Well, in that month [at the end of Father Sofian’s life], in the midst of a long silence, I had the courage (or should I say impertinence?) to ask him if he ever had the prayer of the heart. “I had it,” he responded with difficulty. “But, being stupid, I lost it.” I then asked him if in such a progression the prayer is said with words or if it is just a state of mind. “Both one and the other,” he responded with the same difficulty, after a long silence, filled, as it seemed to me, precisely with the prayer of the heart. And I believe that if he had not been at the end of his life, fully wrapped in his body’s fragility and his human condition, which in fact strengthened him, he would not have answered me in this way. How much he would have preferred one of his subtle ironies, which would make him laugh every time you tried to consider him something or someone. But then, at the end, as if from the edge of another world, he allowed me to cast a glance into his holy heart.
I would only add a single episode, also from the category of discovering Father’s inner state, which took place at the Military Hospital in Bucharest. He was in a room with just a few beds. Outside it was turning to spring, and Father very much loved having the window open. The cold did not bother him. A colonel, much younger and stronger, had ceded his place at the window because the current of air bothered him. For Father Sofian, at more than eighty years old, the cold air not only did not bother him but rather invigorated him. When I entered, I found him lying down on the bed next to the window. He was somehow lost in gazing outside, luminous, serene, as he always was, serenity, or better said, hesychia being his fundamental, continual state. I asked him banally and politely: “How are you doing?”, a question that, in fact, did not ask anything. But Father responded to me just as simply, overturning the banality of the conversation and raising the stakes to the roof of self-revelation with which he was so parsimonious: “Contemplating the transfiguration of nature.” And then I knew, I believe I am not making a mistake saying this, that they were not empty words. Father used the exact ascetic terminology in order to reveal, possibly, that he had reached the stage of contemplating the reasons [logoi, or inner spiritual principles] of things. He could have said that he was enjoying the springtime, or it would have been easy for him to choose a simple array of banalities used for meetings: “Good, good, and you?” etc. But, no, Father preferred to unveil a continually, well-hidden corner of his heart. These two moments were the only ones in which he revealed his inner state to me. The rest of the time, he always reproached himself and did not reveal at any price his life in Christ. Not even in his journal which he kept for a large part of his life and hid any hint of holiness.
From: Părintele Sofian Boghiu: Părtașia în Duh a Unei Moșteniri (Editura Doxologia: Iași, 2021), p. 165-166.