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Oroftiana, the Spruce Forest — Waiting as a Form of Love

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I am sitting in the cinema and thinking that there are places which have no need of publicity. Oroftiana, the Spruce Forest — Waiting as a Form of LovePlaces that breathe within their own silence, indifferent to the fact that no one comes to photograph them or transform them into weekend destinations. Tudor Giurgiu has just finished the film. The Spruce Forest — that simple, almost banal title, which conceals something you do not know how to name: a particular density, a humidity of the air that enters the lungs and stays there, like a thought you return to without meaning to. The director is now in dialogue with the audience. He answers with that apparent ease of people who have thought deeply before speaking — and I listen to him and think about the way some people seem already to have digested what others are only just beginning to feel.

…the identity of a village was built around a person or a family who had lived there and left something behind — not necessarily monuments, not necessarily documents, but a diffuse presence, a trace in the air.

The Holy Fathers would have said that there is a work of the heart that precedes the word. That before one can speak rightly about something, one must have passed through it with the heart, not merely with the mind. Saint Isaac the Syrian, in his Words on the Ascetic Life, writes that one who has not wept does not know what joy is — that these are not opposites, but steps, one after the other, one through the other. Giurgiu's film has brought me, without my knowing it, to one such step.

And so I say, without thinking too hard about it, that our county too has a spruce forest. At Oroftiana. I say this and immediately feel how something shifts in the auditorium — a silence that is not indifference, but rather a pause, a brief stillness in people who hear a word they are not sure whether they have heard before or only dreamt. Oroftiana. A name with a particular weight, with those long syllables that sound of another era, another world — a world in which places had owners with names, in which the nobility left their mark on toponymy, in which the identity of a village was built around a person or a family who had lived there and left something behind — not necessarily monuments, not necessarily documents, but a diffuse presence, a trace in the air.

I recommend that they visit those places. I hear my own voice saying this and recognise in it something of the impulse about which Abba Dorotheos wrote when he spoke of the benefit of one's neighbour — not from abstract duty, not from rule, but from that natural movement of a person who has received something and cannot hold it back, who passes it on because he has understood that fully receiving a gift means giving it on in turn.

The Ascent and the Silence Required

I set off in my mind — my eyes may close, or perhaps I am simply looking somewhere beyond the cinema — towards Oroftiana. Towards that village on the frontier, on the eastern edge of this country, where Romania thins, becomes almost membranous beside what lies beyond. Ukraine is there, a few kilometres away, not as a geographical abstraction but as a concrete presence, as an echo, as a brother you have not seen in a long time and do not know what has happened to him, and cannot ask too directly.

I choose to make a stop at Dealul Doamnei — the Lady's Hill. I do not always know why I choose this — that road uphill, on the slope that makes the lungs work a little, and the cherry tree standing there like a landmark, a witness, something that has decided to remain and does remain, regardless of how many seasons pass. It has told me, so many times, to ascend in silence. Not literally — cherry trees do not speak in the way we do, with articulated sounds and clear intentions — but there is a language of presence, a language of old trees that have seen enough and that, if you give them your attention, transmit something.

This silence is not empty. The Orthodox tradition calls it hesychia — and it is not the simple absence of noise, not indifference, not spiritual drowsiness. Saint Gregory Palamas explains in his Triads that hesychia is an active state, a kind of interior wakefulness in which the senses are not abolished but gathered, concentrated, turned inward without losing contact with the world. Ascending the Lady's Hill in silence, I am performing — without knowing precisely what I am performing — an exercise in recollection, in drawing back scattered attention from too many directions towards a single point: my steps, the slope, the cherry tree, the air.

My father — the mechanic, the man with hands black with grease and with a silence that was worth ten other men's words — climbed hills in just this way. Without commenting, without explaining, without philosophising at the roadside. He walked, and that was all. I understood only after his death that that silence was not the absence of thought, but a form of prayer that he did not call prayer, because he felt no need to put labels on things that seemed natural to him. The prayer of the mind, as the Philokalic Fathers call it — that ceaseless, silent work which has no need of articulated words to be real.

Whispers among leaves. Sighs — or perhaps it is the wind, perhaps only the wind, but at the Lady's Hill the wind sounds different. It sounds like someone who has forgotten to leave.

