would have been waiting for the father many years later at Stalingrad. He had volunteered on the front, and, full of youthful delights, wanted to regain Bessarabia. Also a volunteer presented to General Dragalina, offering for a dangerous action. He never came back to the unit. Again, his life remained suspended by a thread of illusion. The explosion of a shrapnel severely hurt him. It was full of blood, and the bottom jaw was barely in a cartilage. He was disfigured and hardly breathed because of bleeding. Doctors gave him two or three hours of survival. There was no way to help him. They had nothing to do with it. The only chance was a good hospital and surgeon. There, in the open field, nothing could be done. Then the miracle happened. There was an interrupted, troubled engine in the air, and a few seconds later, a German hunting plane landed, stopping right next to the parent. The plane could not fly. He had a fault on the gas tank. It was not a serious thing, for the German screwed up for a while under the belly of the plane and the engine started. Seeing he wants to leave, a Romanian officer, Ciurea (Maramurean), asked the pilot to take the wounded, to take him to a hospital. The German refused. No regulation in the world – human or military – could force him to carry a wounded man. It was a two-seat airplane (pilot and observer) and any extra pound was a catastrophe. Then, without any thoughts, Officer Ciurea pulled the gun and put the aviator in the air. Either he took his father or shot him. The situation was on the knife edge. The two Germans pulled away and counseled. They wanted to get the wounded in the cabin, run a few hundred yards, and then throw it off. Indeed, the wounded man was climbing with a valley in the cockpit, the observer crackled (only he knows how) on the right seat and the plane started. After a few minutes, the parent heard the observer telling the pilot not to abandon him anymore. The plane had regained its stability and the engine was working well. The flight went smoothly. In two hours, the plane traveled 600 kilometers, after which the injured was quickly taken to a hospital where he was waiting for the operating room and all the necessary. “All this time, I thought of many,” remembers his father. “I reviewed my life, I asked questions. It was not the fear of death, of physical or physical painor something else. It was God. I realized that even if I had been the emperor’s famous chief of state, no one could have saved me in the wilderness of the Russian plain. This has changed my life from the ground. After I left the hospital on vacation, my first trip was to Putna, where I worshiped the life of God, my savior, in front of the altar. “

“Christ is risen!” In the prison

Father Adrian has gone through many. He remembers, but does not insist. About suffering and death speaks in passing, as a childhood friend. Arrested in 1958 at a Suceava interrogation, a security officer named Blehan (the son of a church cantor) beat him in the head, so blood clots irremediably affected his optic nerve. At Aiud, the guards were not happy to punish him by putting him in the carriage. Although it was a frost to crack the stones, they poured two buckets of water over his flesh. In a few hours, the water froze turning the skin into a shell to the bone. Of all, the father chooses the most beautiful memories: the figurative figure of Father Sofian, the absolute and unmatched fineness of Father Ghiuş, the moral and flawless attire of the peasant Elijah of Sacele (whom the father also commands today to prayer together with his wife , Păuna, and the child, Toader), Sandu Tudor’s theological reluctance, who died assassinated in the cell itself.

“You will not believe me, brother, but in prison I was closest to God,” says Father Adrian. “There, you cherished the gift of God. You liked the air, which, in an overpopulated cell, was looking for a few seconds, in turn, standing with your nose under the crack of the door. You liked the bread (two slices by which you could see the sunlight), along with the honey of a good word. We were weak, but we were helping each other. I gave it to Vasile Voiculescu for my part. I grew up and barely standing on his feet, he was forced to carry some bigger paper than he did. He could not lift them, and then the guards punished him by cutting his ration of food … In jail, you needed food, but above all, the word of God. Through Him we have shown our strength. I remember that in Aiud I had a calendar on my fingers, according to the Gauss method. I calculated the date of Easter and I realized it was exactly that night. Without thinking about the traces, I began to cry, “Christ has risen!” And immediately from all the cells, the wonderful song began to rise up to heaven: “Christ has risen from death with death to death, and treading life in tombs bestowing “. Aiud sounded the call of hope, our cry of joy, the desperation of the guards who thought we had started a revolt. They went madly through the courtyard and drew warning shots, phoned, and demanded reinforcements. They were frightened of our united voices, the spiritual force of faith, which no broken window can stop.

There are many things that no one else can understand. The strength that God gives you would be one of them … When I was arrested, the investigator pulled my cross off my throat and threw it into the garbage can. I got it from there. He struggled and threw his cross back to the garbage. I did not let myself. Again, I lifted my cross, and he trampled me. After 8-9 attempts, the officer ceded. She left me alone … Being in the torture room, I was saying to myself: “Hold on! Do not laugh at Christ “and maybe you will not believe me, brother, but after 60 blows I did not feel any pain anymore. The body alone was working without my will, as if she was self-anesthetizing.

In prison you cease to exist, only Christ keeps you alive. At the exit of Aiud, I learned that my poor mother, when writing the akathist for the priest, passed my name to both the living and the dead, knowing nothing of me. He was right – in jail, we were both alive and dead, alike. “