Good morning. If you will indulge me, I would like to open with a short prayer in Hungarian. A religious service in a Transylvanian Unitarian church would certainly include this prayer, and so it feels appropriate for me to say it here, at this service about Partnership.
That prayer, which I think some of you know and others may have guessed is what it known in English as the Lord's Prayer. It is one virtually all Transylvanian Unitarians know by heart; they recite it every week in church. Thank you for indulging me in saying in—I hope at least it was interesting to hear the rhythm and beauty of Hungarian, even on the lips of a foreigner such as myself.
Now I want to think a little bit about this concept of Partnership. What is Partnership? Ultimately it is about Love: being in loving relationship, so that we can learn from one another, support one another, grow as individuals and as communities. But there is a key ingredient, I believe: partnership, to be true to the name and to live up to its potential, must be a two‐way street: it is essential that our Partner Church movement not be mistaken for just some kind of charity or development work, one in which we members of more economically and materially privileged churches give aid to those less privileged Unitarians around the world. Of course, that is a part of the goal, and it is valuable work; we who are blessed with so much should reach out to help others, and doing so is unmistakably an important part of partnership. But it is not all. We UUs must gain something, too; the relationship must be reciprocal in order for the word "partner" to have real meaning.
So I am here today in part to talk about issues related to that other side of partnership: not the us giving but the us receiving. That may sound selfish, but I think it is important for us to think about not only what we have to give, but what we have to gain. Not just about what we may have to teach, but what we may have to learn. I don't, unfortunately, have any profound wisdom to share from our Transylvanian brothers and sisters; I have only the knowledge that a loving relationship requires openness and understanding, and so I offer my perspective on the people I lived and worked, played and worshipped with for two years. By learning a bit about who they are, I hope to shed light on what we have to learn from them.
Before I go any further, let me tell you a little more about myself, to put my experiences in some kind of context. I was raised Unitarian Universalist, right here in Northern Virginia, at the UU Congregation of Fairfax. I went to RE on and off and became a regular participant in services when I joined the choir in high school. But I wandered away from UUism during college, and by my mid‐twenties I was identifying as a Quaker. Quakerism still speaks to me in important ways—but now, when asked my religious affiliation, I call myself a Unitarian Universalist. So what brought me back to the UU fold? That's right—a trip to Transylvania.
After years of hearing about Transylvania from my parents (who first went in 1992), I finally had a chance to go in the summer of 2000. It was, dare I use the phrase, a religious experience. The land, the people, the spirit of the place touched me deeply, and I felt I had to remain connected to them somehow. So I visited again in the summer of 2001, and then in July of 2003 I went to live there. I returned to the United States in 2005, so, hard as it is for me to believe, I have now been back in America as long as I was in Transylvania.
While I was there I was working as an English teacher at the Protestant Theological Institute in Kolozsvár. It is the only Unitarian seminary in Transylvania; it's where all the Unitarian ministers get trained. It is not only a Unitarian seminary; as its name indicates, it trains ministers in three Protestant faiths: the Lutherans, what are called Calvinists or Reformed, and the Unitarians. I was hired specifically to teach English to the Unitarian students, and did that for two years. Seminary is a five‐year undergraduate program in Transylvania, so my students were young, ranging in age from 18‐25 or so.
In addition to my work at the seminary, twice a week I went to the Unitarian nursery school‐kindergarten, where I "taught" English, by singing songs with the 2‐5 year olds. I also had the fabulous opportunity to become a member of the choir of the Janos Zsigmond Unitarian High School, which some of you may have heard when they did an East Coast concert tour in the spring of 2003 and performed at GA in Boston that year. The rest of the singers were all teenagers, but no one seemed to mind having one older member. I also served frequently as a chaperone on the many choir trips around Transylvania, and became good friends with the director.
So I spent most of my time those two years in Kolozsvár, and that city, that beautiful city in which I lived and where David Ferenc first preached his Unitarian vision in 1566, that's the place I know the best. But in addition to my ties to Kolozsvár, especially to the young Unitarian ministers in training at the Protestant Theological Institute there, I also have strong connections with the people of the village of Szentgerice, whose Unitarian church is partnered with the Fairfax congregation. I lived in Kolozsvár, but spent a good deal of time in Szentgerice, mostly for weekend visits but also to help with the grape harvest in the fall, and one January I taught a two week intensive English course for interested villagers.
