In Medias/Medgyes

I.

I have been warned

That when we cross from Old Romania

Into Transylvania

To join our people there,

We should use Hungarian place names,

Not Romanian (say Kolozsvar, not Cluj).

Old enmities maintain old boundaries

Where lines depend on which history troubles whom.

Yet, at this table, we strangers

Lingering over coffee and sweets

Are slipping back and forth among three languages,

Sometimes translating

Sometimes hearing with our hearts.

II.

And, remembering my childhood,

I find something in this that has less to do with

The sounds of my grandparents’ voices

That come back to me and speak through my mouth

      Fata frumosa

      Tac, si minca

      Draga, micuta

      Fi cu minte

      Draga

Less to do with memory

Than with these good people now

And another return

To the home in the heart.

III.

History is going on

Armies continue to arm

Victims everywhere take their places.

And, by the light of our matches and cigarettes,

Faith in life whispers across the borders.

               [from Morning Watch, written while in Transyllvania after several evenings of conversation in their garden with Rev. Kiss Karoly and Anna, his wife]

Sermon

In the summer of 1998 I went on pilgrimage to Transylvania. I left alone from O’Hare in Chicago and arrived at Otopeni Airport in Bucharest to meet the rest of the members of the tour --- I hitched a ride with people from Project Harvest Hope.  A man of Romanian ancestry who was then in my congregation gave me his frequent flyer miles to make the round trip.  My aunts and uncles sent me money to spend on whatever I wished while I was there.  Mine was a pilgrimage twice over.  First, I went with the tour group to Homorodokland, your partner church, and to the Evanston, Illinois partner church in the city of Medgyes.  That was my first pilgrimage.

After the tour was over, I then continued on my personal pilgrimage. In Satu Mare, in the north of Romania, I met a translator who guided me to the villages outside the city of Oradea, in Arad, to Mihileu and Ripa, the villages of my maternal grandparents, in a sense, my ancestral home.  My paternal grandparents’ villages are in the southwest of Romania, outside Timisoara, on the border with Hungary.  I am a thoroughbred Romanian.

I remember many things from my time there, not the least of which is how much laughter there was on the tour bus.  I am not a world traveler, though I have been to England, Canada, France and Italy, this trip was my first to Romania.  There were some moments I would not particularly like to relive --- I had a three-week case of what, to be delicate, I will call “Ceausescu’s Revenge.”  I came back with anosmia, the medical name for having no sense of smell.  That lasted for a year. And, in my eagerness to get closer to and praise the then-new Partner Church van, I tripped and fell to my knees in Koloszvar and the numbness in my left leg from that is just about all gone. 

I renewed my interest in petitionary prayer in Transylvania, as in, “Oh, God, please don’t let me die on a mountain road in Transylvania!”  Passenger car drivers drive very, very fast in Romania, and they drive really well.  One of two things is true:  Either the drivers there are all very good, or they’re the survivors.  When coming around the bend of a road, in country or in t0own, you are likely to encounter a Roma wagon halted in your lane, or a hundred sheep bottoms stock still and arrayed as a wall across the road so your car cannot go around.  And, there’s nowhere to go, nothing to do when confronted all of a sudden with a hundred sheep butts, but come to a screeching halt.

There are, however, other things I remember, and other things to tell.  As an Episcopal priest put it, speaking about his congregation’s partner church in St. Petersburg, Russia:  “They have experienced the power of hell and they have not been overcome.”

To be a pilgrim is to travel with some expectations to a place made sacred by the events that happened there, remembered in story and history, kept alive by the persistence of memory and longing.  All four of my grandparents left their homes there for good around 1913.  At that time, their villages were part of Austria Hungary.  They had been Romanians living under Hungarian rule.  They were very poor.  The buildings of their villages, now, look very much like Okland and Ujfalu, Berkeley First Church’s partner church village.  Except at the center of my grandparents’ villages is an orthodox church.

My expectation when I made pilgrimage to those villages was that I would find something there that would complete something for me, something that was lost when my grandparents died when I was 8.  In Ripa, I did find my grandfather’s surname on the World War II memorial.  So, I knew there had been relatives in the town.  The young priest’s wife, when I showed her photos of my family, said there was a woman in the church who looked like my mother and aunt.  But, her husband, the priest, was either unwilling or slow on the uptake, for he offered no help in finding my relatives.  I didn’t push. I should have pushed.

