From the controversial publicist Sandu Tudor to the tempestuous monk Daniil

The “Burning Bush Movement” was initiated by a very controversial figure in the history of Romanian literature and publishing. We are talking about the poet Sandu Tudor. From his father, who had been President of the Court of Cassation and Justice, the poet inherited not only an education and encyclopaedic information specific to Romanian culture between the two wars, but also a lot of material means, which allowed him a lifetime of study and research, travelling and contact with everything of interest in world culture.

Sandu Tudor was no systematist. He was, in the words of Professor Alexandru Mironescu, “a disturbed library”, but his every word was a subject for meditation. His lectures were a mess, an amalgam of jumbled notes that he would spend a minute rummaging through without saying a word. Just when you thought he’d finished, he’d start again. But he was followed with interest by symbol hunters, for Sandu Tudor had an innate inclination towards the mystical underbelly of things, which brought him closer to the literature of the Holy Fathers and the mysticism of monastic life. He lived among the people of the Church, whom he criticised in his newspaper Faith, sometimes going so far as to blackmail them. He loved ecclesiastical and literary scandals. Dialogue with him had to lead to verbal violence. But he polarised the living spirits; people of culture loved him because Sandu Tudor hated superficiality. Those who had no spiritual resonance could not remain in his circle of friends.

His total conversion to the spiritual, however, came after a trip to the Holy Mountain. At the time, a journalist in France was writing some defamatory articles about the monks of Athos, claiming that she had visited the mountain dressed as a man. Intrigued and curious, like any journalist hungry for news, Sandu Tudor gets out of a kayak in the monastic harbour of Dafne, dressed in shorts, a sports shirt and a rucksack.

God, hunting for hardy souls with something of the spirit of the Apostle Paul in them, has brought forth a vagabond Romanian monk, one of the “traitorous” category, who wandered from monastery to monastery, working for food and clothing. He said to Sandu Tudor: “If you want to know the secret of Mount Athos, put on long trousers, let your beard grow and come with me; but do as I do. Many, like you, come to see the libraries, the treasury or the holy relics and return home knowing nothing. Monks do not reveal the secrets of monastic life to tourists; they come as they go”. Sandu Tudor found the suggestion reasonable, and from that moment on he began to do what the monk Averchie had done. When they entered the gate of a monastery, they did three prostrations, another three prostrations on the steps of the church, inside they kissed the icons from the door to the altar. The monks appeared as if from nowhere, they came out of the corners, they looked out of the windows, the abbot knew… Word had spread throughout the mountain that Averchie was going from monastery to monastery with a very devout pilgrim. The doors and hearts of the monks who practised the prayer of the heart were opened to him. From there he came with the stool, the method of breathing and the whole secret of the inner liturgy of the Hesychasts, taken not from the readings, not from the Philokalia, but directly from the anonymous masters of our time: the Hesychast monks. There Sandu Tudor understood that our ego is infinite and that in that existential centre of our being, which the monks call “heart” in the sense of “deep”, there is God and that God is the seal of our personality. It is to this centre of God in man that the monks turn when they lower their heads to their breasts and chant in the rhythm of their breath: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”. He understood that prayer is a state, not a formal activity. It is the natural state of man who feels the presence of God in him, because in God we come and move, and the descent into ourselves is the way to authenticity, the true knowledge of who we are. Any activity of consciousness must be related to this existential centre within us, otherwise it loses its authenticity.

For Sandu Tudor, a rethinking of the whole human culture and intellectual process begins, which, with reference points other than the God in man, becomes not only superficial but even demonic. It is not a theoretical conversion. Sandu Tudor came to these conclusions through the practice of prayer, day and night. He used to say that in order to enter into the order of the Spirit, one must first “get drunk”, giving us the example of another wanderer in The Russian Pilgrim’s Tales who had become a walking prayer. He recounts in detail how, on Mount Athos, he had begun to make prostrations out of interest, to give the impression of a faithful pilgrim; but with each prostration something in him was transformed. One night, at two o’clock, when the mountain began to pray, he was in the hermitage of St. Anne. The sound of bells and drums came from all the valleys and gorges, from the monasteries, hermitages and chapels, and the full moon that was silvery on the sea of Chalcides added to all the gaiety. The sensitivity of the poet, touched by the wings and fire of the Holy Spirit, overwhelmed him. The meek Sandu Tudor began to weep. The abbot of the hermitage, seeing him moved, addressed him with a question like a hammer blow: “Brother Sandu, tell me, what were you doing in the world at this hour of the night?” Ghosts, like demonic visions, began to pass through Sandu Tudor’s mind, and he tried to get rid of them: Nightclubs, Parisian cabarets, literary gatherings, parties… etc. and the Abbot concluded: “We Athonites have a belief: If God still preserves the world, it is because monks pray at midnight”.

Returning to the capital, he devoted himself to philological studies, which he did not read but practised, discovering documents on the existence of the Carpathian hermits and revealing in the Diata of Abbot George and the Laws of Saint Calinic the specificity of Romanian Hesychasm.

In 1944, when I was officially accepted among his friends, Sandu Tudor was enrolled as a brother in the Antim Monastery in Bucharest, with the obvious aim of becoming a monk. With his money he renovated the chapels of the monastery and the Paraklesis painted by Nicolae Stoica. He chose as his patron the most controversial of all the mystics of the Orthodox Church, St. Simeon the New Theologian, as violent and non-conformist in his relations with the formalism and legalism of the official Church; and like him, he built a chapel under the bells, which could be entered only by crawling. It was there that the first headquarters of the Orthodox “Burning Bush” Association was established. Later, thanks to the kindness of the abbot, Archimandrite Vasile Vasilache, the group for studies, conferences and the practice of the prayer of the heart moved to the monastery library.

It was difficult to be around Sandu Tudor. If he didn’t find anything valuable in you, he despised you; but he also helped you to get into the line of authentic thinking. He believed that the man of prayer, however simple, becomes a personality because he lives in truth. It is not fine words that characterise the man of culture, but the theophoric consciousness. If we are truly temples of God, then the Holy Spirit must speak through us. Triviality, superficiality, is the fruit of people who do not live in God. Christ said, “Abide in me, and I in you” (John 15:4). How can the vine bear any fruit but the stump?

Because of the fundamental changes that had taken place in him, Sandu Tudor had become a point of attraction for the Bucharest intelligentsia. The group “Rugul Aprins” was visited by Ion Marin Sadoveanu, Alexandru Mironescu, Paul Sterian, Anton Dumitriu, the poet Dr. Vasile Voiculescu, Pr. Prof. Dumitru Stăniloae, Dr. G. Dabija – lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine, Archimandrite Andrei Scrimă – today professor at the Jesuit University of Beirut, Architect Constantin Joja…, all of them bringing their families and their whole circle of friends.

(Fr. Roman Braga – On the Road of Faith, HMD Press, Inc., Rives Junction, USA, 1995, pp. 172-175)