The Lady and Waiting as a Form of Love

The Lady — the wife of the boyar [translator's note: a member of the Romanian nobility] Oroftianu — is still there. Not in the literal sense, of course, but legends are not literal and yet they are true in their way more profoundly than facts. The husband left for battle. The woman remained. She climbed every evening — or perhaps not every evening, perhaps sometimes she could not, perhaps sometimes the pain was too great to climb and look — up the hill that faced the road on which he had left and the water that marked the line beyond which his world had disappeared.

Holy Scripture is full of waitings of this kind. The woman who searches for the lost coin. The father who stands watching the road in the parable of the prodigal son. Waiting, in the Orthodox tradition, is not passivity — it is an active form of love, a form of fidelity towards someone who is no longer physically present but who continues to exist in the heart of the one who carries him. Love suffereth long, writes the Apostle Paul — and that long does not mean a week or a year; it means as long as is necessary, without setting a limit, without negotiating with one's own suffering.

The Lady of the hill loved with a love of this kind. Or at least the legend says she loved. And even if the legend is a construction, even if the details have been added over time, the essence that has survived in the memory of the local people says something about what a community values, about what it chooses to preserve. A community that preserves the legend of a woman who waited has decided, collectively and unconsciously, that fidelity and love are worth remembering.

From up there, the road on which he left is visible. From up there, the Prut is visible.

The Prut, seen from above, from the Lady's Hill, does not look like a border. It looks like a vein, like a lifeline on the palm of a sleeping giant, like something organic and necessary. I watch — in my mind, in this inner journey I have embarked upon with my eyes closed in the cinema — how that water holds the body of Romania in a close embrace.

Saint Maximus the Confessor writes in the Ambigua of the logos of each created thing — that interior reason, that divine intention which every creature carries within itself as a seal, as a trace of the Logos through which all things were made. The Prut has its logos. The earth at Oroftiana has its logos. These are not mere geographical accidents, not mere configurations of matter — they are places through which, if you are attentive, you can read something of the intention with which the world was conceived. This reading is not pantheism, not a confusion of the Creator with the creature — it is that natural theoria of which the Fathers speak, that contemplation of the divine reasons inscribed in the world, which does not stop at the phenomenon but passes through it towards the One who created it.

— It is time to leave! the cherry tree commands me — or something inside me, something that has understood that there is a limit to how long you can stand in a place of another's grief without becoming an intruder.

I leave slowly. I do not dare breathe too deeply.

Children at Break and the Iconography of Simple Life

I pass by the school and something happens that I did not expect to feel with such intensity: joy. Not a contemplative or melancholy joy, but a direct, immediate, almost physical joy — the children at break, that particular noise of a school yard which is the same regardless of village or city, that noise which is simply life at its fullest speed, unfiltered, uninterrupted by any reflection.

There are many of them, cheerful, lovely. This thought comes to me simply and directly, without irony, without reservation. And I think of my son — at that age when I could watch him from a distance as he played, and he did not know I was watching, and in his unknowing he was complete, he was exactly what he needed to be, and I felt something I can only call gratitude, a kind of contentment that was addressed to no one in particular or perhaps to everyone at once.

The Philokalic tradition speaks of spiritual joy as a gift of the Spirit, not as a state produced by favourable circumstances. Saint Seraphim of Sarov — with his Christ is Risen, my joy! addressed to every person who crossed his threshold, regardless of the season, regardless of the day — lived precisely this state: a joy that does not depend on externals, that wells up from within, that is present in suffering and in solitude and in want because its source lies beyond all circumstance. I have not reached this stage and I do not claim to have reached it. But before those children running in the yard of the school at Oroftiana, I felt an echo of it — something that resembled, from a great distance, what Saint Seraphim called joy.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Children are pure in heart not because they are saints, not because they do not err — but because they have not yet accumulated the layers of defensiveness, calculation, and mistrust that adults build over time across their hearts. They live directly. They exist in the present naturally, without effort, without discipline — and this direct presence is, in the logic of the Gospel, closer to the Kingdom than any elaborate philosophy.

I stop, rooted to the spot, before the yard. My feet stop of their own accord. And in that stopping there is also shame — shame for everything I have needlessly complicated, for all the years in which I believed that depth meant complexity, that thinking meant adding layers rather than removing them.

The Cross, the Hermitage and the Memory of Sanctified Suffering

I stop, rooted to the spot, before the Cross. The word 'rooted' is not metaphorical — there is a physical arrest, a rigidity that comes from within, something that fixes itself and cannot be continued until it is acknowledged. My father made the sign of the cross before every cross he passed. Not from superstition, not from the automatism of fear — but from a deep reflex of recognition, of solidarity with those who had lived and suffered before him. I inherit this gesture, more hesitantly, more intellectualised, but I inherit it.

