As a good soldier of Christ – in memory of Traian Dorz, singer of the Lord’s Host
The Book of Revelation says: “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. Yes, says the Spirit, they will rest from their labours, for their works follow them!” (Rev 14:13).
This verse is particularly fitting for one of the Hospitallers of the Lord, to whom Father Joseph Trifa used to say, with a tear in his heart, “dear Dorz.”
I recalled these words of consolation when, in the middle of June, a brother of faith from the Serbian Banat informed me that Traian Dorz, the singer of Christ and tireless servant of the Gospel, had been in a deep coma for several days in a hospital in Beiuș and that, unfortunately, the moment of his “departure” was near. I immediately called his closest family to tell them that his disciple and friend Vasile, with whom he had walked the streets of the hospitals and baths of Covasna, was watching over him day and night, witnessing his slow, silent death. On 20 June, I received a tearful telephone call informing me that Brother Traian had gone to sleep in the Lord at dawn, at ten minutes past four—the one who had suffered all his life, who had fought, sung, and written all his life according to Saint Paul’s exhortation, “as a good soldier of Christ” (II Tim 2:3).
He was only fifteen and a half years old when he gave himself to the Lord, on Sunday, 8 June 1930. The “missionary” who brought him to the feet of the Savior was Noah’s Ark by Father Joseph Trifa, the founder of the Work of the Lord—a book he had received as a prize from his catechist, a priest from Beiuș. “This book,” writes Traian Dorz in one of his many manuscripts, “which deserves to see the light of print in the free world, spoke to me for the first time about sin, the new birth, the blood of Christ, and the salvation of my soul…” In the first month after joining the Host, he also subscribed to the Newsletter of the Host of the Lord, published in Sibiu, which shaped him spiritually and won him over through the articles of Father Joseph. He had nowhere to go for meetings because the villages were far away, and in Beiuș they were rarely held. “Thus,” Traian Dorz recalls, “my spiritual life developed within rather than without. I had the New Testament with me and read from it in every free moment. As soon as I was alone, I would hide wherever I could to pray. I felt such a need to pray that I could think of nothing else. As soon as I came to a more sheltered place where no one could see me, I would fall on my knees. I lifted up my hands and my whole soul, and so I prayed, hungry for prayer like a child for honey. Thus I feasted on the happiest and tastiest prayer. In this way, I was immersed in the sweetest communion with my Lord, of which I could never get enough…”
This devotion explains much about the spiritual profile of the Christian warrior: for him, prayer was both a weapon of defense and attack. It also illuminates the core of his Christian life—the richness of his spiritual journeys, the unique fragrance of his religious verses, his insistence on the supremacy of Jesus in his poetry, and his total dedication to serving the inner beautification of the Romanian people, whom he loved and for whose salvation he followed in the footsteps of his great predecessor from Sibiu, practicing his teaching and cherishing his memory throughout the years.
Together with Loan Marini, he was a pupil and close collaborator of Father Joseph Trifa, who recognized his talent and gave him the opportunity to publish his exceptional religious poems in the pages of the Society of the Lord’s Prayer. In 1935, at the age of twenty, he published the first fruit of his poetic efforts, the pamphlet La Golgola, and in 1937, during his military service, he published his second collection of poems, On the Way of the Cross. Later, the Romanian faithful would experience moments of ecstasy when reading Songs of the Apocalypse, many of whose poems became songs of love and glorification of the name of Jesus. Who can forget: “What a dear name you have, Jesus, beloved of my soul…”? And who has not hummed with eyes bathed in tears of perfect happiness? “O sweet Jesus, my sweet Lord / day awake and night sighing in sleep / my soul calls to Thy gentle face / day awake Jesus, night sighing…”
No one in our country has sung with more evangelical love and devotion of Jesus the Savior, the “Beloved Bridegroom,” so present in his aesthetically simple yet spiritually imbued lyrics. All of Traian Dorz’s poetry reads like liturgical prayer, uttered with the humility of a penitent seeking divine origins; it is an outpouring of heaven, a biblical litany, a sprinkling of light offered to souls yearning for glory and mystical communion.
I have beautiful memories of Traian Dorz in connection with the work of the Lord’s Host. Since 1948, when God’s will crossed our paths (at that time I was preaching at the Osterian meetings in St. Catherine’s Church, together with writers AL. Lascarov-Moldovanu and I. Gr. Oprișan), we always saw each other and prayed together—whether when he visited Bucharest to see the brothers in Ghencea, during the Oblate meetings in the country, or in the fraternal councils he convened to discuss the progress of the work and measures necessary to preserve the spirituality of the Lord’s Host, according to Father Joseph Trifa’s vision. What holy moments of moving spiritual atmosphere we shared! For example, in the house of Brother Vaier in Cărpiniș, where I spent my holidays in 1952, I read to him his cycle of poems In the School of the Lord Jesus and the dramatic poem The Lost Son, under the dreamy summer canopy of God’s love and indestructible fraternal communion. Traian had just been released from prison and was living with his brother Cornel Rusu in Simeria, though not for long: on Christmas morning, he was arrested again and imprisoned in Deva, so that on 2 March 1953 he could be sent “to work in the colonies,” as the investigating officer had promised him, via the Ghencea camp, a sorting centre for prisoners fit for work. From there, he was sent to the Bărăgan, first to the village of Dropia, 6 km from Ciulnița railway station, then to an experimental farm. I visited him there regularly in 1954, 1955, and 1956. In the spring of that last year of forced residence, he worked only as a field guard on the Ciulnița farm, because the A.S.C.A.R. Polyclinic in Bucharest confirmed the serious heart disease caused by his investigations and imprisonment, forbidding him to do heavy work.
