In the echo of the holy women

...it wafts with God...

Yes, I don't know if it has happened to you to find somewhere, by yourselves, a respite beyond time and world, in which to feel how it wafts with God... with His grace poured out in spiritual fragrances, with the grace of the saints who labored and prayed in the abodes of this age, through which we pass now, in our time of salvation...

Not once has it wafted through my mind, through my soul, with the lives of Venerable Monks or Nuns who permeated the air with holiness, enough for us to breathe today the breath of eternal life.

It was the Transfiguration of the Lord and I greatly desired to reach Locurele and Lainici, as to a place of Romanian witness of Tabor. Every Tabor is a space that is organically part of my being, for the first gift the Lord gave me in life was to arrange my earthly birth on the day of Metamorphosis His, the day He shared with us such an intimate union between God and man in the Hypostasis Who is He, Christ the Lord.

And, as I stood there, high up, in the so beautiful lands of Locurele, I gave thanks and pondered how the Lord embraced us within Himself, in such intimacy, taking your nature, mine... How Tabor testifies to full love, hypostatic and so personal, a calling for you and me, now, here...

...then, as if from the mountains, from beyond them, a warm and fragrant breeze arose... A breeze that brought with it the grace and prayers of those who have dwelt for centuries in these places sanctified by their presence... What an incense-offering beyond nature from those who carried us in their vigils, when perhaps we weren't even yet...when my spirit was absent from within me, You knew my paths...The saints pray for the whole world, and their prayer becomes an inner calling for us at the appointed time. Their prayer relates us to them through the Holy Spirit.

In that wafting, the world faded and its place was taken by nights steeped in vigils and incense smoke, in prayer and inner visages of intercessors. It wafted with the Holy Spirit, it wafted with the prayers of the hermits and Mother Vartolomeea from beyond the mountain, also an ascetic in a Romanian Tabor, that of Cioclovina de Sus, with the prayers of Saint Antonina of Tismana and of the unknown ones... perhaps also of those nuns from the small cemetery in Cioclovina de Jos, where the peace of the age to come is felt so clearly. I let the breeze wander through the valleys of my being and embalm my mind with the remembrance of eternity. Truly, great is the intercession of our forerunners before the Lord! And for me, with my feminine nature, holy is the inheritance of the Spirit that has placed, in my spiritual genealogy, our holy and venerable women!

How shall I repay the holy women, all the Myrrh-bearers, bearing the myrrh of the Spirit and pouring it into my nature, to them, who traversed this path before my time, making it witnessing and comprehensible to the extent that I, the very last, can grasp...

Shall I not thank Lady Maria, my Lady Maria Brâncoveanu, lady of tears, when I suffer and lament for the soul of my kin? When my thoughts burn with worry for my sick Father, when I fear for him, is not Lady Maria the breast on which I can weep? Will I not feel more understood contemplating her suffering for the great Martyr? Will I not thank her that her suffering has alleviated mine?

Or when my soul is crushed for my children, educated with great, great efforts, and most often alone, stigmatized, "crucified" by a society that does not value the purity of their souls and parades them, with modern bullying modern, from Annas to Caiaphas among the impertinent chimeras of the world until it loses them... Will not the heart of Lady Maria strengthen me, she who was torn apart for her decapitated sons? For her persecuted daughters?

And when I am captive in all sorts of intricacies of human intrigues, will I not remember when she endured the Turks' captivity? All my sufferings become small compared to her suffering, but especially com-passionate! And this spiritual empathy is essential, for it gathers us together, relates us, unites us as one in Christ the Lord, He who innocently suffered for us, and we, now, in Him.

How can I thank you, Lady Maria Brâncoveanu, for the inheritance of the Spirit you poured into me, a feminine soul of the 21st century, through your inner and bodily martyrdom that you endured during your life, so many hundreds of years before me! Your tears have also poured into me, most chosen Lady! And your cries to the Lord of Crucifixion and Resurrection have traveled through ages to me and my sisters, wives and mothers, noble Lady! They have journeyed through centuries of souls, of grandmothers and women burning with care for their children, and have called us and united us with the Lord, in His Most Pure Body with which He clothed Himself in us. I can only thank you with devout reverence and now wish you a true Rejoice!

And, because I still ponder thoughts about the Christian woman, about who I am, as a woman, before my Lord, fragments of life's moments unfold in my soul. Almost all of them have the bitter taste of suffering, of unseen blood shed from the heart... I don't know how each person experiences this condition, but the first reflection of the soul that emerges from my self-examination as a woman is pain. And from pains and crushing of all kinds, especially for others, His Resurrection arises!

...sleepless nights, crucified days, countless worries for the family, burdens laid at the feet of the Lord, the daily impossible - it must come from something - that we no longer have what's needed, that something urgent intervenes and we struggle to pick up the children from school, that some severe illness strikes us again, one of our recurring crosses, that some rowdy group of classmates harasses a child in class because 'he's a priest's son...' (and I won't say the epithet), that I effectively drop from exhaustion and most often no one comes to help me even for pay, as is 'natural' among Christians, that Bolt leaves me on the road because I have too many children, that I have no one to leave the little ones with so I can go to the hospital to give birth, and many, too many others... All these are crowned with the greatest inner pains that cannot be expressed, for the salvation of the children, of loved ones...

And, as I sit at the feverish bedside of Măriuca after several bouts of vomiting, poor thing, looking at her already frail and pale little face, I remember each time Anghelina, the daughter of Lady Milița, wife of the Holy Ruler Neagoe Basarab! What maternal anguish to see her child sick, in the agony of fever, then dying... How hard it is for any mother to watch her child suffer, to struggle beyond her strength to help him, and often to simply find herself powerless! Trials that all of us go through, from Eve, through the Most Pure Mother of Life, until now... Through every woman's soul pass these poisoned, merciless spears, kneeling us before the Heavenly Father. Or when children grow up and have adolescent ambitions, anger, and turmoil, I think of how Lady Milița must have once borne the ambition of Ioan, which she also lost...

I feel embraced in the sufferings of Lady Milița, in the prayers of Mother Platonida, and every time I go to Ostrov, I offer her sincere gratitude. Looking at her icon carefully placed in my prayer corner, I always feel accompanied, heard, and understood; every cry of maternal and wifely suffering finds a real echo in her breast. And I cannot find a word that encompasses the gratitude I bear her in the Lord!

I hold close to my chest this bundle of flowers and spiritual fragrances of the holy women as a bouquet from which I feed on light, and I rejoice immensely that, through their canonization and through this jubilee year dedicated to the pastoral care of the Christian family and the commemoration of holy women, I feel that our sacrifice is received within the bosom of the Church before Him for Whom we offer ourselves as a burnt offering.

Maria Tudor

Photograph by Helena Lopes / pexels.com

Icons from doxologia.ro