The cross and the hermitage behind it are not decorative. They are there because something happened, because pain demanded a material form, because people need — and this need is theological, not merely psychological — to place crosses and stones and candles in places where suffering has reached a certain intensity.

'Frunza' [translator's note: literally 'The Leaf'; the local name for a place associated with a massacre] — that place, the lamentations of suffering deposited in collective memory. The wind's keening through the leaves of the forest.

The Orthodox tradition does not avoid suffering. It does not transform it into abstraction, does not spiritualise it from a distance, does not reduce it to a moral lesson. The Cross — the Cross at its centre, the cross on which Christ died — is present in every smaller cross, in every sign raised at a roadside or on a hill that marks a place of death. Saint John Chrysostom says that where there is innocent suffering, there is something of Christ — not metaphorically, not figuratively, but in reality, because He took upon Himself all suffering, not suffering in the abstract, but this one and that one and the other, each with its name, each with its precise geographical location.

The hermitage beside the cross is the community's response to suffering. It is not a response that explains or justifies — it is a response that sanctifies. That says: this place is holy because suffering took place here, because blood and tears have hallowed the earth, and we choose not to forget and not to allow forgetting to transform holiness into absence. The lamentations of the suffering at 'Frunza' are recalled by the wind's keening through the leaves — and that hermitage keens too, in its manner of stone and prayer, and its keening is more enduring than anything.

Pain. I must leave.

The Stuhoasa Forest and the Catharsis of Steps

I walk through the beautiful Stuhoasa Forest and something within me loosens at the first steps among the trees. The forest is not a metaphor and I have no need to make it one — it is a real forest, with real trees, with the smell of resin and moisture and earth that breathes. But in the hesychast tradition, walking on foot through solitary places is never merely physical walking. It is a practice, a discipline of the body accompanying the discipline of the soul, because in the Orthodox understanding — unlike the dualisms that separate body from soul — the person is a unity, and what the body does affects the soul and vice versa.

Saint John Climacus, in The Ladder of Divine Ascent, speaks of compunction — that penthos which is a state of interior softening, a melting of the crust we form as a defence and which, in the end, isolates us from ourselves and from God. Compunction is not pathological sadness, not self-destruction — it is rather a salutary softening, like earth that softens in the rain after a period of drought and becomes again receptive, again fertile. Walking through the Stuhoasa, after the cross and the hermitage, is a form of compunction that I could not have brought about at a desk or in traffic.

I walk. The trees stand. Light falls through the canopy in unpredictable ways — and 'unpredictable' is the right word, because however many times you have passed through a forest, the light the second time is different light, the configuration of shadows is different, the trees have shifted a little, the wind has changed something. You cannot step into the same forest twice — or perhaps you can, but the forest is not the same, you are not the same, and the encounter is always new.

Heraclitus and Saint Gregory of Nyssa, each in his own way, spoke of this law of ceaseless movement — epektasis, in Gregory's term: that continual reaching forward, that unceasing impulse towards God which characterises the healthy spiritual life. You do not stop. You do not arrive and settle in. You walk, and walk, and walk further, because the destination is infinite and drawing near to it does not exhaust it but deepens it. The Stuhoasa teaches me this lesson without knowing it is doing so.

The Church at Hilișeu-Crișan — The Love That Remains

At Hilișeu-Crișan, there is a church built out of love. I go inside and stand for a few minutes without my phone, with nothing but my own presence there and the light coming through the windows and that particular smell of a liturgical space — wax, incense, old wood, air that has prayed — a smell you recognise immediately and which does something to you at a pre-reflexive level, before the mind has time to catalogue it.

The couple who founded this church chose to love in a concrete, material, enduring way. Not in the grandiose sense of a gesture of pride dressed up as piety — but in the sense of that philanthropy of which the Fathers speak, of the love that transforms itself into deed, that descends from interior feeling into the tangible reality of the world. Saint John Chrysostom, who was perhaps the most exacting of all the Fathers towards love that remains merely declarative, would have recognised in the foundation at Hilișeu-Crișan an authentic work — because it was built for others, not for oneself, or for oneself through others, which is an entirely different thing.

