(varianta in limba romana pe http://www.danionvasile.ro/blog/2007/09/17/de-ce-am-ales-ortodoxia/)
Danion Vasile
I am giving this talk because I feel compelled to give witness to the way in which Christ calls to Him those who have been deluded by different religions or by unorthodox spiritual practices. The topic, From the Goddess of Death to the Emperor of Life, relates past and present – since before turning to Christ, the Son of God, and to the teachings of the Orthodox Church, I was a worshipper of Kali, the Goddess of Death.
I would like to start by saying that the things I am going to speak about will seem incredible to some of you. I understand scepticism and I am not trying to convince the sceptics of the validity of what I am going to say; I know that my story will sound like a work of fiction to them, like Orthodox science fiction, in fact, but I also know that there are people out there who will see with their souls and will believe that what I am about to say has actually happened to me. Now, almost fifteen years after I had converted to Orthodoxy, I feel as if I had been born and raised in the Orthodox Church. It is more and more difficult to me to remember the yoga practice I was so keen on and the paranormal forces I used to possess, or the tantric sexual debauchery I used to live in…
Many years have passed since I started writing and speaking against yoga practices, against occultism and the other ramifications of the New Age Movement. Why have I been doing it? Because I know that millions of souls have fallen prey to this delusion, because I know that these souls need Christ’s truth, and because I know how difficult it is to walk along a spiritual path at whose end it is the devil that awaits for you, not God.
It is a lack of humility to speak about one’s life, I know. Yet I shall not speak to you about the good deeds I have done, but about my evil deeds and about the way in which Christ came into my life and gently led me to the light of the truth…
I was born on August 15, 1974, on the day of the Dormition of the Theotokos. As a child I was not close to the church. Although I was baptized when I was a baby, just like most Romanian babies, during the communist regime very few people attended church regularly – and although some of them believed in God they did not provide a religious education to their children.
I remember entering a Catholic Church when I was little; there, on the inside walls I saw scenes from the Passion of Christ. That night I dreamed that Christ was taken to Golgotha and He fell under the weight of the cross. I wanted to pick up His cross… Although the dream moved me, I cannot honestly say that it was the beginning of a commitment to the Christian faith for me. However, I was particularly attracted by a crucifix in our home, which I was told had been brought from Greece, that is, from Mount Athos, by my great-grandparents. I used to look at it and I remember being impressed by Christ’s suffering, but I still did not think about leading a Christian life.
Shortly after I turned thirteen I started my sexual life. My father insisted on it; he kept saying that I was not worthy of being his son if I did not – so I did… To this day, I remember that I used to spend hours on end trying to talk a girl into going to bed with me. Twenty years ago kids led a much purer life than they do nowadays and it was much more difficult to persuade someone to sin.
Right before I turned fourteen my mother committed suicide by throwing herself out the window. She fell approximately six feet away from the spot where my sister happened to be standing; my sister, who was eleven at the time, suffered a terrible shock. My mother’s death made me look for an answer to the question, ”What happens to us after death?”. I had occasionally tried yoga exercises before that tragic incident, but after it, I took to yoga with more dedication. My father brought home yoga books and books of Oriental philosophy for me to read. I tried to control my heartbeat to the point of stopping it altogether, but I could not do it. I also tried astral voyages and levitation exercises, but I was not good at it. I had even come up with a new spiritualistic technique in my attempts to contact my dead mother, without realizing that instead of talking to her or to other spirits I was talking to demons. It became obvious that I could not do things like that by myself: I needed a guru.
It was when I paid a visit to a young woman who was older than me and who had paranormal forces that I decided to give my undivided attention to spiritual quests. For a long time that young woman had been telling fortune from cards with extraordinary precision. She had been doing it until she started having dreams about dilapidated churches and about a voice, which was asking her, “God or the devil?” Nevertheless, she still did not go to church even though she did quit telling fortune from cards.
