Sandu Tudor, the restless confessor of faith. Sandu Tudor seen and told by me, Ileana Mironescu
In the following, I will tell how I met Sandu Tudor, what my relations were with him, what memories I have of him, and of course I will be able to evoke him from my point of view, which may be different from today’s point of view, perhaps even partial and biased, but certainly complementary.
I write this account in the knowledge that great people, and Sandu Tudor was one of them, have experienced ups and downs in their lives, but on an upward path towards their professional, moral or spiritual perfection. Knowing at the same time that there is no man who is not seen by his peers without downfalls, I recall them in the case of Sandu Tudor without any resentment. I do it to remind you that there are ups and downs for everyone on the way to the top.
I met him many years ago, I can say more precisely since my childhood, before the great earthquake of 1940. He used to come to our house in the typical housing estate in the Drumul Sării district, of which my memory preserves bright, even idyllic images from those times. We lived in a small, intimate house, surrounded by trees and small gardens, with civilised neighbours and friends, with extraordinary children, such as the poet and Hellenist Al. Miran or the pianist Doina Soare. This neighbourhood was still marginal and very far from the city centre, not for Sandu Tudor, who came to us in his private car, but for us, and especially for my father. The almost daily journey to the university and the chemistry laboratories was long and took up much of the time he could have spent studying, writing and bringing up his children; public transport in those days was precarious and my father didn’t even have a bicycle. And we moved to the building of the Institute of Chemistry, where the laboratories were located, on Cheiul Dâmboviței, so closer to the university, and which had accommodation for the teachers who did laboratory research there. It was very good for my father, but not so good for me; I was isolated from my friends, I no longer had schoolmates and playmates in the immediate vicinity. So, in order not to be left at home, my parents took me with them on their visits, and so I ended up at Sandu Tudor’s. The visits continued, of course: Sandu Tudor, as before, in his car, and we, my parents and I, by public transport; an arduous journey by tram, by bus to the northern end of the capital, near Cașin monastery, where there was the house where Sandu Tudor and his wife lived in a large apartment.
I can still remember the dissatisfaction I felt at the time because I had to give up my hobbies, playing the piano, reading, meeting and walking with children of my age. This bad mood was perpetuated by the long and tedious journey by tram and bus, and finally, why not say, by the visit itself, during which my father’s conversations with our host or my mother’s with his wife did not appeal to me. On the other hand, I was also obsessed by the image of the car in which Sandu Tudor and his wife, both elegantly dressed like “film stars”, came to visit us, as if on a pleasure trip, unaware, like us, of the vicissitudes of public transport. This ordeal of visiting Sandu Tudor ended, for me of course, with an accident. Here it is! Once, on one of my regular visits to Sandu Tudor’s house, I left the living room where the conversations were taking place and went through an adjoining room into his wife’s bedroom, where a doll I had once seen was sitting on a small table next to a huge mirror that reflected it and made it even more attractive. It was not just any doll, but a mechanical one which, at the touch of a button at its feet, would rotate, then sing a tune and spray a little perfume, unexpectedly! It was admirable! However, I did not enjoy this “toy” for long. No sooner had I pressed the button, I think for the third time, than Sandu Tudor burst into the room, shouting and calling for my father to see his daughter’s superficial preoccupations. On the other hand, in front of those who had come to see what had happened to me, he accused me of not paying the slightest attention to adult discussions, of not reading, not writing, of not doing anything intelligent, of only caring about playing with my doll and female “things”. He concluded by drastically asking his father to stop tolerating situations that were unacceptable for a good education. The indulgent father tried to calm him down, but once he started moralising, Sandu Tudor found it difficult to calm down.
It was not the first time that I was the target of his reproaches, to which I replied without embarrassment, and which he probably did not consider necessary in an educational dialogue. He was often annoying and even obnoxious, reminding me that I did not read “the essential books of humanity”, that I wasted my time going for walks and playing with stupid children, that I wasted the money given to me by my grandparents and did not buy books to stimulate my discernment, etc. I was 9-10 years old at the time and, I admit, I was an ordinary, normally developed child, but for Sandu Tudor I was far below the level of his educational requirements.
This put an end to my participation in my parents’ visits, but not to Sandu Tudor’s scoldings, which continued on other subjects and in other circumstances, rebuking others being his way.