There is a profound difference between the types of love I have encountered on this journey. On the Lady's Hill, love is suspended, it is a waiting frozen in time, it is beautiful and heart-rending, and it is a love that could not be fulfilled, that remained somewhere between promise and silence — and in this there is a particular holiness, the holiness of the unfinished thing, of the interrupted gesture that continues to vibrate. At Hilișeu-Crișan, love has materialised into something concrete, into stone and wood and painting, into a space where other people can come and stand and feel something.

Both are paths towards the same God. Saint Maximus the Confessor — who never tired of demonstrating that all converging paths meet in the Logos — would have seen in the Lady who waited on the hill and in the founders who built the church not contradictions, but complementarities: two ways in which the same love manifests itself under different conditions, through different temperaments, through different circumstances. The love that waits and the love that builds are expressions of the same fire, of the same fundamental movement towards the other.

There are no whispers there. They are still holding hands, eternally in love. Love never faileth, writes the Apostle — and it does not fail because it carries within it something of eternity, something that exceeds the temporal conditions in which it appears and which, once given, remains given, remains true, remains there even when the two have become dust and memory.

The Return — A Blink and the Reading of the World

— I should like an autograph, please!

The voice brings me sharply back. I open my eyes. Or perhaps my eyes were never closed, and that journey unfolded in parallel, on that inner screen we run continuously without realising it. Ana — or whoever the person requesting the autograph might be — has broken something, has interrupted a continuity, has pulled a thread that has brought me back to the cinema, to my seat, to my body with its concrete weight.

I am back in the cinema auditorium. I have only blinked.

That blink says everything. It says that the boundary between the places you have lived and the places you live in your mind is infinitely thin. The hesychast Fathers would say that there is no boundary at all — that the outer world and the inner world are not two separate territories with a wall between them, but two modes of perceiving the same continuum. The Kingdom of God is within you, says Christ — and this means, among other things, that the deepest reality is neither outside nor strictly inside, but at their intersection, in that dynamic place where subject and world meet and transform each other.

Oroftiana is not a few dozen kilometres away. It is a blink away, it is there, available, waiting to be visited in both senses of the word: with feet on the road and with the heart open in silence.

Why the Places No One Knows Still Matter

There is an ecology of places. Not in the strictly biological sense, although that sense exists too — but in the cultural sense, in the spiritual sense, in the sense that the Fathers called the holiness of place. Every place in which someone has prayed, in which something authentic has been suffered, in which love has truly been given, in which something has been built out of love — each such place carries a trace of these works, an invisible but real imprint.

The Orthodox tradition takes the geography of holiness very seriously. Places of pilgrimage, relics, icons — all of these say that matter is not indifferent to what occurs within it and through it, that the earth on which a saint has walked or on which innocent blood has been shed or on which a cross has been raised is different from indifferent earth. Saint Symeon the New Theologian speaks of the uncreated grace that pours into the world and leaves traces visible to those with pure eyes — and although he spoke primarily of the bodies of saints and of the Holy Sacraments, the principle extends: grace does not leave the world unchanged; grace sanctifies matter.

Oroftiana is a place that has carried grace. It has carried the love of the Lady who waited, it has carried the suffering of those at Frunza, it has carried the silence of the Stuhoasa, it has carried the founder's love from Hilișeu-Crișan. This place has an accumulated soul, a spiritual memory that you cannot read from any geography book or local history, that you can read only by going there and staying and listening with what the Fathers call aisthesis pneumatike — the spiritual sense, that interior faculty which perceives what the bodily senses cannot perceive and which Saint Macarius the Great describes as a seeing of the heart.

A Letter to My Son

To my son, who may read these lines when he is older, when he has been through things I cannot imagine now, when he has acquired his own scars and his own knowledge and perhaps a wisdom I do not possess and of which, honestly, I am in need: there are places in the county where we were both born that are worth knowing. Not because they are spectacular in the sense in which we understand spectacle today. But because within them something has been deposited from the lives of people who lived before us — love, suffering, prayer, waiting, building. Everything a person has ever done with the heart.

Your grandfather — the mechanic, the man you did not know well enough, because he left when you were too young to remember — would have climbed the Lady's Hill in silence. He would not have commented on the landscape, would not have philosophised, would not have said anything remarkable. He would have stood there for a few minutes, made the sign of the cross before the cross, looked at the Prut, and left. And in that silence there would have been more than in any article I can write.

