Priest Ioan Istrati
At a house we rang on the interphone and somebody opened for us. We entered stealthily so that no dog may appear or something else. We knocked at the door. A man with a moustache appeared and he was very upset and leered at us moving his eyebrows upwards by turns.
`Who opened for you?`he asked.
I said:
`We called and I said it`s the priest with the blessing of the houses for Epiphany and somebody opened for us otherwise we could not enter.
The man upsetting even more:
`We didn`t expect for visits.`
While he was speaking, it was dark enough, I noticed something round, shiny around his head like the aura of a saint. I said to myself that was a sign from the skies.
It was a pan which was coming down on his head held by his wife. She hit hin with a bang then said with a sweet voice:
`Please come in, father.`
The man puzzled went out of the way.
The woman with the pan was very fervent:
`Do not listen to him. He was born during communism and doesn`t know about the blessing of the priest. Come, man and make the sign of the cross`
The man makes rapidly a slight sign of the cross and kissed it.
`Splash him, father, with holy water over his mouth, so that he may not drink like a pig anymore.`
I gave them small icons and greeted them.
I stood and thought: for two thousand years these holy fervent and wonderful women carry on their backs the Romanian people and the faith, the language, the prayer and the children and they take their husbands to the church as if they were oxen under the yoke
And they have time for cooking, for cleaning, for work, for shopping at the market, for taking care of their children and for their education and late at night when their children sleep and the bovine man snores so loudly that the house is shaken they still have time for some akathists read among tears in that wonderful zeal to gain the heaven of God.
