“From today on you are my friend”
In March 1956, at the beginning of the month, when the mountains around Câmpulung were covered with snow, I decided to make a trip to the Rarău hermitage, where there was talk of a special monk. In the middle of the night, together with a “friend”, who I later found out was in the service of the Securitate and had been put on my trail, I set off on the road to Rarău. A long and hard road, with snowstorms, without a footprint to be seen. A 17-kilometre road over the mountain, with snowdrifts covering the trees in places. For a whole day we swam through them, and late in the evening, when darkness had engulfed everything around us and the wind roared in the bell tower with its open windows, we entered the courtyard of the hermitage, tired.
Everything was silent, except for the wind, which was still murmuring through the rocks of Rarău (…) The light coming through the large window of one of the buildings led us to it, along a path that was hip deep in the snow. When we reached the door, just as we were about to knock, it opened and a young man with a black beard stepped out, accompanied by an elderly monk with the face and bearing of an intellectual:
– “Who are you and where do you come from?” the abbot asked us before introducing us. “No doubt,” he continued, “you’re in some kind of trouble, otherwise you wouldn’t be on the mountain in this weather. Do you have anything that concern you? Come in.”
As soon as we stepped over the threshold of the cell, the first thing they did was to ask for our passports.
– There are all sorts of people here and I don’t want to be dragged off to Securitate for investigation, don’t get upset, I want to know who you are?
We give him the papers and wait by the door.
– Sit down! Have a seat, he told us in a friendly voice, after having legitimised us.
We were in a small cell in the abbot’s office, where there was nothing but a table with books and two chairs. On the table, among the books, was the Bible, and on the walls were some icons and a burning candle. It was warm inside and smelled of incense.
– I’m listening, he said, sitting down on a chair. You are talking to the abbot of the hermitage, Daniel!
– “Father Abbot,” I said, “we are indeed being driven by the fears of the soul, and we want to put an end to them!”
The abbot looked at me with the eyes of a psychologist and asked:
– What is this all about?
– Father Abbot, we both have the same worries… That’s what it’s about… and I told him my story from thread to hair[1].
– Yes! he says, I have listened to you, now listen to me… Have you heard the story of Job? How much trouble did he go through? You know he lost everything in life except his faith, his faith in God. God tested him and he was strong, he didn’t give up his faith and he didn’t blaspheme God and God saw his faith and made his life much better than it had been. Maybe you are also being tested by God, maybe you are one of His loved ones and He is testing you. Pray to God not to forsake you in these times of despair. Pray with a pure heart and you will see that you are not lost. It is God alone who gives peace to the troubled!
I listened to him attentively. Tiredness and the heat of the cold made me give way to a hasty response:
– I know the parable of Job well, and I often wonder if things happened exactly as described in the Bible?
The abbot jumped up from his chair and opened the door angrily:
– Get out!… Get out at once!… Leave the hermitage, you are not welcome here!…[2] Do you seek the stability of your soul and doubt the Word of God?…
After a moment of consternation, when he saw that we were not leaving, he opened the drawer of his desk and took out a file containing his personal documents, diplomas, certificates and other papers[3]:
– You will think you are before Abbot Ilisei. (Abbot Ilisei had grown up as a small child in the hermitage and, apart from the rules necessary for celebrating Liturgy in the church, he knew nothing else) No!… I am not Abbot Ilisei!… Here… and he began to put in front of me, one after the other, many documents: diplomas, civil and military certificates… If billions of people have asked themselves all kinds of questions over the years, reading the Holy Scriptures, trying to find out who is the architect of this universe? How deep, how profound it is. The Holy Scriptures, a work inspired by the Holy Spirit, for which revolutions and wars have been fought in the course of time, millions and millions of people have died, some of them burned alive, others torn apart by beasts, dragged away on wheels or crucified… Wake up, sir, if you need peace of mind. Meditate if you don’t want to be lost…
For a moment I remained mute, not knowing how to get out of the mistake I had made and giving vent to rash words.
– “Father Abbot,” I said shamefacedly after a while, “please forgive me for my impertinent words. I do not doubt the Word of God! I believe in it, but I expressed myself wrongly!”
– We’ll talk again tomorrow! Go to bed!
After these words, we went out in peace, because things had calmed down and we weren’t being chased out of the hermitage. A monk picked us up and took us to a heated cell where, tired from the long journey, we couldn’t sleep for a good night, haunted by thoughts of the mistake we had made.
The next day, which was Sunday, we attended Holy Liturgy, which was celebrated by the abbot and his twelve monk disciples. At the end, the abbot spoke to us for two hours, taking us through the teachings of all the world’s religions, their initiates and the great philosophers who taught them. We were then invited to have lunch together.
