Father Constantin Sârbu – a genius of liturgical service [1]

Those who walked from Mihai Vodă Bridge towards Uranus or Izvor in the 1970s could easily get lost in the maze of streets so aristocratic that they had the impression that they were not in a Balkan city, but in the heart of a museum of the most refined urbanism, a Louvre or Sans Souci scattered among the hills of Dâmbov, An exhibition of the most diverse tastes and epochs, yet united in the “bon goût” of our past centuries, full of charm and distinction, of elegant manners brought from Paris, Vienna, Rome or Madrid and eternalised (so our wise ancestors thought) in the most harmonious miniature villas and palaces, over which the most elegant royal residence in Bucharest – Mihai Vodă Church – has reigned for almost four centuries.

While wandering through the tragic district of our capital, now sunk in the depths of a paranoid megalomania, halfway down Sapienței Street, my eyes fell on a modest house with an aura of mystery that stopped you in your tracks; only when you looked up did you see a cross on the flat roof and understand that you were standing in front of a makeshift church. It was the only one I had ever seen in Bucharest, and I entered more out of curiosity than piety. What struck me from the start was the incredible number of worshippers in such a small space, and by discreetly standing on my toes I was able to estimate the number of people present, at an hour and time when the country’s churches were almost deserted. The silence was absolute and the order perfect, which partly explained the possibility of this massive gathering in such a modest space. However, as I was later to discover, this was only the effect of the real cause, and the unveiling took place in the presence of a priest who impressed me so much that I still remember having a sleepless night on my way home. Like the makeshift church, the priest’s appearance was far from striking in beauty or elegance or any of the other gifts of the Creator. I could say that if only that first impression had remained with me, today I would not have such a decisive memory, or, more likely, none at all. I was so fascinated that the next Sunday morning I went early, took a seat in the pew, and stood near what was called the iconostasis. At that first Divine Liturgy, not only did my inner turmoil not subside, but I could say that the traditional religious universe, meek or perhaps cowering in automatic and little understood forms, was shattered. Although I had grown up in the Church and had never missed a liturgy in my life, here I can say that I experienced, compactly and integrally, sentence by sentence, word by word, gesture by gesture, second by second, the first originally understood liturgy. Father Sârbu was not repeating a script written more than a millennium and a half ago, but with incomparable skill and intelligence he was building, point by point, the magnificent Eastern liturgical edifice, each time for the first time and only for the present, just as the Holy Body and Blood are only prepared for the moment of Communion.

The past melted away in that absolute moment, and the future no longer interested anyone. We were in the primordial time and in the heart of the primordial act; conventional categories did not exist in this liturgical topos, which was transformed into the purest subjectivity, into an interiority that moved like a beneficial laser any duration, quantity, mass, density, etc. Naturally, my ego, of a typically pietistic conventionality, did not want to give in to this “atomic icebreaker”, and it was only after two or three months that I managed to overcome my stupefaction in the direction of amazement and humble understanding, brought to my knees by this liturgical genius that I believe has never been repeated in the history of this Benedictine nation. For me he remains like the mysterious Melchisedec – the priest of the Most High – because I know nothing else about Father Constantin Sârbu and I have only seen him in liturgical times. Besides, I don’t want to add anything to this supreme and dazzling image, because from him I understood the essence of liturgical worship, that is, everything about the liturgy. The famous phrase of Nicolae Cabasila, “nothing more can be done”, does not apply to anyone like this liturgical giant.

