Sermon delivered at the First Parish in Concord by Rev. David Gyero on March 25, 2001.
Yesterday, when preparing my sermon in the beautiful sunshine of Beacon Hill in Boston, I suddenly realized that today is the first Sunday of the first spring in the New Millennium. Last week some of my colleagues greeted me with this greeting that I have never heard before: "Happy Spring!" As I started to think about this, I also remembered that at the beginning of the year both here and in my homeland Transylvania we greeted each other with this similar greeting: Happy New Year! And I remembered Easter and Christmas, and our birthdays and celebrations, all of them being related to our infinite desire to be happy. I remembered that we say it over and over again each year, and during the whole year many of us only wait for the desired happiness. Isn't it a strange component of our lives that we always wait for something: our whole life is a continuous waiting from the moment we are born. And even if its objects are changing, and the holidays come and go, the waiting still stays inside us. It makes us forget that we were born to live and not only to prepare ourselves for life and we wait and wait, until the moment when we can't wait for anything else anymoreÉ
Getting used to this waiting includes a dangerous category of time in our life: the transition period. We often look at these times as not being real parts of our lives, only a transition to those periods when we will be really living. Whenever we say that we don't have enough time to love, to care, to do good, to smile, because we just happen to do laundry, or wait for a baby or study for school - then we are trusting that those transition times will go away and then we will live, then we will stop and look around, because our expectations were fulfilled.
I wonder how many times we got to this point where we were able to say: "Finally, I am here, I was waiting for this so much, now I can relax, now I don't have to wait for anything else, now I have arrived there where I really do live?" How many times did we start living indeed? Yet life, and in it the distribution of time, is endlessly just: each of us gets 1440 minutes in a day, 525 600 minutes in a year, and for a life, if we count it with 80 years, 42 048 000 minutes. Exactly the same amount for everybody: you here in Mass. and us there in Transylvania. And the value of these minutes is raised above all the other values on the earth by the fact that we never know how much has yet left.
You have a saying here which was of course taken over by so many cultures including mine - Time is money. We not only say it, but also justify it in our way of life: we rush, we live a helter-skelter life, we grab things so that our reserves to be full, that our money in the bank to be increased with timeÉ But our time will increase by what? Religiously speaking, it is a very questionable truth to say that time is money, because all the lost money can be retrieved. Lots of human stories justify this statement, where after total bankruptcy people became successful againÉ But show me one person who has been able to retrieve just one of the so many lost moments! Time is maybe the only irrecoverable resource for human beings.
And still, how many of our precious moments are called transition periods by our hasty minds! "Now I donÕt have time for this" - we say, as if our life would be somewhere else then here and now. And by the time we realize that it is not, often we have only a short period of time left. Today I came here to tell you about a new beginning in our community life back home: we want this not to be the case anymore for our Unitarian community in Transylvania.
Let me briefly remind you, that Transylvania is a Latin word meaning the land across the forest. It belonged to Hungary for most of its history, until it was given to Romania as a loyalty present after the 2 world wars lost by Hungary. There are 2 million Hungarians still living there as ethnic minorities, 80,000 of them being Unitarians, members of the first Unitarian church in the world founded by Francis David in 1568.
Transylvanian Unitarians celebrate the lent these days: the 40-day period between Ash Wednesday and Easter. After the loud and colorful weeks of the carnival, when our life was surrounded by joy, music and laughter we enter this period of praying, meditation and silence, and our hopes and dreams are born again. This year, our waiting for the lent is focused on other things too. 11 years ago, the New Year of 1990 brought us the gift of liberation from life-threatening persecution under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu and his communist regime. For the first time in my life, we had real freedom, joy and hopes for the spring.
11 years of hard transition followed, during which we tried to adapt our society to European norms. Unfortunately, the results of the elections finalized in early December show us that after more then a decade of struggle, pain, dreams and hard work we are still in serious danger. The population has elected a Parliament, which will be controlled over the next 4 years by the former communist and ultra-nationalist parties. The Presidential election was won by a former secretary of state trained in Moscow. Political slogans scream again that "Hungarians, Jews, Gypsies, and country-seller, traitorous Romanians have to leave."
We Unitarians are among those who are seen as aliens in our own country, enemies of the dominant Romanians and a scourge in society. Think about this: our Unitarian ancestors were the first people in the world to proclaim religious tolerance and freedom of conscience as law. It was in 1568 in Torda, when John Sigismund was the Unitarian king of Transylvania. He had the power to force Unitarianism onto others; instead, he offered them the right of choice. Yet today, it is we, his descendants who are the targets of ethnic cleansing and religious intolerance in our own land. Our lent is warmed up by the renewing spring, but there is also fear and concern on our faces. After 433 years of proclaiming it as a law, we still wait for tolerance.
I am far away from the fire now, safe in Boston, watching and praying from a distance, working in the department of the international relations of the UUA. On one hand I am sorry for not being there with my congregation, with my family and with my friends. But on the other hand it has been important for me to be here as well, because during these 6 months that I have spent here I have learned something from you, American UUs, which is helping me to have a different kind of perspective upon the whole thing.
At home, we always used to say that unfortunately we can't do much about changing the nationalism around us, we have to learn how to live with it. What I have learned here is an idea about HOW we can do this. I have experienced among you a totally different kind of approach from human to human. In Transylvania our personal connections, our whole society, including the churches, are still led by the communist type of human relationships which says that if you open your soul towards an other human and trust him, you are going to lose, to be hurt, to be embarrassed. If you stick out your neck, it is going to be cut off. If you reach out your hand, nobody will hold it. We are afraid Ð each one of the others, we are distant, we are distrustful. Our experience teaches us it isnÕt worth it to dare to be different, to dare to care.
