Category Archives: history

He spoke of prison with nostalgia.

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Braga quote joy OCN crp

“My dear friends, I think the mystery of my life is joy, and I never tire of telling everyone
to be joyful. Why should we be sad when we belong to the Lord and He love us so much
that He cannot take His eyes off us, as a mother cannot take her eyes off her baby?”

About ten years ago, James Kushiner interviewed Father Roman Braga for Salvo magazine, and the interview was published in this article: “Solitary Refinement.”

Not long afterward, following Fr. Roman’s repose in death, Kushiner wrote again, in a 2015 Touchstone magazine newsletter:

Prisoner of the Redeemer   

Early this morning, about a four-hour drive east of Chicago’s Holy Name Cathedral, a new and much smaller church in the Michigan countryside sheltered the body of a recently departed priest-monk of the Orthodox Church, Fr. Roman Braga. His funeral was scheduled to begin at 9:30 AM.

While Fr. Roman held no office as elevated as the Archbishop of Chicago, it would not surprise me if in some ways he influenced nearly as many people over the years through his counsel, prayers, and service to the church–to all who spoke with him.

Fr. Roman moved to Michigan from Brazil the same year I moved from Michigan to Chicago (1972). Twenty-five years later, on October 7, 1997, I met him for the first time at Holy Dormition Orthodox Monastery in Michigan. I was privileged to have a several conversations with him over the years, including an interview published in Salvo Magazine (Solitary Refinement: How One Man Found Freedom Inside a Communist Prison. A former high school teacher, he *loved* Salvo and young people.) His counsel helped me in many ways.

Fr. Roman was expelled from his native Romania in 1968, where he had served as a priest of the Romanian Orthodox Church. He had spent 5 years in a labor camp digging the Black Sea Canal, and later served 6 years of a new 18-year sentence, including time in solitary confinement, before being released under a general amnesty in 1964. He began his priestly ministry, watched carefully by the secret police, who came one night in 1968 with a Brazilian passport in hand and expelled him.

Fr. Roman said he discovered Jesus Christ more deeply in the depths of his being in prison, especially in solitary confinement, where he came to experience true spiritual freedom. He spoke of prison with nostalgia.

The New Testament has many scenes in prison: John and Peter, then Peter, Paul and Silas, then Paul. How many of Paul’s epistles were written from prison?

Didn’t the new church of God began in a prison (phulake), with the first sermon preached (ekeruxen) to its prisoners by Pilate’s former Prisoner (1 Peter 3:19)? Here the “gates of hell” did not prevail against Christ and his new church as he burst those gates and led the captives free.

I could sense from the way Fr. Roman prayed and chanted the “Akathist Hymn to Jesus Christ” on Sundays before Divine Liturgy that I was witnessing a loving communion between the Lord and his servant. One stanza is an icon of his faith:

Jesus, true God.
Jesus, Son of David.
Jesus, glorious King.
Jesus, innocent Lamb.
Jesus, Shepherd most marvellous.
Jesus, Protector of mine infancy.
Jesus, Guide of my youth.
Jesus, Boast of mine old age.
Jesus, my Hope at death.
Jesus, my Life after death.
Jesus, my Comfort at Your judgment.
Jesus, my Desire, let me not then be ashamed.

He also praised Jesus Christ, “Redeemer of those below” and “Vanquisher of the nethermost powers.” Fr. Roman was singing a song to his Paschal Liberator. I will always think of him with a captivating twinkle in his eye, revealing an inner joy forged in the crucible of prison. He was, with St. Paul, a “prisoner of the Lord” and true servant.

Father Roman, I trust, beholds the face of his Beloved Savior in the mansions of the righteous. Christ is risen! Memory eternal!

Yours for Christ, Creed & Culture,

James M. Kushiner

Executive Director, The Fellowship of St. James

The supreme moment of hospitality.

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Because when I recently rediscovered this post from three years ago, I was nourished by it again, I am re-posting it for my new readers and for all of us. It concerns the most enduring things, never outdated. One of those always-new things, which I’ve only this year begun to read and think about in the context of the Annunciation, is hospitality of the sort that the Virgin demonstrated toward the very Son of God. She is an example for us all.

Today is the beginning of our salvation;
the revelation of the eternal Mystery!
The Son of God becomes the Son of the Virgin
as Gabriel announces the coming of Grace.
Together with him let us cry to the Theotokos:
“Rejoice, O Full of Grace, the Lord is with you!”

I had wanted to continue my ruminations on The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air by further considering The Moment that Søren Kierkegaard refers to when, after waiting in silence, “…the silent lily understands that now is the moment, and makes use of it.”

I don’t know what that moment consists of for you, for me, for us as a world community, or in our cities or church communities or families. No doubt there are overlapping times and seasons containing infinite instants, and only by quiet listening can we make any sense of them. But this passage in particular I wanted to pass on, in which the writer discusses what is missed when we fail to make the proper, standing-before-God kind of preparation:

“Even though it is pregnant with rich significance, the moment does not send forth any herald in advance to announce its arrival; it comes too swiftly for that; indeed, there is not a moment’s time beforehand…. But of course everything depends upon “the moment.” And this is surely the misfortune in the lives of many, of far the greater part of humanity: that they never perceived ‘the moment,’ that in their lives the eternal and the temporal were exclusively separated.”