Go to Oroftiana. Climb the Lady's Hill in silence — not the strategic silence of a man who wants to observe something, but the silence of one who accepts being observed, being read by that place, being seen by the hill and the cherry tree and the wind that knows more things than we do. Stand before the cross. Walk through the Stuhoasa at a steady pace, without a fitness app, without earphones. Go into the church at Hilișeu-Crișan and stand inside for five minutes and let that smell of wax and incense do what it knows how to do.

And if you feel something — it does not matter what, it need not be defining or transformative — if you feel anything at all that cannot be posted or explained or turned into content, anything that exists only within you and for you and asks no confirmation from outside, then you have received what those places had to give. You will have entered, without knowing it, into what Saint Isaac the Syrian called spiritual knowledge — not information, not erudition, but that science of the heart which comes from the direct experience of deep things.

Epilogue: The Spruce Forest and the Logos of Place

At the end, I return to the title of Tudor Giurgiu's film. The Spruce Forest as a metaphor for a place of memory, of emotional density, of air that enters the lungs and stays there. Every region has its spruce forest. Every county has its places in which something older and heavier than the present day has been deposited — something that resists forgetting not through its own force, but because it has been sanctified, because it has carried within it love or suffering or prayer, because it has been the place in which one person or many people lived with all the intensity of which they were capable.

Saint Maximus the Confessor — to whom I always return, because his thinking has a structure that encompasses everything without reducing anything — says that the divine Logos is present in the logoi of all things and that to truly contemplate a thing means to pass through it towards its logos, to hear in the concrete reality of a hill or a river or a tree the invisible signature of the One who conceived and created it. This does not transform the hill or the river or the tree into objects of cult — it leaves them what they are, respects their own reality — but it adds a dimension of depth that cannot be extracted by any exclusively material analysis.

Botoșani [translator's note: the county in north-eastern Romania to which the author belongs] has Oroftiana.

It has the Lady's Hill and the cherry tree that stands there for several centuries, full of patience, transmitting its simple message: ascend in silence.

It has the Prut seen from above, embracing the body of a country with the patience of water that knows borders are provisional and that it will continue to flow long after all the maps have been redrawn.

It has the children in the school yard, pure in heart in the sense of the Beatitudes, unknowing of how much grace lies in the earth beneath their feet.

It has a cross and a hermitage and the keening of the wind through the leaves — and in that keening, for those who have ears to hear, there is something of the good grief of which the Fathers speak, that sorrow which does not destroy but purifies, that penthos which is the gate to joy.

It has the Stuhoasa and its active silence, hesychast without knowing it, healing simply by the fact that it exists and that you can walk through it at your own pace.

It has a church built out of love, where a couple holds hands in eternity, with that love which never faileth because it carries within it a spark of the Love that created the world.

I am back in the cinema auditorium. The director is answering another question. Life around me continues at its normal speed. But for a few minutes — or perhaps longer, I do not know how long that blink lasted — I was there, in those places, and I have carried them back with me.

That is how thin the boundary is between this world and that deeper world within it.

That thin.

And that real.

Ten Questions

Things to bear in mind about Oroftiana, the Lady's Hill, and the world beyond the Prut.

With answers for those who wish to understand, not merely to know.

What is hesychia and why does it matter when you climb a hill on the frontier with Ukraine?

A long answer, because the short question deceives — it makes it seem as though we are dealing with a dictionary definition, when in fact we are dealing with an experience you either have or do not have, and if you have it, you understand retroactively what the word means, and if you do not, no definition can fully replace it.

Hesychia — from the Greek ἡσυχία, silence, peace, rest — is not the absence of noise. That is the first and most important correction the Philokalic tradition makes to anyone who comes with the impression that hesychia means keeping quiet and sitting still. Saint Gregory Palamas, in his Triads in Defence of the Hesychasts, explains that hesychia is an active state of the whole being — a gathering of the powers of soul and body into a single point of attention, a turning inward that does not cancel the external world but traverses it differently. It is the difference between looking at a landscape as a tourist and being present in the landscape as part of it — and that difference is not poetic, it is ontological.

When you climb the Lady's Hill and the cherry tree tells you to ascend in silence — or when something within you tells you, because in fact it does not matter where the command comes from, what matters is that you hear it — you are not being asked to block your thoughts. You are being asked no longer to chase them blindly, no longer to be dragged in all directions by them, to remain where you are with all that you are. That is hesychia. It is a simple thing and extraordinarily difficult at the same time, and I manage it only in brief, fleeting moments that catch me by surprise and disappear before I can hold on to them.