While I was talking to her, I told an innocent lie. At that moment, I felt a physical force coming out of her and pushing me away… I felt like jumping out the window to get rid of that unseen pressure. The young woman went to another room and I calmed down. When she came back, I told her that I had been lying to her about something and she said that was the reason why panic had seized me. I said I wanted to have such powers too and she suggested I take up yoga. She recommended the yoga courses taught by Gregorian Bivolaru, the most renowned and controversial Romanian guru of our day…
In 2004, the Romanian authorities took legal action against Bivolaru, accusing him of ”white slave trade and law transgressions associated to organized crime” and in 2005 he left the country illegally and sought political asylum in Sweden; the Supreme Court in Stockholm considered that he was persecuted for his religious beliefs and that the charges brought against him had to do with religious persecution and refused to extradite him. Now, after I had known him and the way in which he used to subjugate our souls, I would compare him to Jim Jones, who talked hundreds of disciples into commiting suicide in Guyana, in 1978. Bivolaru did not determine anyone to commit suicide – not yet, anyway, but I would have done it if he, who was my guru, had asked me to; I would have committed suicide without thinking twice because I would have been convinced that if my guru was asking me to do it, it meant that suicide would benefit me spiritually.
In 1990, at the time that I joined Bivolaru’s group and started yoga classes with him, less than a year had passed since Ceausescu’s dictatorial regime had been abolished and we were finally enjoying religious freedom in Romania. Ceausescu had persecuted the Church and all spiritual groups for years on end. That was why those who had been imprisoned during those harsh times became very popular after 1989 – and Gregorian Bivolaru was one of them. He had been arrested and put in jail on the charge of spreading pornographic materials, but his disciples declared that those accusations were only a pretext and that the true reason for his incarceration were his yoga teachings. It was a plausible defense, taking into consideration the fact that many priests had been jailed for life by the communist regime on the accusation that they had been affiliated to a political group of Nazi orientation…
I had just started school when I turned to yoga; I was in the tenth grade and I believed that everything I was told was the Truth; I certainly believed that Bivolaru was a great spirit, maybe even the new Messiah. We were told that just as Christ had been the master of the spiritual Age of Pisces, even so the Age of Aquarius or the New Age had a Messiah who was about to come in order to take the world to the heights of holiness.
In those days there circulated some prophecies in our country spread by different Christian denominations claiming that Bucharest would be the New Jerusalem and Romania would become the spiritual centre of the planet. I strongly believed that was so – since I was convinced of the great importance of the meditation techniques taught by Bivolaru. I was convinced that he was familiar with the shortest path to spiritual liberation and to the cessation of the reincarnation cycle. Just like all New Age masters, Bivolaru was preaching belief in reincarnation and held that tantra yoga was the most efficient path to perfection. What is tantra yoga? It is sexual yoga. By mental concentration, yogis claim that they transmute sexual energies into spiritual energies. They engage in sexual acts, but not for the mere pleasure of it – because in tantra yoga orgasm is seen as a waste of energy, whereas a sexual act without orgasm is considered a means of spiritual progress.
Being a high school student, I was glad that many college students and intellectuals were attending yoga courses. For me, it was solid proof that I was on the right path. Nowadays, looking back on it after so many years, I realize that some of them were coming just for the sake of sex… It is easier to take up yoga and have as many sexual partners as you wish than to spend your money paying for it in a brothel. At that time, however, I did not see things that way…
Bivolaru was considered the Great Master… For instance, he taught us how to float in the air: it was a technique that had to be practised for four months and then we would just float… Although we were not interested in acquiring paranormal forces, some of us did acquire them and it was no wonder that we did. A young man managed to fly from the ground, where he was sitting in a meditating position, high up, close to the ceiling, placing objects on top of the cupboard. Other people acquired paranormal forces called ”sidhis”… Following many yoga exercises, I, for one, felt that I had become as large as the room I was in and that the four walls of that room were pressing on my energy field. Little did I know that it was all a sensation induced by the devil…
At any rate, I did not really perceive the presence of the evil one except on very rare occasions… During our meditation sessions, they would play a very nice, soft ambient music, but once they played a horrible music that seemed to come from hell… a music that would put rock-and-roll to shame… I was shocked to hear it but I thought I was not sufficiently evolved spiritually to know how to integrate it… Some other time I meditated in front of the mirror by candlelight, trying to catch sight of my aura… I was rehearsing for a meditation that I was going to take up in the Jewish cemetery next to the place where I was living at that time, but I did not have to take the trouble to reach the cemetery… While meditating, I suddenly felt a demonic presence next to me. I did not actually see it, mind you, I just sensed it so vividly that I was very scared.
