We are in complete agreement on this, Mr Voina. As a man of letters and a philosopher, you have understood me perfectly. It is essential that the priest’s message be direct and simple, but what he communicates must stir emotion in the souls of the faithful, for emotion elevates feeling, and it is there that we can most easily encounter God, in those realms of experience and devotion. However, simplicity of communication is not easily attained; it is accessible only to the cultured, to those with a genuine vocation as shepherds…
— …and not a pompous spouter of quotations, as I see even among the youngest of priests today, convinced that their sole mission is to overwhelm their congregation with a deluge of parables swallowed whole a few hours before the sermon. Forgive me, Reverend, but it is the plain truth,’ Voina continued in that soft voice, deliberately and carefully chosen to be submissive and intimate, which seemed to invite you to feel at ease, but only once his will had already been imposed; there was no battle left to fight, and he could afford to be indulgent, approachable, a comrade to the one he had singled out for favour.
— We must cultivate, especially within the church, everything that has the power to tear us away from a profane, linear existence, devoid of concreteness and feeling, which stirs nothing. Everything that stirs us, awakens us! How short our lives actually are, if we consider that, in qualitative terms, those moments of great inner upheaval are all that matter…
— ‘Father,’ Voina had interrupted him, not caring that Partenie was trying to follow his train of thought, carried away and at the same time driven by the musicality of his own voice and with great oratorical fervour, as long as the sermon is conceived by most of the Lord’s ministers as a bombastic collage of metaphors and abstractions, a mechanical gesticulation of familiar images and fixed ideas, it will never reach the heart of the believer. At best, it will bewilder a few devout old women, but that is not the Church’s mission today. It must reach out to young people, to instil in their hearts, firmly and for life, the values for which their forebears died or suffered oppression unimaginable by today’s standards. How does the Church defend itself against the wave of criticism in recent years and the systematic attempts to trivialise and ridicule its role in society? We are not speaking here of educated, philosophically argued atheism, but of a well-targeted and methodically propagated campaign of derision, which undermines the Church’s position in society—and especially its relationship with young people—more than any atheistic doctrine.
The abbot had withdrawn into himself and was gazing at the icon of the Mother of God, now deaf to Voina’s words and attentive only to his own inner dialogue. He was probably praying, for his lips trembled at regular intervals, and tears glistened in his eyes, as though his soul were tormented by unseen trials, and the knees of his heart were bent in adoration of the Immaculate One. Or perhaps he was asking the Creator for forgiveness for the revulsion with which he had looked upon the sick man who had confessed to him that day, for that was what he had felt towards him—admittedly, only for a moment—disgust and fear, as though the unfortunate man were the carrier of an extremely contagious virus. He now repented for the harshness with which he had immediately condemned him in his heart, as if he had known with certainty that his sins had brought upon him that dreadful illness. Was a single moment of terrible error enough to burn for an eternity in Hell? To have all his good deeds, all his sacrifices, his sufferings and his pure prayers wiped out at the Last Judgement? “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…”
Failing to realise that Partenie had detached his mind from worldly matters, Voina continued her monologue, unperturbed, as if she were delivering a lecture before her admirers, despite the fact that, viewed from the outside, the room seemed lifeless, with only the icons on the walls and an old man speaking to the wax statue of a monk, unaware of the mystery of that hour of the Obednitsa, when the stone walls of the sanctuary banished every word that was not a prayer.
[…] Seen from above, the Monastery of Mary in Iederă looked like a fortress from times gone by, enclosing within the sombre embrace of its ancient walls a living heart, born and reborn in ceaseless prayer, of a little white church, as ethereal as the wings of an angel. All around, the proud mantle of the forests had thinned year after year, until all that remained standing around the monastery were a few hundred rows of soldiers from the formidable army of trees that had once sheltered it.
— We glorify the past, even though, viewed through a moral lens, it is no different from the present. The same habits, the same villainy. Rather than glorifying eras, we should instead praise individual achievements, works of genius, and the courage and perseverance of providential figures. Otherwise, as you can see, it is tribal thinking, in the sense of the primitivism with which these pithecanthropus-like figures relate to life and to their relationships with others. There is no longer a moral foundation to our actions, but only a material one: a frenzied and bloody struggle, to the death and beyond. Life is not worth living like this. It has no meaning when lived like worms, merely in the mire and in filth. And the Church must extend a hand to the believer, in their struggle against the tyranny of immediate impulses, against the wretchedness of the flesh; it must be present amongst people to enlighten and comfort them, to soften the earth-shattering truths of Scripture, to bring salvation closer. And not the other way round, Father: the believer’s hand must not remain stretched out in vain towards the Church, begging for mercy […].
Seeing that he was receiving no reply, Voina paused tactically, to give his companion time to break his silence, which he had initially interpreted as a state of deep concentration. Then, as soon as he realised that Partenie had not heard a word he had said, he began to fidget in the enormous armchair, annoyed at the thought that his entire argument had failed to make any impression on the abbot’s mind.