How does Saint Maximus the Confessor explain why a geographical place can be more than a coordinate on a map?

Saint Maximus the Confessor — a seventh-century theologian, a martyr, one of the most systematic thinkers that Eastern Christianity has produced, a man who preferred to have his tongue and right hand cut off rather than sign a theological formula he considered erroneous, which tells you something about the kind of people this tradition sometimes produces — developed in the Ambigua and in the Questions to Thalassius the concept of the logos of created things.

The idea, stated as simply as possible: every created thing — every flower, every mountain, every river, every person — carries within it a logos, an interior reason, a specific divine intention. These logoi are not arbitrary symbols that we project onto things — they are inscribed in the structure of reality by the Logos through which all things were made, as the prologue to the Gospel of John tells us. To truly contemplate a created thing — what Maximus calls natural theoria, the contemplation of nature — means to pass through its surface towards its interior reason, towards the intention with which it was conceived.

The Prut seen from the Lady's Hill has its logos. The earth at Oroftiana has its logos — and to this logos are added the layers of love and suffering and prayer of the people who have lived there, because matter is not indifferent to what occurs within it and through it. This is not pantheism. It is something more precise and more challenging than pantheism.

What is compunction and how does it relate to walking through a forest after standing before a cross?

Compunction — penthos in Greek, compunctio in Latin — is one of those words that the Orthodox tradition uses for things which contemporary culture has entirely lost from its vocabulary and, consequently, from its experience. Saint John Climacus devotes an entire rung to it in The Ladder of Divine Ascent — the seventh rung, if I remember rightly — and describes it as a state of salutary softening of the heart, a melting of the layers of defensiveness and indifference we accumulate over time.

It is not pathological sadness. It is not depression rebranded spiritually. It is rather what happens when the frost gives way — it is the earth that softens after a long winter and becomes again receptive, again capable of receiving seed. You can arrive at compunction through prayer, through fasting, through liturgical music, through reading certain texts — and, I now believe, through certain places and certain experiences, if you are present within them with all you have.

Standing before the cross at Oroftiana, with the memory of Frunza and the keening of the wind, produced in me something I would not have called compunction in that moment — I would simply have called it emotion, or sadness, or heaviness. But walking through the Stuhoasa immediately afterwards worked as a decompression, as a allowing of that softened state to be distributed through the whole body through movement, through breathing, through the contact of feet with the earth. The body knows things that the mind theorises with a delay.

What does Saint Isaac the Syrian say about the relationship between weeping and joy, and how does this relate to the children running in the yard a few metres from a place of suffering?

Saint Isaac the Syrian — a seventh-century Syrian monk, briefly a bishop, author of Words on the Ascetic Life which are among the most cited texts in Philokalic literature — has a theology of tears that seems to me one of the most counter-intuitive and truest things I have ever read. He says, in essence, that one who has not truly wept does not know what joy is. Not as an arbitrary rule, not as a punishment for those who have not suffered enough — but as an observation about the structure of human experience: that authentic, deep, enduring joy is accessible only to those who have passed through the upper layers of superficial happiness and arrived at something lower and more stable.

The joy of the children running in the school yard at Oroftiana, a few metres from a cross and from the memory of suffering, is not contradictory to the nearby suffering — it is complementary. It is exactly what Isaac says: that these things do not exclude each other, but condition each other. That that place can contain simultaneously the cross and the school yard, the keening and the laughter, the memory of death and the energy of life — and that this coexistence is not a geographical accident but something deeper, something that says that life is greater than either of its extremes.

What does it mean that a church is built out of love rather than out of obligation — and what difference does that make, theologically speaking?

Saint John Chrysostom — whom the Fathers call Chrysostom, Golden Mouth, with a directness and a love blended together that seem to me perfectly calibrated — was perhaps the most exacting of all the Fathers towards the discrepancy between the declaration of love and its practice. His homilies on wealth and poverty, on foundations raised out of vanity whilst people are dying of hunger in the street, are uncomfortable texts that the Church reads liturgically and that few fully internalise.

But Chrysostom also makes the distinction — and the distinction matters — between building out of pride dressed as piety and building out of authentic love. The first is recognisable because it places the founder's name in the foreground and God in the background, because it is more interested in its own visibility than in the function it fulfils. The second is recognisable by precisely the opposite: by discretion, by orientation towards the other, by the fact that what is built is a space for others to encounter God, not a monument to oneself.