We had moved again. We were already settled in Vasile Lascăr Street and I had my own room, where I put the piano for my daily studies. I would play it for hours, because I wanted to get a conservatory diploma in addition to my baccalaureate. This room overlooked the living room of the apartment, where my father had found a refuge to do his teaching, writing and reading, and the music, even that of my technical exercises on the piano, did not bother him, on the contrary, according to him, it stimulated him to concentrate and work. As a result, the door separating the two rooms remained open most of the time. Everyone in the house got used to the music I played on the piano until the day Sandu Tudor paid us a visit that changed everything. I was playing Chopin’s ‘Etude op. 10 in C minor” on the piano, and they were talking in the drawing room, and suddenly Sandu Tudor appeared at the door of my room and asked me sharply that I could find nothing more inappropriate to study than this music of an unstable individual who heard nothing but funeral melodies, parades of the dead and ghosts, and the music he composed was a music of despair and disintegration of the soul. I stopped singing in awe. I thought he was delirious. Hadn’t he, Sandu Tudor, spoken some time ago of the poetry of Chopin’s music, of his melodic genius? Hadn’t he, Sandu Tudor, accompanied my father to public concerts? Hadn’t he, Sandu Tudor, gone to listen to music at record auditions at the house of the famous Mr Apostol? And hadn’t he himself built up a collection of classical music records, including Chopin interpreted by Alfred Cortot?
What was I supposed to understand? Had he radically changed his musical preferences because he had become a monk? Yes and no. His manner remained the same, he was the same aggressive interlocutor. Yes, something had indeed changed. He now had other musical preferences, namely Byzantine liturgical music. Perhaps because he had been influenced by Father I.D. Petrescu, a renowned Byzantinologist, and the composer Paul Constantinescu, his friend? I found the right and true answer much later; I will come back and explain. In any case, Sandu Tudor’s entry into the monastic circle was also marked by the dissolution of his record collection and his rich and valuable library, either by donation or by sale. He gave me, of course, books of musical analysis and biographies of famous composers of his choice. The books in his former library were also distinguished by the fact that they were bound in grey cloth with a blue label on the spine and their titles written in gold letters.
And now let me come back to his way of looking for reasons for indignation and expressing them in a violent way, without mincing words and regardless of the circumstances. Two situations, or, if you like, two events, come to my mind, which took place in the same period, around 1950, when Sandu Tudor was arrested and deported to the site of the “Danube-Black Sea Canal”, a site for the extermination of political prisoners, during the reign of Gh. Gheorghiu-Dej.
We were in the same room: me at the piano, my father at the desk, writing and smoking his pipe as usual, and my mother in the armchair, leafing through a magazine. The doorbell rang and suddenly Sandu Tudor appeared. He had just entered the house and, smelling the tobacco smoke, without greeting me at the entrance, he began to make a monstrous fuss at my father, telling him that he who puffed on a pipe and pretended to read or write, like the so-called left-wing intellectuals of the West, could not be a true example of a Christian and a teacher. And many other serious reproaches, made in a raised voice, which put all of us in the house in a black mood.
Not even my mother, who was always careful not to make a mistake and upset the guests, escaped being rebuked in an irritated tone by Sandu Tudor, which, as in the previous case, happened in my presence. If there were other conflictual situations, I suppose there were, but my parents and Șerban, my brother, were discreet. So here is the second incident. My parents were getting ready to go to a theatre performance; they were hesitant, unsure how to dress, because they had tickets in a central box as guests of the director, and on the other hand it was autumn weather. As usual, Sandu Tudor appeared unexpectedly and stood in the doorway, looking at my parents for a long, searching moment. When he found out that they were going to a theatrical premiere, he continued to question them and make observations: why they were going to a boulevardier play, why Maria, my mother, was wearing an inappropriate dress (my mother did not have a “deux pieces”, as he claimed), why my father and mother had also forgotten that tabloid journalists would be present at the performance and that the presence of Prof. Univ. Al. Mironescu and his wife at a “lewd” show, etc. The whole conversation ended in mum being left in tears and the show and evening to be missed.