You can imagine the cultural and religious shock that I experienced when I met the mood of the human relationships at the UUA and at the UU congregations I have visited. I am not speaking about sensational deeds here - but just about your way of behaving with each other, of accepting your differences and valuing the richness. The small day-to-day events, the natural approaches, the smiles, the hugs, the sparks in the eyes tell me that you are meeting an other human being, and you are valuing this humanity no matter what its expressions may be. You model trusting, respect, openness, acceptance in your everyday life that I've never met before. You have shown me a way of doing it Ð of taking responsibility for reconciliation, acceptance and tolerance.
My world is not safe for such things yet. I have never stuck my neck out because it was not safe to do so. But here, I have an opportunity to learn how to do it. I feel myself safe, I feel people around me love each other and protect each other. I needed to experience this, to know this, so that when I go home, I could be a model for those out there. When I go home to Transylvania in July, I need to share what you have taught me. I need to teach ourselves how to do it.
You need to know that I am not alone in the dream of renewing our church life in Transylvania. It is a generation, which plans to do it, a young generation. Us who grew up speaking silent mother tongue and prayed carefully under communism, us who have celebrated the failure of that regime with a teenager madness, us who have seen our bravest ideals starve to death during the time called transition. The chance that we indeed may do it, and the conviction that we indeed must do it, made us adults from one day to the other. We realized that our 45 years under communism and then our 11 years of transition were spent mostly in waiting. We were waiting for the outside causes in order to be happy. And even if we have wished a Happy Spring or a Happy Easter to each other for so many times, the holidays and the new years never brought us the fulfilling, because we were waiting for the outside causes instead of celebrating the light which was growing in us with the holidays. We realized that we must stop waiting for the causes.
In this process of realizing it, we have received a great deal of help from you. And WE means Unitarianism in general, as well as the one congregation to which you are directly connected through the partner church movement. This morning I am bringing the greetings of your partner church in Szekelykeresztur, its minister Jozsef Szombatfalvi and all its 3,500 members. The message they sent you has two parts, simple but deep, just like their lives. First, they say thank you for this connection, for the letters you write, the money you collect, the scholarships you provide, the prayers you whisper. But first of all, they would be grateful for your presence in Szekelykeresztur. They know they need this living connection with your more than anything else you can give, including money and letters. They need to feel you there, they need to see you, to touch you, to experience you. During these years of search and rebuilding, in the midst of social and economic struggle or nationalist and intolerant threats, it is vital to know that we are not alone, that there is a larger community out there to which we belong and which empowers and energizes us. There is need for many things in our lives, but nothing is as important as the living sisterhood and brotherhood. In our 433 years of Unitarian history, we were almost always oppressed, persecuted, intolerance and hate flows towards us even today, and now when we must concentrate our forces to make a difference, we need you to be part of this process. Before you do anything else, just be Ð for me this is the basic teaching of the partnership. And I hope that you, members of the First Parish in Concord will understand this before anything else.
The second message from Transylvania this morning speaks about a dream, which promises us all a happier future. We, who want to make this happy future, realized that the only way to get to it is through education. So we have planned to build a dormitory complex in Kolozsvar, the main city of Transylvania, for our Unitarian high school, university and seminary students who come to study there. Currently, these students, whose number is higher than several hundred, live all over the city, because the state confiscated all the buildings of our church, which historically served as dormitories. They are often threatened by nationalist slogans because they are a minority both ethnically and religiously, many of them live under poor conditions because they or their parents can't afford a better housing. The main goal of the new dormitory project is to create a safe spiritual home where young generations can explore the depth of their religion and culture, and be educated to become the leaders of the next Unitarian generation in Transylvania.
The UUA and the PCC have agreed to help raising the necessary funds for this project. Today, I am here to tell you too about it. In order to make it, we will need your help: our children will need your help. We will come back again and ask for your support. We think you are one of those who can help: so when the ask comes, please see whether you can say yes to the call. Please know that it is hard to ask, when I think of our great grandparents who had the financial power and economic knowledge to build these schools on their own, without asking anything from anybody. In 1793, your partner church in Szekelykeresztur had to choose between building a new sanctuary or a new school. They chose the school, creating the 2nd Unitarian high school in Transylvania. Today, I am coming to you asking you to help me build this education system further, because the Romanian state still holds most of our income generating properties, land and forest, which in the past were enough to cover our needs. Here I am, calling to your generosity: I don't think anybody else gave more to their partner church to help the education of their children than you did through your scholarships. Now we are asking you to contribute to the future of the whole Unitarianism in Transylvania.
Let me leave you with the message and tune of our Transylvanian Unitarian youth hymn. Created after the darkest political era in the 1920s, it speaks about a happier tomorrow for which we were longing in the past. Now we are determined not only to wait for these happy new years, but also to make them.
The Night Is Done (Transylvanian Unitarian Youth Hymn)
The night is done, the sun is here, / Life is all ours, let us sing! /The wish to heed JesusÕ words / Inspires work and leads us on. /Our one God, please guide us, / Your holy hand keeps us safe here. /Help our true cause be victorious, / Forward together we shall march on, /A happier age is calling us! /Our flag flies high, our God is one, / The fight is hard, but our faith is strong. /The night is done, the sun is here, / Life is all ours, let us sing!