Still, my most intense contact with the devil came as a result of my initiation into tantra yoga. Although at the time it occurred I thought it was a revelation, a moment of contact with the Absolute, after becoming a Christian I understood that my revelation had been of a demonic origin. Here is how it happened…
I was at the beach with a girl, and there were yogis all around us. We were sitting on the sand in a meditating position, facing each other and touching our palms and our kneecaps… Suddenly I simply forgot that I was human. I perceived the Universe like a being with seven energy centres and I felt that my seven energy centres were connected to the energy of the universe. I do not know how long that ecstatic state lasted but when I came around I thought, “What is the point in taking up fasting when by practicing tantra yoga I can progress much more easily?” Therefore, I made up my mind to practice tantra yoga…
Although I had taken up yoga in order to get rid of the spiritual misery that the sexual sins had left in my soul, I started having sex again – only that this time I was firmly convinced that I was doing the right thing. Each night I said Our Father three times, asking God to forgive all my trespasses and to give me the strength to do only good. The thought that I was sinning by having sex did not even cross my mind; I thought that if I had given up having orgasm, everything was clean… My conviction that tantra yoga was a good thing was so strong that I wished that the master had sex even with my sister, who was a virgin and was around fifteen years old. At a time, the master had sex with my girlfriend each week and she told me that other girls were queuing in front of his room, waiting for their turn; they were all eager to have a tantra yoga training session with the master…
I would not want you to think that yoga had become a pastime for me… I was fasting and I even thought of giving up food altogether – that is, I was thinking about living without eating anything at all…
I started by not eating at all for a day, two days and then even three days in a row… Then, I managed to fast for an entire week; I just drank water and that was it. I was not even eighteen at the time, which means that I was still growing up – so that it was very hard for me when I decided to fast for another week, but with no water this time. I fed on air and on energy from the evil one… It was during Passion Week in 1992. I remember asking myself at the beginning of the Great Lent of that year, “Whom shall I ask for help: Bivolaru or Christ?” I chose to ask Christ to help me first and then if He did not help me, I said to myself, I would subsequently appeal to my guru.
I had great confidence in the forces of my guru. We had been informed of a special form of yoga, called Guru Yoga, which was conditioned by a complete obedience to one’s master. There was a story too, which everybody believed was true, of a man who had thrown himself into a precipice because his master did not accept him as his disciple; he broke his arms and legs and his master put them back in place and then resurrected him… Such stories made me trust my master even more. I even had a vision about him, which I realize now was a demonic vision: the universe was full of millions of cells and my master was sitting in a lotus position in each one of them. I was breathing in those cells – inhaling them as it were – and then when I exhaled the cells came out, but my master remained inside me…
A friend of mine that I had invited to attend a conference delivered by Bivolaru told me that she saw rays of light coming out of him…
Since I had such a great confidence in the guru’s powers, I think that God put in my mind the thought of fasting and asking for Christ’s help just to offer me a way out of the trap I had fallen into.
During that week of fasting, I read excerpts from the Philokalia for the first time. I did not realize that my meditations on Shiva or on Milarepa had nothing in common with the spiritual teachings contained in the Philokalia… I had my moment of weakness when I thought I was going out of my mind because of the fast, but I asked for Christ’s help and I succeeded in overcoming it; true, I was a yogi, but I had not given up Christ. Moreover, each week the master asked us to meditate with Christ’s conscience… So, standing in front of the crucifix, I was praying like this: ”God, I received baptism by water in childhood and it did not help me at all. Baptize me with fire now…” I really thought that Christ would help me progress along the path of yoga…
On Good Friday, I admired the sunrise in a park, meditating in front of a big stone crucifix… Although I did not go to church on Easter, preferring to meditate at home, my relationship with Christ became much more powerful after that period of fasting.