The sound of the telephone rang out as a relief, like the final gong of a boxing match in which the opponents had taken turns embracing one another, avoiding confrontation. The monk had been flung back, out of the hiding place where he had sneaked at a time of his own choosing. Voina had leapt to his feet with an agility unusual for his age, as though what he’d seen displayed on the phone screen had electrocuted him, and he’d rushed out of the room, muttering in terror:
— Pavel, you’ve ruined us all…
[…]
In the cell in the north-east corner of the monastery, the abbot had pulled up a small three-legged stool beside Brother Neofit’s bed; the brother was gazing serenely out of through the smoky windowpane that let in the blood-red light of the setting sun, and murmured the Jesus Prayer ceaselessly.
‘How was the service, Partenie?’
‘Father Nicodim was inspired today. It’s a shame only a handful of people came, but they were all deeply moved…’
— …as I’ve been telling you for a long time, the celebrant has a difficult task, the cosmic mystery of which even the most astute theologian cannot reveal to him. Only he himself can discover it, through a zeal for ministry and for teaching. And his sermon, as the crowning glory of the sacramental act he performs, must be more than an artificial stringing-together of proverbs or parables. Quotations are useful, but only when they flow naturally in support of your ideas, and by no means the other way round, where your own words amount to nothing more than a feeble defence of quotations haphazardly gleaned from the Holy Fathers.
‘There is great turmoil in the country,’ the abbot had said in a low voice, and it was clear he could hardly wait to interrupt Voina’s theological discourse; Voina sat crouched on the bed, which was as small as a seesaw, his frame frail from old age and monastic life, his hands resting limp and white upon the woollen vestment pulled over his coarse linen tunic.
‘The Government has fallen and early elections are being called. The opposition is advocating a national political union and is demanding that all parliamentary parties be given ministries in the new Executive.’ It has been suggested that the electoral threshold be lowered, so that small parties and as many independent candidates as possible—who are said to be closer to the people than the major parties, which are irreparably compromised—may have a voice in Parliament. The President has already proposed a new Prime Minister to serve on an interim basis and organise the elections. He considers him suitable because he has not been involved in politics for the last five years; he was Romania’s consul in Argentina, where he undertook some remarkable cultural initiatives… But I fear this is still an unfortunate suggestion…
— You might as well say his name. There’s no need to spare my feelings; nothing can hurt me now. I’m just an old man waiting for the end, and the end never comes.
— Well, it’s him, Rusceanu. I’d hoped that these surprising moves would bring a breath of fresh air, new people, new hopes,” sighed Partenie, gently taking Voina’s arm in a brotherly gesture.
— Where are these people to come from, dear Father? Even Providence has grown weary of us. We no longer tempt it in any way… His voice had regained its former haughtiness, as in days gone by, prophetic, though only those who could have seen him would have fully understood the gulf between the loftiness and arrogance of the message and the meekness of that small, frail body, whose hands, with every strain of his voice, clutched feebly at the shaggy blanket, as though the old man were pouring his last reserves of strength—the glory of the writer he once was, the standing he had enjoyed amongst politicians—into those final words.
‘We would not be Christians if we did not hope for salvation,’ the abbot had whispered, resting his forehead against the old man’s hands—like marble petals—after cupping them in his own palms.
‘The only thought that still comforts me at this hour is that I shall soon be reunited with Sonia.’ She has begun to appear to me more and more often in my dreams, and I often wake up with my heart in my mouth, with the distinct, almost tangible feeling that she needs me, that she wants to tell me something… I feel her here, beside me; it seems as though I can touch her, as though my thoughts can give her form once more.
— ‘Illusions,’ Partenie had said quickly, and had discreetly made the sign of the cross, but shame had immediately overcome him and he had smiled awkwardly at the old man, his eyes pleading for forgiveness for the lack of insight in his judgement.
‘I must have committed a mortal sin at some point; such misfortunes do not befall one without having erred terribly. I have unwittingly disrupted the divine order of nature. We all thought Sonia was safe, and yet she died suddenly of an embolism, less than two hours after my visit to Rusceanu. The CT scan had detected no abnormalities… He let out a muffled, drawn-out groan, as if he were struggling to swallow a burst of sobs. His eyes wandered across the inner screen of his memories, oblivious to what was happening around him.
— And Pavel, that poor lad… I’ve never seen a man more lost. He was begging me with his eyes to do something; he looked at me like a sinner before the Heavenly Throne, hoping for forgiveness, for salvation. He couldn’t understand that it had all ended there, suddenly, with no possibility of delay or appeal. Right then and there. We were all standing in front of the bed where she lay, naked, our minds adrift, and the pain seared us fiercely, like the desert sun; it burned our skin, the soles of our feet, our eyes; it was everywhere and we could not hide from it, for we had nothing to cover ourselves with, and we wanted to run away, our feet hopelessly stuck in that scorching sand, to run away from ourselves and towards ourselves, and we wanted to embrace one another, but we could no longer bear each other… Where has Pavel gone, my dear brother?
