A Photo in Transylvania

by Thomas Howard - January 7, 2008

Reprinted with permission.

A sumptuous travel magazine – to which, I need scarcely add, we do not subscribe – arrived in our letter box the other day. Things are so beautifully laid-out these days that one cannot always tell whether a given item is actually just a piece of advertising.

In any case, the cover shows a Romanian Orthodox priest in gold vestments blessing a plowed field. Two small acolytes stand by, as well as a layman with a banner and some villagers. Low wooded hills lie in the background. All seems idyllic. The main article inside carries the theme along. A harried Westerner is invited to think, "Ah. Tranquility. The simple life. I must book a ticket."

The scene turns out to be Transylvania, which readers at all familiar with Balkan history will know has not at all been a tranquil region, if we are thinking of Hungarian and Romanian questions.

But the photos started a train of thought in my mind. The people in the farming village whom the photographer had picked out tended to be immemorially old. Wrinkled, toothless crones in babushkas, old men in flat cloth hats. One supposes that most of them have not dashed very often to spas in Brazil, Indonesia, or the Caribbean.

What has happened in their lives? Well – birth, work, childbearing, work, eating and drinking, work, family life, work, the Divine Liturgy, festivals, work, death, and so forth.

But various things probably have not happened. Most of them have never been featured in an article, nor been "known" – even locally – for anything particular, nor tried a fancy restaurant, nor leafed through a hefty highbrow Sunday paper or one of the startling magazines of fantasy, nor sent any e-mails. There are doubtless very few "names" that any of them can drop.

Here, then, must be a recipe for the despondency that follows on the heels of sheer ennui? I mean, what have they got to ginger things up for them? There's no spice in their lives! No distractions. How on earth do they carry on?

It is a set of questions that might burst, quite understandably, from someone whirling around on the calliope of the West. But there is another possible reaction to such a set of photographs. It is, of course, the very one that the magazine sought, except here it would be carried through from mere tourism to a sort of pious fantasy. The tranquility that, it is supposed, reigns in the farming villages of Transylvania must also reign in the hearts of these old folks. Good old saints, all of them, surely, with their liturgy and icons and festivals?

Well, heaven grant it. It might well be the case – or, shall we say, it most certainly is the case for any of them, as for any of us, whose lives are hidden with Christ in God, as St. Paul puts the matter. The photographer may place me in a plowed field with low wooded hills for his picture, or in a mall, or a gridlock at 57th Street and Madison Avenue, or an airport security line in my stocking feet. The setting won't really change things, or so Paul (and the saints) would urge.

Here is one of the old themes of Catholic spiritual life: The region that my soul inhabits is interior. Great block-like words bespeak that region: hiddenness. Obscurity. Anonymity. Detachment. Withdrawal. Oblivion. Silence. Poverty. Stillness. Renunciation.

We all know that list, heaven knows. But what a thunderous abyss opens when we utter even one of them. And how they have all fled before the roar, speed, distractions, and strobe lights of Instant Everything.

On the surface of things, it would appear that the fields and wooded hills might be the easier region in which one may pursue holiness (which, after all, is the only point of all those block-like words). But it is too easy to romanticize those fields and hills. The sheer tedium of plowing and chopping and carrying on, decade after bone-wearying decade, often under terrible governments, leaches away the romance.

In the old Requiem they sang Ad te omnis caro veniet – To Thee shall all flesh come. That is the Day on which I must give my accounting. If I find myself caught short, the gridlock won't count for very much when it comes to making my excuses.

Thomas Howard is retired from 40 years of teaching English in private schools, college, and seminary in England and America.