Nevertheless, my relationship to Christ did not disengage me from my commitment to the Hindu deities. I liked to meditate with Kali, one of the cosmic powers, the national goddess of
That was why I was surprised when I asked Bivolaru after a yoga class about the connection between Christ and the cosmic powers (we were writing our questions down and sending the slips of paper to the master), I heard his answer: ”What connection? There is no connection…” If he had answered, “Christ is a great conscience that looks after our planet, while Kali is one of the beings that keep the universe in existence, and although Christ is not as important as Kali, they are familiar with each other” – I would have believed him. But he said that there was no connection between Christ and the cosmic powers, as if there were two parallel truths, totally unrelated to each other, and I could not accept that. It was for the first time that I seriously doubted my master’s wisdom. Then I asked him, aloud this time, which yoga path was higher, the path of asceticism taken to extremes, or the path of tantra yoga, which involved a very sexual active life. His answer was that each individual should choose the path that suited him the most, but before he gave me that answer, most people in the audience burst into peals of laughter; the very idea of sexual asceticism was received with such heavy irony… Those peals of laughter, as well as the master’s answer, made me wish to find the truth elsewhere…
Not long before that, I had listened to Swami Shivamurti, an initiated Indian master, Swami Satyananda’s disciple. In the late 1970’s she had been sent to Kalamata to impart yoga teachings to the Greek. In 1984 she had set up ”the ashram”, a yoga monastery at Paiania, close to
At some point, she assigned a yogic name to me, some sort of baptismal Indian name. Although I expected a famous name, like Mahashiva or Milarepa, I was given an apparently commonplace name: “Bhaktimurti”, meaning “the form of devotion”, “the form of piety.” In other words, for me the shortest path to illumination was worshipping someone – a deity or a cosmic power… So, I chose to worship Christ. I think that God had put the name of “Bhaktimurti” into Swami Shivamurti’s mind; even if she was not serving Him but the powers of darkness, God spoke through her just as He had spoken through Balaam’s donkey. Yet, I doubt it that she knew she had benefited me greatly by choosing that name for me.
I had made up my mind to join her ashram and she told me that she would definitely have me in it, but since I had not come of age I needed my father’s written consent. In Bulgaria, something of a great consequence for my future occurred… A yogi woman took me to some well-known churches in Sophia, one of which being a Russian church in whose basement there were the holy relics of Bishop Seraphim Sobolev, a wonder-worker. By his coffin there were small pieces of paper on which people were writing their wishes and prayers to the deceased pious hierarch. I stood by the coffin and entreated him with all my heart to help me. I said to him, ”Help me that not my will be done but that God’s will be done with me!” In those moments, I felt that something did change, something that I cannot even put into words. At the time that I was practising yoga, I felt sick whenever I walked into a church; it seemed to me there was no air at all and I could not breathe; besides, I could not stand the liturgical services except with very great difficulty… However, there in that Russian church which housed the bishop’s relics, it was as if a fog was lifting from me. Although he has not been canonized, people worship him as if he were a saint.
I came back to Romania terribly excited about my oncoming trip to Greece. My father gave me permission to go to Greece because he knew I had no intention to graduate from high school anyway. The class mistress begged me to come to school so that the teachers would see me and give me a pass lest I would fail to get my remove, but all I was interested in was how to make progress as a yogi. In fact, even when I used to go to school yoga was my only concern. School studies seemed such a waste! Although I was attending the Computer Science High School, which was the best in Bucharest at that time, and although I was very proud to have passed the entrance test – after all, I had been captivated by computer science all my life – yoga was my great big passion. It had subjugated me so completely that I could not concentrate on anything except for asana and meditation techniques. In all honesty, I had been brainwashed into thinking that I could only read and study yoga materials – nothing else but that.