His absolute originality lay, among other things, in the fact that the liturgy was celebrated not only at the holy altar, but in the whole Church, and not only by the priest, but by the whole people. In the Church of Wisdom there were no spectators; he had the unique gift of involving everyone so completely that it was impossible to tell who was performing the sacred mystery. In the small church, which had become an altar in its entirety, and in the assembly, which had become totally Eucharistic, the Christian ideal of communion, dreamed of and invoked by the Saviour in the Archpriest’s prayer (cf. Jn 17), was finally realised. The deepest longing of the heart of the teacher and friend was expressed in the powerful Hebrew psalm formula: “I have longed to eat this Passover with you”, was fulfilled at the end of a century and millennia, in the most humble Eucharistic “tabernacle” in the city with the mystically luminous name, under the hand of that sacredotal genius, creator of the supreme symphony of the flesh. Later, when I read Schmemann’s masterpiece of liturgical thought, L’Eucharistie, I trembled with overwhelming joy with every page, because what he proposed I had “seen with my eyes and felt with my hands”: the liturgical word incarnated in concrete life in the heart of much-suffering Bucharest. On the way out, after experiencing a sacred time and space, you were something else entirely. This was once expressed by a believer (he worked at the border or at Otopeni customs): “When I come out of Liturgy in the Church of Sapienția, I feel that I can build a block of flats”.

In order to save the Mass from all-consuming formalism, Father Sârbu moved around the church, the text was scattered throughout the liturgical space, the words were perfectly controlled during the utterance, and he did not even say a conjunction or a preposition mechanically; He announced each new moment with a few penetrating words, so that we all knew exactly what was happening to us at that moment, his gaze, like the word, was addressed to each one and to all at once (I dare say that the liturgical phenomenon at Sapienței went far beyond the wondrous and enigmatic early Christian glossolalia), it was aware of every moment to the point of pure and uninterrupted presence, fact was transformed into action, word became life, time was sublimated into liberation, space was sublimated into frenzy, and the whole universe fell into rapture, into an unrestrained movement towards the essential. I am sure that ten priests like him, seated simultaneously at the key points of the universe, would have achieved the long-dreamed-of “cosmic liturgy”, but not just the ideal one of Ursus von Balthasar or Teilhard de Chardin, but the real one to which humanity has been striving for two millennia.

I consider myself the happy witness of the most powerful liturgical miracle of this century, and I can never thank God enough for the fulfilment of the promise made two millennia ago: ‘Truly I say to you, you will see greater miracles than these’. And the last miracle is still fully visible today, when, in the heart of the disaster area, at the epicentre of the hurricane of madness that swept away a fifth of the magnificent city, the modest little church remained unmoved, sheltering under its protective wing the illustrious royal building [the Church of St. Michael the Archangel] that had been demolished by the murderous gesture of a hysterical demolitionist. Beneath the tiny heap in the churchyard, from “underneath all the buildings”, Father watches the moment of the birth in the depths of this Christian nation of another priest-emperor in the garden of Romanian wisdom.

I am sure that in the heavenly liturgy Fr. I would say the traditional “rest in peace”, but it doesn’t suit him: I never saw him tired. For him we have to find a formula that is not used elsewhere, because he was, is and will be unique. If I have seen him, I have believed; blessed are those who have not seen him and believe!

(Professor Ion Buga – Contemporary Minipatrology, Symbol Publishing House, Bucharest, 1994, pp. 167-174)

[1] The testimony was brought to life by the zeal and piety of the theologian Alexandru Valentin Crăciun, to whom we express our gratitude. On this occasion we also give the motivation for the restoration of this testimony:

“While a considerable number of accounts of the life and work of Fr. Constantin Sârbu were published together (in volumes or pamphlets) between 1999 and 2000, the only account to see the light of print before 1999 was that of Fr. Ion Buga (Minipatrologie contemporană, Symbol Publishing House, Bucharest, 1994), one of the most informed witnesses of the “liturgical phenomenon” in the Church of Wisdom. The text is a masterpiece. This justifies its inclusion in the volume “A Great Christian Confessor: Father Constantin Sârbu” (Bonifaciu Publishing House, 2000). Unfortunately, for unknown reasons, both the anthology “Tears and Grace” (2010) and the second edition of the volume “A Great Confessor…” (2011) no longer include Father Buga’s testimony, which the editors once held in such high esteem. We are therefore obliged to reproduce the text of 1994 as it is, in the hope that it will find its rightful place in a future volume dedicated to the memory of Father Constantin Sârbu.