When I think of Transylvania my heart grows full. It is hard to know what to include; two years of experience are hard to synthesize. Should I tell you about the mundane details of life? — the large gas or wood‐burning heaters in the buildings, using outhouses in the villages, communicating via text message on cell phones or, alternately, in person when stopping by friends' houses unannounced and without a specific invitation, but rarely on the phone, at least not for long conversations. I could tell you of shopping in the large outdoor market overflowing with fresh fruit and vegetables and just about everything else one could imagine for sale, from shoes to brooms to toilet paper. I cannot share two years of life in just a few minutes, so let me share some snapshot memories of my life there, to give you a series of pictures of Unitarian life and thought in Transylvania.
I remember a class discussion: I ask the students how they would characterize Transylvanian Unitarianism to an American who didn't know much about it. In a small class of four students, I get four responses. They readily agree that Unitarianism is hard to describe, because there is no creed, no dogma one must believe. But when I press for more details, I get different responses—and they agree to disagree, and that that—agreement to disagree—is part of the essence of their faith. None of the differences among the four students would sound that far apart to UU ears—but it is interesting to see them listen to one another and say, "no, that's not what I believe," and also say, "It's okay."
A student who graduated after my first year and is now a young minister made a comment about not understanding why UUs are so eager to learn from all the world's religions with, he felt, the notable exception of Christianity, when Unitarianism grew out of Christianity—and, as you may know, in Transylvania, Unitarianism is Christian. For Transylvanian Unitarians, "Christian" does not mean acceptance of the Trinity, or belief in the divinity of Jesus; neither of those things are part of their faith. But they follow the teachings of Jesus, they are a Bible‐based religion, they read the Bible at every service, and they identify as Christian.
Another student made a comment to me one day; she said, "American Unitarianism had such fabulous leaders and writers in the 19th century—William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson… what happened?"
Yet another student expressed to me his belief that the only reason Transylvanian Unitarianism identifies as Christian is that it would not be taken seriously as a religion in that part of the world otherwise, but that the term "Christian" actually had little practical meaning. A classmate vociferously disagreed with him, and said that they are Christian because they follow the words of Jesus as outlined in the Bible, and that the Bible is the word of God. They agreed to disagree.
The minister of the Fairfax partner church, in Szentgerice, said that it was very odd to him when he visited America to realize that he was being perceived as a representative of a traditional, conservative, and—he sometimes sensed—maybe, closed‐minded faith, when in his own world he is radical and outside the norm. His religion's status as a "real" religion is even questioned sometimes, by members of other religions, because he does not accept the Trinity, does not pray to Jesus or in Jesus' name, does not believe that Jesus was God.
Then there was the day I arrived at the nursery school in which I taught English, before the teacher was finished with the lesson. She was teaching the kids the days of the week (in Hungarian, of course) and they were doing it by saying the days, and as they said each day coming up with some mnemonic and a visual association to help them remember. In most cases, they came up with something that started with the same letter that the given day started with, and drew a picture of that to jog their memories as they recited the days. When they got to Sunday, which is the last day of the week as it is usually recited in Hungarian, the teacher had them remember it by saying, "Sunday is the day we go to church." And as she prepared to draw a church she asked, "What does a church look like?" The kids started describing it enthusiastically: "a building" "it's big" "it's tall" "it has a tower" and the teacher drew the basic shape of a classic church with a steeple. Then one of the kids said, "It has a cross on the steeple!" And the teacher stopped, and said, "Yes, some churches have crosses…"
In Transylvania one can tell the kind of church by what is on the steeple, at least up to a point. Romanian Orthodox churches have a distinctive elaborate cross. Catholic churches have a simple cross. And Protestant churches have either a ball, a rooster, or a star. (I'm not sure why—I don't think most Transylvanians are either.) So when the little boy made his statement about crosses, the teacher said, "What about this church right here, the Unitarian Church, what does it have on top? And what about the Reformed Church up the street?" And they thought through what the different churches have on their steeples. The teacher said, "So some churches have a ball, and some have a rooster, and some have a cross—and we here, some of us are Unitarian, and some of us are Reformed and some of us are Catholic—so I'm not going to draw anything on the top of this church, and you can imagine whatever you like is up there." Her impulse to be inclusive in this way struck a chord with me in its essence: She didn't draw anything on the top because she wanted to include them all, and I thought—that's what we try to do. But in America, we can't even draw the church.
Another memorable day I went to check out an apartment with a friend, a woman from Hungary who was studying at the seminary—she was Hungary‐Hungarian, as opposed to Transylvanian Hungarian, so she didn't speak Romanian. The young woman who showed us the apartment that my friend was considering moving into was an ethnic Hungarian, but had gone to Romanian language schools and now lived and worked in a Romanian world. This young woman had a hard time speaking in Hungarian, which had been her mother tongue. She kept using words that my Hungary‐Hungarian friend didn't understand, and then the young woman would pause and say, "oh- I'm sorry, is that Romanian? I don't remember Hungarian that well…" It made me understand in a new way the urgency I sensed among church leaders to hold on to the Unitarian youth, to give them a strong sense of self with a Hungarian identity—otherwise, their world may one day soon be a thing of the past.