The departure date was getting near. I had made up my mind that before reaching the ashram, which was near Athens, I would visit Mount Athos where, I had heard, the holy fathers were practising the Jesus Prayer. I wanted to be initiated into the practice of the Jesus Prayer too… My father suggested we should call on Father Constantin Galeriu, a well-known priest in Bucharest, who had suffered for Christ in communist prisons.
Father Galeriu sent me to Father Ilie Cleopa of the Sihastria Monastery in Moldavia, which suited me perfectly since I was already thinking about visiting some monasteries to see how monastic obedience was practised – as a sort of preparatory stage before the ashram. However, Father Cleopa was so adamantly opposed to the yoga practices and my relationships with the monks at Sihastria were so tense because of their disapproval of my being a yogi that I left the monastery after a very short stay.
After I had returned to Bucharest I joined another New Age spiritual group, called
”The Alliance for Spiritual Integration in the Absolute”, which combined Orthodox teachings with spiritualistic teachings and taught people to see auras, angels and whatever else had to do with the so-called spiritual world. In fact, all they did was make people fall prey to demonic deceit, for the devil can sometimes appear as a good angel too… In this new group, the devil could work much more efficiently than in the yoga group, or, to put it differently, he was much more visible. While practising yoga, one can visualise the spiritual world only after many years, in this group, one could see it on the spot… Although I, for one, did not actually see many paranormal things, I had the power to make others see them; all I had to do was put my hands on top of their heads, say a prayer, and they began to see things right away…
At school, I even initiated a class in acquiring paranormal powers… We would get together in the festivity hall and do our paranormal studies there. Going camping at one time, I taught most of the children that I met there to see the spiritual world… I had no way of knowing that what they saw was coming from self-suggestion or demonic influences. At camp, I wanted to see if I could hypnotize anyone. I tried and… I did succeed. It was easy, much easier than I expected…
One of the instances that made me think about what I was doing was my meeting with a hieromonk. The people in the New Age group had convinced me that there was no point in my going to Greece to be a disciple of Swami Shivamurti Saraswati; in a female monastic community of our country, there was a priest, a saintly man who was a reincarnation of Saint John the Evangelist. I wished to see “Saint John” with my own eyes, so I went to the monastery together with my girlfriend and tantra yoga companion, who was twenty-four. I was almost eighteen. As we approached the monastery fence, we saw the reverend father standing next to the fence, as if he had been waiting for us. He asked us, “You are yogis, aren’t you? Go away, you, lost souls! Here is a monastery and this ground is sacred… What are you doing here? Who has heard of such a thing – boys and girls coming together to a monastery…? You, sinners, aren’t you ashamed of yourselves? How dare you come here, of all places? You, followers of Steiner, theosophists and God only knows what else…”, he muttered, entering the building that housed the monastic cells. My girlfriend had indeed read many of Rudolf Steiner’s writings and other theosophical works. The reverend father could see right through us… Only later did I understand why he had scolded us for having come together to the monastery – he was referring to the fact that we were lovers, but at the time I had no idea that what we were doing was fornication and that it was a sin.
My girlfriend and I stepped inside the church, thinking that he would not chase us out of there. When he entered the church, he pointed his finger at us and asked us, “You believe in reincarnation, don’t you?” – “Yes,” I answered, being convinced that I had to stand up for the truth in front of Christians who were not familiar with the truth. Then, he added, “And you think that I am John the Evangelist, don’t you?” – “Yes,” I answered with conviction. “Get out, you lost souls! Here is the House of the Lord, and if you do not renounce your madness it means that you do not belong here!” I did not expect him to drive us out of the church. I knew that both the Christian tradition and the Oriental tradition demanded that the patience of the disciple should be put to the test in the most unexpected ways, so I was not going to give in. My girlfriend, who was older, felt bad at hearing the priest’s rebuke and burst into tears…
It would have been natural that I should be converted to the Orthodox faith right then and there… My friends from the “New Alliance” group had repeatedly told me that before accepting me as his secret disciple, the priest would put me to a very difficult test indeed and I thought it was all a trial. Having been manipulated and indoctrinated through and through, I did not realize that the reverend father really meant what he said. We returned to Bucharest, but my wish to see that priest again was getting stronger by the minute. I went back to the monastery and he asked me to choose between the Church teachings and the New Age teachings I had formerly believed in. I refused to let go of my erroneous spiritual commitments and I decided to take off on a pilgrimage to the Moldavian monasteries. A strange thing happened to me at the Sihla Skete. While I was standing in front of a monastic cell with the Bible in my hand, a priest came up to me and asked me to read a certain passage to him; his hair and beard were white and he had a gentle face; in the passage, it said that heretics would be punished for their erroneous ways. Then the priest walked away and I thought, “Yes, heretics would be punished, that’s for sure, but why did he ask me, of all people, to read that passage? Does that mean I am a heretic?”
