Homily

I am reading a book that contains a number of stories about Christians who suffered torture, imprisonment and even death during the Communist reign in Eastern Europe this past century.

There was a prison in Romania called Jilava, built entirely underground. One of the prisoners there was an Orthodox man, who would later become a priest, named George Calciu. He told this story in an interview in 1966, having spent 21 years in prison. The communists put four prisoners in each cell. In George’s cell was a man named Constantine Oprisan, who was sick with tuberculosis. From the very first day in prison there, Oprisan was coughing up fluid from his lungs.

Calciu, in his interview, said, “The man was suffocating. Perhaps a whole liter of phlegm and blood came up and my stomach became upset. I was ready to vomit. Constantine Oprisan noticed this and said to me, “Forgive me.” I was so ashamed! Since I was a student in medicine, I decided to take care of him…and told the others that I would take care of Constantine Oprisan. He was not able to move, and I did everything for him. I put him on the bucket to urinate. I washed his body. I fed him. We had a bowl for food. I took this bowl and put it in front of his mouth.”

Constantine Oprisan – “he was like a saint, “ Father George Calciu said in his interview – he was so weak that he could barely talk. But every word he said to his cellmates was about Christ. Hearing him say his daily prayers had a profound effect on the other three men. Father George said that simply looking at him you could see the love in his face. Constantine Oprisan was a physical wreck because he had been so badly tortured in another prison for three years. Yet he would not curse his torturers and he spent his days in prayer.

Father George says, “All the while, we did not realize how important Constantine Oprisan was for us. He was the justification for our life in this prison cell. Over the course of a year, he became weaker and weaker. We felt he had finished his time here and would die. After he died every one of us felt that something in us had died. We understood that sick as he was and in our care like a child, he had been the pillar of our life in the cell.”

So they washed his body and prepared it for burial and told the guards that Constantine was dead. The guards led the men out of their windowless cell for the first time in a year. Then the guard ordered Calciu and another man to take the body outside and bury it. Constantine was nothing but skin and bones, his muscle tissue had wasted away. The skin pulled over his emaciated skeleton had turned yellow. Father George said, “My friend took a flower and put it on his chest – a blue flower. The guard started to cry out to us and forced us back inside. Before we went in, we turned around and looked at Constantine Oprisan – his yellow body and this blue flower. This is the image that I have kept in my memory – his body completely wasted away and the blue flower on his chest.” Almost 50 years later Father George said that nursing the helpless Constantine Oprisan in the final year of his life revealed to him the light of God.

“When I took care of Constantine Oprisan in the cell, I was very happy. I was very happy because I felt his spirituality penetrating my soul. I learned from him to be good, to forgive, not to curse your torturer, not to consider anything of this world to be a treasure for you. In fact, he was living on another level. Only his body was with us – and his love. Can you imagine? We were in a cell without windows, without air, humid, filthy – and yet we had moments of happiness there that we never reached when we lived in freedom. I cannot explain it.”

The author of the book writes, “In terms of sacramental theology, a mystery is a truth which cannot be explained, only accepted. The long death of Constantine Oprisan, which gave spiritual life to those who helped him bear his suffering, is just such a mystery. The stricken prisoner was dying, but because he had already died to himself for Christ’s sake, he was able to be an icon to the others – a window into eternity through which the divine light passed to illuminate the other men in that dark, filthy cell.”

This is the power of the love of Christ, totally embraced by a young Romanian prisoner, a power which changed lives lived under inhuman conditions. Not the power of protests, violence, threats, and intimidation. Not the power of demeaning and vilifying other people and demanding they be fired or lose their positions because they hold to Christian principles and not the current fad of the day. Not the power of hatred, pride, and Godless arrogance. It is the power of the love of Christ which brings light to this world, and grants even the most abused and tortured people to follow and live by the Lord’s words which we heard today:

“Love your enemies and do good to them, and lend expecting nothing back; then your reward will be great and you will be children of the Most High, for He Himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.”

My friends, the love of Christ is our only real power and defense, and it is our only sure and real hope in this life. May the Lord, have mercy.