The couple from Hilișeu-Crișan — and I do not know all the details of their story, and perhaps it is better that I do not — built a church. That they built it out of love I deduce from the way it survives in the memory of the place, from the absence of grandeur, from the manner in which you are received there, from that feeling that the place was designed for others, not for oneself. Perhaps I am wrong. But if I am wrong, I am wrong in the right direction.

What is spiritual knowledge in Saint Isaac the Syrian and how does it differ from intellectual knowledge?

Saint Isaac makes a clear distinction, taken up by the entire Philokalic tradition after him, between natural knowledge — that which we acquire through the senses and through reasoning, through observation and analysis — and spiritual knowledge, which he sometimes also calls knowledge of the heart or spiritual vision. It is not a distinction that annuls the first in favour of the second — Isaac was not an anti-intellectual mystic; he was a man of extraordinary intellectual acuity — but a distinction about levels of depth and about the instruments appropriate to each.

Intellectual knowledge is the correct instrument for mathematics, for physics, for logic, for textual analysis. It is the wrong instrument — or an insufficient one — for the knowledge of persons, for the understanding of suffering, for access to the deep meanings of existence. There aisthesis pneumatike comes into play — the spiritual sense, that faculty of the heart which perceives what the bodily senses cannot perceive and which Saint Macarius the Great describes as an interior vision.

Oroftiana cannot be known intellectually. You can read about it, you can analyse its geographical coordinates, you can study the history of the place — and you will know correct and verifiable things. But you will know things about it, not know it. Knowing it requires presence, requires silence, requires the willingness to be affected, to let the place enter into you, not merely you to enter into the place.

What isepektasisin Saint Gregory of Nyssa and why is a forest you walk through never the same forest?

Epektasis — a central concept in the mystical theology of Saint Gregory of Nyssa, elaborated above all in The Life of Moses and in the Homilies on the Song of Songs — is that continual reaching forward, that unceasing tension towards God which characterises the healthy spiritual life. The fundamental idea is that God is infinite and that drawing near to Him does not exhaust Him — there is no point of arrival after which you say I have arrived, I now know everything, I am now complete. There is only an ever-renewed impulse, a thirst that deepens with every draught, a vision that widens with every gaze.

Applied to the Stuhoasa, to any forest, to any place traversed with attention: you never enter the same forest twice not because the forest is different — although that is also true: the light shifts, the wind has moved something, the season has altered something — but because you are different. Every traversal of the Stuhoasa is a new encounter between a different person and a place that has also changed. There is no real repetition in living things. There are only variations on themes, and in the variations lies all the richness.

What does the Apostle Paul say about the love that never faileth and what connection does this have with the founders of Hilișeu-Crișan?

Love never faileth — ἡ ἀγάπη οὐδέποτε πίπτει — from the First Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 8. The immediate context is an enumeration of the qualities of authentic love — it suffereth long, it is kind, it envieth not, it doth not behave itself unseemly — and in the midst of this enumeration comes that assertion which strikes differently every time: that love never faileth, that it remains when prophecies shall fail, when tongues shall cease, when knowledge shall vanish away.

Paul was not speaking of romantic feeling, although romantic feeling, if genuine, participates in what he describes. He was speaking of agape — the love that is not conditioned by response, the love that does not calculate, the love that is closer to a manner of being than to an emotion. The love that builds a church so that others may have a place in which to pray is agape in the Pauline sense — it is oriented towards the other, it is unconditional, it is enduring beyond the lives of those who exercised it.

The founders of Hilișeu-Crișan are no more. But their love is there, in stone and wood. Never faileth is not a beautiful metaphor — it is an assertion about the structure of reality: that authentic love leaves a trace that outlives the matter through which it was expressed.

What does it mean that the Kingdom of God is within us and how does this relate to a blink from a cinema seat to Oroftiana?

Ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ ἐντὸς ὑμῶν ἐστιν — Luke 17:21. Christ answers the Pharisees who ask him when the Kingdom of God is coming and tells them it does not come with outward signs, that they will not be able to say lo, it is here or lo, it is there, that the Kingdom of God is within you — or, in other translations, in your midst, among you.

The hesychast Fathers read this as an affirmation of the immediate accessibility of divine reality — not as a denial of transcendence, but as an affirmation of its immanence. That you need not wait for a future moment to come into contact with God, that you need not arrive somewhere geographically, that you need not first obtain something — that the deepest reality is already present, already available, that the boundary is in us, not outside us.