Close to the Sihla Skete there is a cave where Saint Teodora lived the harsh, ascetic life of a hermit; ravens were providing for her, carrying food to her in their beaks. I wanted to spend a night in that cave, pray there, and ask God to help me choose the right path. The monastery abbot gave me his blessing, so one night I started making for the cave. On the way through the forest, I heard all sorts of strange noises. Someone had told me that three years before a man was eating raspberries from a bush and on the other side of the bush there was a big bear… I could not wait to reach the cave where I thought it would be nice and peaceful; during the day, I had gone there several times to pray and it had been so quiet…
Yet this time it was not so at all… That night was going to be the most awful night of my life… I thought I would stay up all night and say the Jesus Prayer, but the temptations came very fast. First, there were the bats – many bats flying so close to me, flapping their wings, that I felt the cold draught of air made by those dreadful wings blow right into my face. I was scared stiff and I felt sick. I was afraid one of those bats would try to cling to my hair. Although I had had my head shaved a year before in order to look like a true yogi, my hair had grown in the meantime, so I covered my head with my leather coat to keep the bats off. At some point, I thought that maybe God wanted to punish me for my sins and I uncovered my head, but the bats did not touch it… After a while, there was another temptation: mice started climbing my boots. It was a terrible feeling… Some of the people who had been in that cave before told me that there were no bats and no mice in it, but I saw them… On the other hand, perhaps what I saw was a demonic sight… It was so difficult to tell…
I was getting more and more scared. I felt that the nervous tension was reaching breaking point; I actually thought I would go out of my mind. I also thought that if I fell asleep the devil would get hold of me. It is so difficult to explain but it was what I felt and what I thought… I kept dropping candle wax into my palms, on different spots, so that the burns would keep me awake. I prayed and prayed, “God, for the grace of the hegumen’s blessing, have mercy on me! God, for the power of obedience, have mercy on me!” I could not say the Jesus Prayer at all; all I did all night long was to read prayers from a prayer book from beginning to end; as soon as I finished it, I started reading the same prayers all over again…
Then, there was another temptation that really topped the previous ones. All of a sudden, I saw this huge animal walking into the cave through its very narrow entrance; he stepped in and took three big steps. The first step made me lift my head, the second step made me quite apprehensive, and the third one was the pits. It was a big animal all right and it could only have been a bear. I thought, “I do not have room to get out of the cave, not even if I tried to slide by him. If I try to fight him, I do not stand a chance of defeating him. Best thing is to die in prayer.” I was positive that I would die right then and there – so I just prayed without turning to look at the bear… Realizing that there was no longer any noise behind me, I turned to the cave entrance, but there was no animal anywhere in sight… It had been a demonic temptation that had frightened the daylights out of me… Maybe there were bats and mice in that cave but there certainly was no bear, because a bear could not get out of that cave without making the same kind of noise it had made when stepping inside it – since the entrance was so very narrow… Those who are familiar with the cave know what I am talking about and will definitely agree with me…
God did see that I had not entered the cave to brag about my ascetic efforts afterwards, but that I was desperate and I wanted to pray to Him and entreat Him to show me the right path. I was afraid that the Orthodox faith was not the true path either and that I would have to look for another spiritual group. I had rather die than exchange an erroneous path for another one. I prayed to Him, “God, let me die rather than live far from You and teach others to take the wrong path”…
The night after the terrifying night spent inside the cave, I had a dream that changed my life. I dreamed I was looking in a canonical book on the expiation of sins, searching for a canon that would be suited for my sins. In the dream, I heard a clear and powerful voice, which woke me up. It said, “Here is your canon: you shall teach the others about the philosophy of the Church Fathers.” I awoke at once, trying to understand why the canon I had been assigned, which I had perceived as a divine message, did not refer to my teaching other people about the theology of the Church Fathers, not about their philosophy. An experienced father confessor explained to me what that meant: God did not want me to think that the dream had been induced by self-suggestion, so that was why I heard the word “philosophy” instead of “theology”. To be sure, at that time I did not know that the philosophy of the Church Fathers was in fact their theology, i.e. speaking with God and about God…