“During all this time,” Traian Dorz confesses in his autobiographical account, “I continued my writing with perseverance. The hard conditions of suffering, work, and loneliness in which I lived gave a wider and deeper dimension to my moods. My communion with the Lord reached unique states and experiences, from which my soul collected, with tears, the gold, silver, and precious stones with which it built the fortress of my immortal songs for Christ. In addition to the three and a half years of work, learning, suffering, and struggle with Father Joseph at the plough and the altar of Sibiu, the school and altar of years of solitude and tears, through the long caves and tunnels I have passed through from then until now without interruption, were my preparations for what I have to say today, tomorrow, and forever.”
Indeed, I visited him there and found him guarding the corn, clover, and cotton crops, identifying with the scents and beauties of God’s creation, which he never ceased to praise in verse with eyes “always tearful with love and light.” There, feeling “closer to heaven than to earth,” and spending hours and days writing his songs of glorification, I spoke to him of the urgent need to reorganize the Lord’s Host. I had carefully prepared this plan with two other prominent brothers (Loan Capătă and Silviu Hărăguș) for the day he would be free, so that together, thirteen laypeople and a priest from across the country, under the protection of Father Losif’s teaching, could discuss the winds and storms of temptation to divide, aiming to preserve the unity of faith by highlighting the specificity of the missionary work of the Lord’s Host within Romanian Orthodoxy.
On the same occasion, when he asked how I envisioned this indispensable reorganization (since he considered the Brotherhood of the Lord’s Host a “rural” movement with limited national reach), I spoke to him—and Traian Dorz listened with obvious attention and curiosity—about the urgent need for a constitution, at local and national levels, of single commands or “fraternal councils of leadership” for the elite of our movement, in full accordance with the unitary ideal of Christian struggle and the intransigence of evangelical spirituality. This “staff” would decide on the missionary tactics appropriate to the specific sectors where the “urgent needs” of our fellow men and women—lost or afflicted by vices and iniquities—must be met, and it would serve as a coordinating and controlling instrument, ensuring the “good fight” did not degenerate into arbitrary skirmishes.
Traian agreed that the “fraternal council of leadership” should be organized in a trihotomous manner, in compulsory uniformity, from the coordinating centre to the last fraternal grouping in subordination. Thus, a triangle of leadership would supervise missionary activity across all areas: 1) the spiritual section, preserving the purity of Christian struggle, rules of obedience, and the inviolable bond with the Orthodox Church, regardless of hostility from the hierarchy; 2) the missionary section, where pedagogical, cultural, and artistic factors predominate to spread the Gospel through the living Word or printed material; and 3) the practical, administrative section, focusing on socio-economic factors and verifying material and practical Christian action. Unfortunately, these plans were never realized due to inadequate political conditions and the indifference of Church leadership. Traian, like the rest of us who dreamed with him of Romania’s transfiguration through the unrestrained proclamation of God’s Word, endured persecution, Securitate harassment, arrests, and unjust convictions—from 1959 through his trial in March 1982, when he was again arrested and imprisoned in Satu Mare for illegally printing and distributing religious books.
The passing of the Christian fighter and poet Traian Dorz is a profound loss for the “wind of religious spring” that is the Society of the Lord’s Prayer.
In his “testamentary word” to the friars on the Day of the Cross in 1986, he urged them to remedy visible deficiencies in the Society of the Lord, such as the lack of leaders in fraternal gatherings, to halt increasing misbehavior, disobedience, and disunity, and to counter the deviation of youth from a life of irreproachable purity. He cautioned against divided assemblies that ignored Church teaching and the ethos of the Lord’s Host, where disruptors, drawn by the neo-Protestant vision of the Gospel, sought to misinterpret the ordinances and words left by our spiritual father, Iosif Trifa, as rules of faith and fraternal communion.
We conclude with Traian Dorz’s prayer from this “Testamentary Word,” honoring his passage into eternity:
“Lord Jesus, You know the spirit in which I have walked with You, in Your service and in Your work among my brothers, in the short and troubled time in which You entrusted me with such a heavy task and such a beautiful banner. Please help me now to come to You in peace on the path You have set for me. In Your sight and in Your kingdom… O Lord our God, come strong and remain victorious at the head of the battle and the warriors of the host; strengthen the feet of those who run, the minds of those who lead, the hearts of those who suffer. Light their way and divide their waves before them, that they may go victorious to the bright fulfillment of Your will and the purpose for which You have ordained them; raise in the worthiest hands Your victorious banner, Your valiant sword, and Your inspired harp. And I beseech Thee, help me, O Lord, to enter in my turn through the gracious gates of Thy heavenly Jerusalem, into the tabernacle prepared for the family of Thy host in heaven; to join my forefathers who await me there, as a humble servant, but found faithful in the little work entrusted to him. Amen.”
(Sergiu Grossu, Un vânt de primăvară religioasă, Oastea Domnului Publishing House, Sibiu, 2005, pp. 86-92; republished in In memoriam Traian Dorz. Mărturii la 20 de ani de la trecerea in veșnicie, edited by Corneliu Clop, Oastea Domnului Publishing House, Sibiu, 2009, pp. 165-170)