– Tonight we have a vigil, so you can come too! the abbot said to us as we left.
In the evening, at midnight, there was a gentle knock on the door, followed by the prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us”. At the same time the bells began to ring and the semantron to beat. We dressed quickly and went out into the courtyard. (…) Shyly, not wanting to disturb anything that came our way, with our souls heavy with emotion, we crossed the threshold of the chapel and fell on our knees. In front of the altar, the abbot and the twelve monks of the hermitage, all on their knees, holding a candle the size of a pencil and a piece of paper with some prayers, were talking to God. There was complete silence for a few minutes, and then suddenly, as if at the touch of a button, sobbing and wind began to blow through the window. For a few moments it was quiet again and everyone stood up. The abbot, like a ship’s captain escaping a great storm, came towards me with a face full of joy:
– What do you say, is there a God? he asked me.
– I never doubted it! I replied.
– There is, there is, brother!… Go to bed!
Back in the cell, we couldn’t sleep that night either. The next day, as we were leaving for home, the abbot invited me to join him in his cell:
– Mr Ungureanu, your soul fund is good, take care of it. Ask God to be with you. From now on you are my friend.
And I remained his friend until the end of his life, which ended in Aiud prison in 1962. (…)
There would be much to tell about Father Daniel – the man Alexandru Teodorescu – the poet and writer Sandu Tudor, about how he became a monk, from what he told me as a friend, during the nights we spent together in my house[4].
After meeting him in the hermitage, back home, I felt a complete relief. It was as if I had escaped from the weight of a rock that had been weighing me down.
(George Ungureanu – Camera zero, Alexandru Bogza Cultural Foundation Publishing House, Cîmpulung Moldovenesc, 2009, pp. 64-67,70)
[1] George Ungureanu was in a dramatic situation at the time. After six years in hiding from the Securitate, five of them in an underground hiding place in his own house, he was suddenly abandoned by his wife and left alone with no income and a small child to look after. In his memoirs, the survivor describes this period: “Night fell on my soul, lightning fell on my house, on the whole family: mother, brothers, sisters, despair and hell followed. The ordeal I had expected to end was now even more terrible; I was like a shipwrecked man struggling among the sharks to reach the shore. (…) Years of the life of a mole, an animal chased day and night, with constant struggles, races and eyes everywhere. When the overloaded chariot of life goes over the edge, it only takes one small mistake to bring it crashing down. The strong bond that bound me to my marriage, I couldn’t believe there was a force in this world that could break it. And… it snapped like a spider’s thread. In despair, I began to put my hope in God. He alone can save me, for from man comes nothing but delusion”. (p. 61 of the same work)
[2] Fr. Daniel was known to be sometimes volcanic, impulsive, cutting. Fr. Adrian Făgețeanu relates that: “many did not love him because he was very demanding, that is, he demanded that everyone be very correct in what he said and thought”. However, “he was most demanding with himself”. This behaviour could raise doubts about the holiness of Fr. Daniil, since holiness is often associated with gentleness, but let us not forget that St. Cyril of Alexandria was also demanding and volcanic, of whom we learn that “his strict monastic training, his irreproachable life and his impulsive temperament led him to intervene in all the great and small problems of the time in his Church and in the Christian Church in general. Like Theophilus, he was bold and tough. His reputation as a man of strong and fearless hands was widely known. His excessive and sometimes unreasonable zeal, and his impulsive and violent temperament, made the Patriarch sometimes forget in his actions the evangelical principles which should govern the policy of a Christian hierarch”.
[3] In the course of his life, before becoming a monk, Fr. Daniil was a sea captain and, during the Second World War, an air captain. After the war he was a publicist and teacher, becoming a very learned and experienced man.
[4] In another testimony by the same author, we learn that after his first visit to the Rarau Hermitage, Fr. Daniil often visited the house. One day, out of curiosity, George Ungureanu asked Fr. Daniil what serious reasons he had for giving up his wealth and honours to become a monk. Father Daniil replied with pleasure: “I had everything in life, I could live alone. As a sailor I sailed all the waters of the world, spending weeks and months in the great ports of the world. Then, as a newspaper editor – I sold a few hundred thousand copies – I bought a plane and one day it broke down and I prayed to God to get out alive. I escaped. And once, in the war, a platoon leader tried to kill me. But I moved my bed that night. That’s how I escaped. (Evocation published in The Burning Bush, edited by Acad. Dr. Antonie Plămădeală, published by Episcopia Sibiului, Sibiu, 2002. p. 106)