The divine voice that came to me in that dream marked a turning point in my life. I went back to the reverend father that had chased me away twice and told him I wanted to embrace the Orthodox faith and become a churchgoer. I prepared myself for confession – I wrote out my sins on paper (there were seven pages overall) and then I went to confession. I felt that my soul was cleansed from sin and that my life changed completely… Although I was still unworthy of it, I received the Holy Eucharist, following the reverend father’s advice and with his blessing.
Since then I gave up my belief in reincarnation, the yoga practices, and sexual debauchery. There were some hard times, some very hard ones, but I always felt Christ was near me… Saying these words to you and thinking about my past feels as if I were telling someone else’s story. It is difficult for me to remember that I was a yogi; it seems it had not been me… In truth, repentance purifies the mind and cleanses the soul.
After a few years, I got married and I had the feeling that I was a virgin; I really had the feeling that I had not known any other woman before and that my wife was the first woman in my life… In fact, a life of sin does not resemble a family life – not in the very least. Although on the surface they may seem similar, they are two altogether different things.
What happened after my first confession of sins? I started attending church services, I went to college and studied theology, graduating from the Department of Orthodox Theology and then taking a master’s degree in Denominational Studies and Ecumenism (focusing on the aberrations of the New Age Movement). When I was in high school, I met a priest who lived like a saint; at present, a book is being written about his life and about the miracles that he performed. He told me that I would write very many books, which would meet spiritual needs… After having written my first books – by now their number has exceeded twenty – a fellow Christian I met when visiting a monastery told me, “You know, ever since you were in high school Father X (and he named the saint-like priest) said that you would write many books. I see that his words turned out to be quite prophetic…”
I started writing in order to convince those who are far from the Orthodox Church that they are far from the Truth, from beauty, and from inner fulfillment. My first books were against aberrations and spiritual delusions, against astrology and horoscopes, against belief in reincarnation, against the Gnostic gospels. A Journal of My Conversion – from the Goddess of Death to the Emperor of Life describes my conversion to Orthodoxy, while one of the latest books I have written, The Gospel according to Judah, attacks not only the Gnostic gospel attributed to Judah, but also Judah’s way of thinking as it is reflected in the contemporary theology, iconography and literature. I have realized that writing for those who have been deluded by the New Age Movement is not enough: those who are “lukewarm” [Revelation 3, 15] and lead a mediocre Christian life need help too. I have written books for young people, as for instance, The Wedding Book – How to Start a Family and Young People and Sexuality, pointing out the way in which debauchery perverts the minds of young men and women in our day and age… I have also written books for mature people, dealing with ways in which one should face troubles and disease, and commentaries on the Paterikon…
I am fully aware of the risk I am taking… In Orthodoxy, it is not the young people who should speak up, but the elderly who have a solid spiritual experience… I write because I owe obedience to my spiritual father who said that he regretted that I did not have four hands so I could write more… He also said that I had to write because my redemption depended on it. When I came to Greece for my Ph. D., the first thing I asked a reverend father here was, “Is it all right that I should write so many books, taking into account the fact that I am so young and inexperienced, just because I owe obedience to my spiritual father and because I am under his spiritual authority?” His answer was, “If your spiritual father prays for you and he sustains you by his prayers everything will be fine. Show obedience to him and everything will be all right.”