It is true that he, Sandu Tudor, paid excessive attention to his clothes, both for others and for himself; even as a monk, his habit, specially made for him, was impeccable, always ironed, clean and lightly perfumed, and finished with a wide belt to which he attached an artistically worked pafta. He insisted, not only by example, that a monk should be as respectable as a clergyman in his outward appearance, both hygienically and aesthetically. To return to his tendency to offend, this remained a constant feature of his behaviour, even during his years in prison and after his arrest in 1958. The sociologist Ernest Bernea, who met him, I think, in Aiud prison, wrote about it. He was incorrigible and it is understandable that all three women he married left him.
What was the “driving force” behind this behaviour is a question I asked myself many years ago. Did he have a superiority complex and see himself as personally flawless? Did he have an overdeveloped sense of observation that put him in the position of a moralist who wanted to correct his neighbour’s mistakes? Did he feel powerless to look with compassion and patiently help his fellow man to make amends? Or perhaps he was troubled in his heart by too many thoughts, too many aspirations, and the world outside of him dispersed his attention and strength, and he unburdened himself emotionally without judging, without weighing his words! He was certainly a perpetual worrier, outwardly choleric, but in everything he said and even in what he did there was no trace of malice and he held no grudge.
In connection with the above, I would like to make one final remark, namely that he was a man without pride in speech or dress. His experiences in life, including that of being on the verge of death, did not give him the feeling of being an exceptional man, nor did they give him the air of a happy man who had everything going for him. On the contrary, they deepened his Christian faith and humility, which are more clearly expressed in his writings, and at the same time strengthened his resolve to consecrate himself to the service of God by entering monastic life. An extract from a gloss in the “Akathist of St. Dimitrios the New” expresses his humility before the Lord and his sincere faith in an apt way. Here it is:
“Their troubled minds did not properly understand that my miracle had its meaning beyond me.”
However, there was an invisible and inexplicable barrier that prevented me from becoming as attached to him as I was to the gentle monks of “Antim”, Father Benedict and Father Sofian.
Raised by my parents and by my confessor, Father Benedict Ghiuș, I knew that the Christian way of life is expressed not only by the way we speak, but above all by the way we live, by taking Christian demands seriously and making them the basis of our daily feelings and actions.
And I believe that for a true Christian, and especially for a monk, life is a daily practice of the rules of living together and of living in the Christian spirit, and not a speech that could seem demagogic if it is not supported by facts. I do not judge him, and what I am doing now, writing these lines, is not a judgement, but a juxtaposition of his way of being, behaving and reacting with my way of seeing, thinking and accepting or rejecting.
Once I judged him harshly, and with a pained voice I told everyone I knew that Sandu Tudor was guilty of the failure of my brother Șerban’s life. This happened after my father, my brother and Sandu Tudor were arrested and sentenced to many years in prison in 1958. At that time, Șerban was 23 years old, about to graduate from university, and had announced his intention to marry the daughter of a very good friend of our family. All this was ruined by Sandu Tudor’s unannounced visit to our house, which was closely monitored by Securitate and police authorities.
Sandu Tudor was appreciated by our friends not only as a journalist or as a great and courageous man who had dedicated himself to monastic life, but also for his talent as a poet. His verses in the volume Comornic, as well as the unpublished ones that circulated in typed copies on sheets of plain paper, were well known and some were even known by heart. I remember the performance of my friend Claudia Dumitriu, daughter of the professor of mathematical logic at the University of Bucharest, a performance of memorisation, because she could recite dozens of poems by heart. Unfortunately, I had an attitude of rejection towards everything Sandu Tudor did, and therefore towards his poetic creation, and I had an exclusive preference for Arghezi, Blaga and Voiculescu, of whom I knew countless verses by heart, which I recited to friends and by which I demonstrated my independence of artistic judgement.
Nevertheless, I appreciated his poetry, and “Hymn-Akathist to the Burning Bush of Our Lady” was and remains for me a masterpiece, often read and reread, which was not absent from the few things I packed in my suitcase when I left for Switzerland in 1980. Moreover, during a visit there to an old acquaintance of my husband, Dr Ana-Maria Marin, my reading of this Akathist aroused such enthusiasm that I was asked to send a photocopy of my copy to be printed. This was done and in 1983 it appeared in the “Citadel” collection in Madrid, unfortunately with many misprints. It was the first version of the “Hymn-Akathist”, written in 1947 at Antim Monastery in Bucharest.