So many thoughts swirl in my own noisy mind and heart that I could not imagine how I might find a way to share even these few gleanings with you. Then, in God’s providence and the church calendar, appeared someone who is the supreme example for us of being ready for the moment, that time in history and that time in her life, in a particular moment of a day, when the Angel Gabriel appeared to her. Today we remember that event, when Mary listened, and responded, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”

The Word became flesh and came to live with us, taking on all our human experience, its weakness and suffering and  death. He defeated death, and opened the gates of Paradise. The Incarnation, the beginning of our salvation, is The Moment of history; our own “Yes” to God, echoing Mary’s willingness, can be the essence of our every prayer as well, as we wait on Him.

Kierkegaard exhorts us, in words that seem especially fitting for this time of uncertainty and change: “Would that in the silence you might forget yourself, forget what you yourself are called, your own name, the famous name, the lowly name, the insignificant name, in order in silence to pray to God, ‘Hallowed be your name!’ Would that in silence you might forget yourself, your plans, the great, all-encompassing plans, or the limited plans concerning your life and its future, in order in silence to pray to God, ‘Your kingdom come!’ Would that you might in silence forget your will, your willfulness, in order in silence to pray to God, ‘Your will be done.’“

We know that God’s will for us is good, now as ever. Our inability to see or understand that is due to our weakness or sin, or His hiding of His works. May He give us grace to wait and to pray, and eventually we will see the full salvation of the LORD.

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!
For who has known the mind of the Lord,
or who has been his counselor?
Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?
For from him and through him and to him are all things.
To him be glory forever. Amen.

Romans 11

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown…

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TO A POET A THOUSAND YEARS HENCE

I who am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along.

I care not if you bridge the seas,
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.

But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?

How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Maeonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.

Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.

-James Elroy Flecker

Lesen, by Ulrich Bittmann

Like an anvil, and bread baking: St. Polycarp

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St. Polycarp was born in the first century and was burned at the stake in the second. Because of an early and well known document, The Martyrdom of Polycarp, thought to be the oldest authentic account of an early Christian martyr’s death, he is one of the most famous who have refused to deny Christ in the face of extreme threats.

His life is connected to several other notable saints, earlier and later, starting with St. John the Apostle and Evangelist, whom he knew and talked with; St. Ignatius, who met him and afterward sent a long letter of exhortation to him; and St. Irenaeus of Lyons, who was baptized by Bishop Polycarp when a youth and was sent by him as a missionary to Gaul.

The Letter of St. Ignatius to St. Polycarp resonates with life and the vibrant faith of the writer and the churches of Christ in those early centuries. An excerpt:

“Stand firm, as does an anvil which is beaten. It is the part of a noble athlete to be wounded, and yet to conquer. And especially, we ought to bear all things for the sake of God, that He also may bear with us. Be ever becoming more zealous than what you are. Weigh carefully the times. Look for Him, who is above all time, eternal and invisible, yet who became visible for our sakes; impalpable and impassible, yet who became passible on our account, and who in every kind of way suffered for our sakes.”

The author of “The Martyrdom of Polycarp” is unknown, but it was sent to the church in Philomelium, Asia Minor, from the church in Smyrna. Here is one paragraph from the letter:

“And as the flame blazed forth in great fury, we, to whom it was given to witness it, beheld a great miracle, and have been preserved that we might report to others what then took place. For the fire, shaping itself into the form of an arch, like the sail of a ship when filled with the wind, encompassed as by a circle the body of the martyr. And he appeared within not like flesh which is burnt, but as bread that is baked, or as gold and silver glowing in a furnace. Moreover, we perceived such a sweet odour, as if frankincense or some such precious spices had been smoking there.”

In a letter to his friend Florinus, after the death of Polycarp, St. Irenaeus writes fondly of his elder in the faith:

“I can even describe the place where the blessed Polycarp used to sit and discourse — his going out, too, and his coming in — his general mode of life and personal appearance, together with the discourses which he delivered to the people; also how he would speak of his familiar intercourse with John, and with the rest of those who had seen the Lord; and how he would call their words to remembrance. Whatsoever things he had heard from them respecting the Lord, both with regard to His miracles and His teaching, Polycarp having thus received from the eye-witnesses of the Word of life, would recount them all in harmony with the Scriptures. These things, through God’s mercy which was upon me, I then listened to attentively, and treasured them up not on paper, but in my heart; and I am continually, by God’s grace, revolving these things accurately in my mind.”

On this day on which we commemorate St. Polycarp, I will be listening to a sonata composed in his honor by Heinrich Biber (1644-1704): “Sancti Polycarpi”, and “revolving these things” I’ve been learning about these men in my own mind —  their struggle to stand firm, as St Ignatius exhorted, and to “Weigh carefully the times. Look for Him, who is above all time….” Thank you, Lord, for the ever encouraging testimony of your saints, and on this day, especially that of Saint Polycarp of Smyrna. +