The blink in the cinema that took me to Oroftiana and back — and perhaps it was not a blink, perhaps it lasted longer, I do not know — is a small illustration of this principle. The physical place is not primary. What comes first is the willingness to be present, to listen, to allow reality to affect you. And from that willingness, the place comes to you, even when you are sitting in a seat in a cinema in Botoșani.

What is good grief in the Holy Fathers and why is the keening of the wind through the leaves at Oroftiana not despair?

The Philokalic tradition distinguishes, with a precision I find quite brilliant, between two types of sorrow — a distinction which Saint Paul makes in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians and which the Fathers will develop at length after him. Sorrow according to God — κατὰ θεὸν λύπη — produces repentance unto salvation and leaves no regret. The sorrow of the world produces death — it is the sorrow that turns back upon itself, that finds no way out, that feeds on itself and deepens in the absurdity of its own absence of meaning.

Good grief is oriented sorrow. It is weeping that does not end in itself, but passes through itself towards something — towards recognition, towards softening, towards a new openness to life. It is the penthos to which I referred above — that state which does not destroy but purifies, which does not freeze but unblocks. The Holy Fathers regard it as a gift, not a punishment.

The keening of the wind through the leaves of the forest at Oroftiana, mingled with the memory of suffering at Frunza and with the presence of the cross and the hermitage — all of this produces good grief if you are present there with an open heart. Not despair. Not cynicism. Not resignation. But that tender breaking which is the first step towards something more luminous, that interior moisture which allows the seed to be received. At the exit from the Stuhoasa, having passed through everything — cross, hermitage, forest — something is different. Something has been reset. And in that resetting, quietly and without fanfare, life resumes its course.

Selective Online Bibliography

Patristic texts and Philokalic resources available on the web

The Philokalia and Patristic Texts

Orthodox Theology and Spirituality — Romanian Resources

International Resources in English

Note: Please verify the availability of links at the time of access. Some patristic texts in digital format may also be found in the archives of the National Library of Romania or in the digitised collections of major Romanian monasteries.

Author's Note

Tracing the arc from the initial idea of the article — from Cristian Stâncescu's name-day post to waiting as a form of love, through to patristics.

The original source of inspiration was a text on Facebook by Cristian Stâncescu, a friend.

His comment on the article: 'Your text is lovely — not cold at all!'

See the original text below:

A page from a story! 'The Spruce Forest', Tudor Giurgiu's film, has ended. The director is in dialogue with the audience. I tell him that our county too has a 'spruce forest', at Oroftiana. Silence in the auditorium. I recommend that they visit those places. More questions, more answers... I close my eyes. I set off on a journey towards Oroftiana, the village on the frontier with Ukraine. I choose to make a stop at 'the Lady's Hill'. I ascend in silence. That is what the cherry tree that stands guard over that hill has told me, so many times on my travels through those parts. Whispers among leaves. Sighs. 'The Lady' — as the people of those parts called the wife of the boyar Oroftianu — is still waiting for her husband who left for battle. From up there, the road on which he left is visible. From up there, too, the Prut is visible — you can see where it holds the body of Romania in a close embrace. — It is time to leave! the cherry tree commands me. I leave slowly. I do not dare breathe. I pass by the school. The children are getting on with their break. There are many of them, cheerful, lovely. I stop, rooted to the spot, before the Cross. On the other side is a hermitage. The lamentations of the suffering at 'Frunza' are recalled by the wind's keening through the leaves of the forest. Pain. I must leave. I want to come home. But not just anyhow — I want to visit the places of other lovers. I walk through the beautiful Stuhoasa Forest and make my way towards Hilișeu-Crișan. There is a place born of love there: a church. There are no whispers. They are still holding hands, eternally in love. — I should like an autograph, please! Who might that be? Ana? Whose autograph? I am back in the cinema auditorium. I have only blinked!

Something else happened at Oroftiana: The story of the massacre at Oroftiana, Botoșani county. 400 Romanians killed by Soviet troops.

Recognized Limitations

The text has intentional sincerity and a clear structure. But these very qualities become its traps: erudition stifles the voice, sincerity becomes self-justification, structure becomes routine. Oroftiana is not a place that needs a patristic showcase to exist. It needs words that let it bleed, be silent, or breathe without being immediately translated into seminary language. In its current form, the text does not take the reader to Oroftiana. It sends him to the bibliography.