The story of Sandu Tudor’s poetic work does not end here. He continued to write as a monk, first under the name Agaton, then Daniil. In the monastery he always carried a notebook and a pencil, as well as a church book, in a bag slung over his shoulder, similar to those worn by Christmas carolers in Bukovina. A verse, a thought, a prayer, anything that came to mind that he felt was important to write down, no matter where he was, he would take out his notebook and pencil and write. Whatever he wrote that ended up as a poem, a prayer or a meditation, he would rewrite and when he “came down” from the monastery to Bucharest on monastic business and under the impulse to communicate with his old friends, he would give them these to read and even keep some of them. My father had such unpublished poems and prayers brought to him by Sandu Tudor. I suppose that he also left the texts of his creations, conceived in the silence and memory of the monasteries where he served, to other old friends he visited, such as Father Benedict Ghiuș, Paul Sterian, Anton Dumitriu, Zaharia Stancu. On the occasion of Securitate raid on our house on 13-14 June 1958, all my father’s manuscripts, both his personal ones and those he had received as gifts from V. Voiculescu, P. Sterian, Sandu Tudor, etc., were confiscated on the grounds that they contained and concealed evidence of the crime of “conspiracy against the democratic state”. Much later, and only partially, they were returned to us. Thus, after his release from prison, my father could no longer find his diaries with daily notes from the period before his arrest, which referred to the entire history of the “Burning Bush” cenacle in “Antim Ivireanu” monastery, nor the handwritten poems he had by Sandu Tudor and so on.
In 1956, at the suggestion of Sandu Tudor and with the agreement of Fr. Ghiuș, my father urged me to go and live for 2-3 weeks with the nuns in a convent in Moldavia, to get to know their way of life, the rigours of monasticism and, above all, to understand how to pray. As Sandu Tudor said on that occasion in his caustic way, I had to understand that the gestures, the kneeling, the prostrations in church can usually hide an emptiness of soul, even a pretended religious behaviour. This ritual, which shows respect for the place of worship, does not express true adherence to the faith and cannot replace prayer, which takes place in the heart and becomes an intimate bridge to God. Thus prepared, I understood mystical things in the monastery, including the meaning of the speech Sandu Tudor had given years ago about his preference for liturgical music. If I once saw an ambiguity in it, or even a superficial opinion, sitting with the nuns, I agreed with him; I felt in the liturgical song a liberation of my heart, of my mind, from any burden, an increased life in prayer. I listened to the whispered murmur of voices, which was music that came from the heart and addressed the heart, like a prayer, purified of all earthly thoughts, of all cheap sentimentality. At the same time, as a musician, I realised that in music, where there are not only steps of musical technique, but also much more important steps of expression, tending towards the subtle and the sublime, liturgical singing occupies a leading position. With the passage of time, I have come to see Sandu Tudor differently, in all his complexity, as a restless man for his fellow men, an inspired creator and seeker of the hesychia.
His personal example showed that in a world sick with ideologies and prey to hatred and fratricidal conflicts, salvation can only come from the Lord.
In February 1963, my brother Șerban was unexpectedly released from prison. At home, greeted with joy, his first words were the news about my father and Father Daniil (as he called Sandu Tudor); my father was alive, but Father Daniil had died of a stroke in 1962. Asked, sometimes by my mother, sometimes by me, if he had not received medical care, if he had not had someone at his side in his moments of agony, if a priest from among the prisoners had not accompanied him to his obsequious end, if he had not found out where he was buried, Șerban did not know more than that, because news, he said, circulated slowly in the prison, whispered from one prisoner to another. He didn’t know exactly when he had died or under what circumstances the stroke had occurred. All of us, including him, were deeply disturbed by this inhuman and un-Christian end of Father Daniil, and the outrage against those who had disregarded and mistreated him made me scream and cry. I wept with sobs at the pain of his loss; by losing him to persecution for his Christian faith, an authentic confessor of the Orthodox faith had disappeared from among us, and I had lost an incomparable spiritual leader who, under the appearance of necessity, even severity, vibrated with special affection for his fellow men.
(Ileana Mironescu – Around Alexandru Mironescu, edited by Fr. Benedict Vesa, Renașterea Publishing House, Cluj-Napoca, 2015, pp. 85-102 apud Tabor Magazine, no. 8, year VIII, August 2014)