I had my doubts about obeying: should I or should I not follow the path of obedience? I was even tempted to leave my spiritual father because it seemed to me that he was not the best guide and advisor I could have. One night I had a dream. I dreamed I was inside a church in which there were the holy relics of Saint Nectarius. My spiritual father was praying on one side of the coffin and I was standing on the other side. The saint started moving in the coffin… and I asked him to give me his blessing. He had a big metal cross in his hand and started making the sign of the cross on top of my head. He did it several times, saying, “Bless you, bless you…” On awaking and recalling the dream, I was afraid it might have been sent by the devil, so that I called my spiritual father on his cell phone. I said to him “Father, you know that I do not take dreams seriously, but here is…” – and I related my dream to him. Then I asked him, “Do you think it came from the devil, from my subconscious or from God?” He answered, “How could it have come from the devil when this very morning I was praying for you over the relics of Saint Nectarius? I am in Greece, don’t you know that?” No, I had no idea he was in Greece. I thought he was in Romania, but he had activated his roaming and had answered his cell phone from Greece… I also told my dream to an elder leading a saintly life in a monastery in Greece and he said to me, “Your spiritual father could not have come out and say outright to you that your dream had come from God, lest he fell into the sin of pride – particularly as you saw him next to the saint’s coffin. It was indeed a dream from God. Saint Nectarius wants to encourage you to walk right on along the path of being a witness to Christ…”
That dream was the encouragement I needed in order to go ahead. The road is bumpy, the temptations are great, but I nurture the hope that Christ will help me take another step and then another one…
My life in Christ has been extraordinarily beautiful… The greatest thing for me has been that I came to know the Truth and to know that the Truth is love… In the Orthodox Church, I have learned to love. Christian love is warm – it is not like yogic love, which is cold and superficial… I have discovered the beauty of family life, which is indeed a treasure. Next to my wife and to our three children I have the distinct feeling that I am in the middle of a beautiful dream… It seems to me that people speak and write too little about Christian families. Getting married was almost like a bet in a way: I was hoping that it would be a beautiful life, but I was not sure. My family life has been much more difficult than I had anticipated but also much more beautiful…
I give witness to the beauty of the Orthodox faith because some of those who have practised yoga have serious communication problems and are socially maladjusted although they have formally converted to the Orthodox faith; they have received the Christian teaching but they still have a yogic behaviour.
I confess that I am overjoyed at being an Orthodox believer… In the past, I was afraid that I would get bored with it and I kept asking myself, “Will Christian life become commonplace for me?” Moreover, I have discovered that a life lived in communion with God, with the Theotokos, with the saints and martyrs of the Church can be anything but boring.
On the contrary, I believe that the life of a Christian is extremely captivating. In addition, one should be a real hero in order to live like a Christian in this world, which is so full of sin and so fond of heresy.
My purpose has been to convince you to reach out to those who are far from the church. Usually after a conference, people collect funds for the poor or for Christian missionaries in African countries or for various and sundry social activities.
I shall not ask you to put money in a box but to put a part of your soul in it and to realize that right next to you there may be so many people who have been deluded by different religions and denominations. You could make a difference. You could help them through living a truly Christian life.
These people have had enough of empty words and unconvincing Christian sermons. They need shining examples of a Christian way of living. They want to see in you a living icon of Christ.
Do not force anyone to come to Christ, but win them over with your Christian love. No one can resist love. Today’s world looks for love in the wrong places and all that people find is fake love.
Offer them true love, sacrificial love, and you will change them. Even those who have decided never to change will start out on the path of conversion – slowly, but surely.
Look, I am just sending out to you this unseen box, inside which I am not asking you to put money but I repeat, something far more precious – a part of your soul. Are you up for such a donation?
You would make so very happy! May God assist you in all your good works and bestow His grace on you. Amen.
(traducere: Luminiţa Niculescu)
can you belive christianity still exists?
Pingback: www.topcholesteroladvice.info » From the Goddess of Death to the Emperor of Life