Just two more remembrances:
There was a young Unitarian minister who told me, not long after we met, that actually, he didn't really believe in God. He said he had become a minister because he wanted to be involved in community leadership, but community leadership that wasn't tainted by government politics, given all the distrust and negative associations which remain from the era of Communism. However, a few years later that same minister, by then married, related the gist of a sermon he gave at a wedding in which, he told me, he talked about seeing the face of God in the face of one's Beloved, and his sense that God and Love are inextricably bound.
Another young minister I had become friends with expressed some exasperation when I asked him to tell me what he meant by God: "Americans always ask that," he said, "but I don't think about it that way. God is a mystery — we don't need to understand him. I can't put it in words."
These memories, these snapshots as I've called them, give a glimpse of the two years that inform my perspective on Transylvania, the Hungarians there, and particularly Unitarianism there. What can we learn from them? What do they have to teach us?
I've said Partnership is about Love. Since Love is about Understanding, let me share with you my understanding of who our Transylvanian Partners are, and some thoughts on what we may have to learn from them
First and foremost, they are Hungarian. They are Romanian citizens, yes, but they are Hungarian, and it is very important to respect that in their identity. Secondly, they live in a diverse world—in addition to the Hungarians and the majority Romanians, there are Roma, commonly called Gypsies, and there are still a few Jews and members of a German‐speaking group known as Saxons. In that world Hungarian Unitarians are an ethnic and religious minority, but one with a 400+ year commitment to toleration and respect for difference. We are alike in more than just our name.
There are of course important differences between us, too. Their strong traditions, which serve to give them a base of strength, may make their church services seem too narrow in focus to be appealing to some UUs. Transylvanian Unitarianism is, as I said, a Bible‐based religion; a minister may quote from sources other than the Bible on occasion, but there is always a Bible passage read, and as I noted at the outset virtually every Transylvanian Unitarian religious observance includes a recitation of the Lord's Prayer. They identify as Christians.
Unitarians in Transylvania are more certain of their place than most American UUs I've encountered, myself included. They know they come from a history which goes back over 400 years on the land where they still live—they aren't searching, the way many of us are in a very basic way, to figure out who they are. They know who they are. Their challenge is how to survive as who they are—how to maintain their culture, their language, ensure that the next generations know their own history and language, how to ensure that the villages, which are the lifeblood of the larger community—even the cities: everybody has relatives in the villages, and gets food from them—how to make sure those villages survive as Romania struggles to meet the standards of the EU‐standards which involve regulations about such things as slaughtering pigs which may irrevocably change the village way of life. They are struggling to win back land and buildings which were taken under the Communist regime and have yet to be returned, or have been returned in name only. They are working to create strong and vibrant communities, to make them places where there is good education and health care, so that the youth will stay in the villages, or return after a university education, at any rate stay in Transylvania, and continue the life. They are teaching the youth about their own heritage, to give young Unitarians there a strong sense of self so that their identities are not lost in a society in which they are a double minority, as Hungarians among Romanians and also as Unitarians in a region where the vast majority of Protestants are members of the Reformed Church.
So one of the things I believe we have to learn from Transylvanian Unitarianism is that they are so clearly defined by what they are, and not by what they aren't. One of the reasons I think I drifted away from my home church, even though I was raised UU, is that I did not find it engaging to be part of a movement whose members seemed overly concerned with what they weren't. Transylvanian Unitarians have something to teach us about permanence, and survival, and acceptance of mystery, without needing the certainty of intellectual agreement with every word in the hymns they sing. Theirs is an older certainty. And yet they do not blindly accept dogma: Their religion may look traditional and old‐fashioned to some UUs, but it is radical in its insistence on the right of individual conscience.
We as a world‐wide movement have an important — a critical — message to bring to the world. Part of what we as a World Movement have to teach is something we are still working to learn, I believe: a kind of synthesis of the common threads of Unitarianism everywhere and some of the particular teachings different parts of the movement have to provide. But in order to go forward and carry that message out, we have to have strong, vibrant communities. This is true on both sides of the Atlantic: Our communities here can be strengthened by the spiritual and historical depth and solidity of Transylvanian Unitarianism, even as we help strengthen their communities and help ensure their continued survival. What we all have to teach each other is not static, it is a message of openness and respect for all, it is one we are constantly learning to live and living as we learn—it is a message we learn about from one another and must try to teach the world.
Amen.