In Mihileu, I went to the cemetery to see if I could find my great grandmother’s grave.  The graveyard was full of nettles and I was wearing sandals, so I didn’t try to go in.  It was very hot, in the mid nineties, and very dry.  The dust on the streets was four inches deep.  Although I saw a couple of children peeking out of a window, I encountered no one in the streets.  My young translator and driver were eager to be on their way.  They were thirsty and hungry. I didn’t push. I should have pushed.

Being able to walk where they walked, to see fields across which my grandfather walked to court my grandmother, to see the town nearby where the Hungarian landowner lived for whom my grandfather drove a wagon, to eat berries from the bushes outside the cemetery where my great grandmother is buried, even to breath the dust of the quiet, empty streets…not the stuff of miracle or healing some pilgrims find. Not the wished-for completion of the story, or reconnection with long-lost family.  But, I rediscovered that I am so grateful for their sturdiness, for their willingness to leave all they knew for the possibility of a better life; not the certainty, but simply the possibility. I am proud of their pioneer spirit.  I am proud of them, proud to be of them. 

Being eight when they died, I never got a chance to ask them the questions I would have come to later on.  I never got a chance to ask them what it was like, leaving everything they knew, taking with them only what they could wrap in their duna, their down comforter, to carry with them.  What was it like, looking across the valley knowing you would never see it again?  What was it like saying goodbye to your friends and what family was left?  Tell me about crossing the ocean in steerage…  Tell me about Ellis Island.  Now, I have so many questions.  Part of the gift of that pilgrimage is the recurring understanding that there are some things of which one simply has to let go.  Some questions will never be answered.  Sometimes we just have to go on without everything being resolved, finished, tidy.  Some days, that’s a good thing to know.

My other pilgrimage --- the one to that spiritual ancestral home --- sowed in me the seeds of appreciation for the Transylvanian Unitarians, those keepers of Francis David’s communion cup, the guardians of the liberal spirit of religion for over 400 years.  And, the more I learn about non-North American Unitarians, the more deeply I come to appreciate our legacy of liberal religion here.  And, I have questions, too.  With Hungarian minister, Josef Kaszony, I wonder:  How is it that we American Unitarians can hold our religion so far from the center of our lives?

I wonder, as Americans who are as likely to experience our religious climate as freedom from religion as they are freedom of religion, what our lives would look like if our religious tradition on our soil went back to the sixteenth century?  What would our lives and faith resemble if we had to struggle against oppression to preserve it, hide it to preserve it, sing our hymns in secret with the windows and doors closed and shuttered so others wouldn’t hear and report us to the police?  Would our religion mean more to us if it were threatened?  Does the faith come to be important partly because it is threatened, because it is lived against the odds, and formed in response to forces that would silence it?  Does a faith come to be strong because it serves and preserves, feeds the soul so that courage and steadfastness and love simply come, over time, as the natural fruit of that faith? 

I can see at least two wide divides we have to cross to get to an understanding of our Unitarian counterparts in Transylvania.  The first is to understand the meaning of our freedom.  The second is to understand the meaning of their faithfulness.

It seems to me that over time we Americans have lost the depth of understanding of the depth of our freedom, what it gives us and what it requires of us. Democracy is an ocean of possibility we have not fully explored.  As is so often true of great battles and understandings won at some cost by others, the farther we have gotten from those events of moment out of which our freedoms were created, our hands and hearts have come to hold the story, the history [some of it accurate] rather than the events themselves.  We were not there.  We cannot experience the particular intensity and understanding that the founders of our country felt over those formative years.  We need a new challenge.  No.  We need to identify as ours, as vital to us, the challenges and struggles that face others in the world.  In order to discover the depths of our faith and its strengths, I believe we American Unitarians must take it out into the world with us to see what it can do.  We are perfectly free to make ways to understand the genius of democracy and the exquisite intelligence of liberal religion. Reaching across borders is one way we might come to better cherish our faith, reaching with one hand full to give, one hand upturned to receive.

The Unitarians of Transylvania have preserved their faith and been preserved by it through war and want, through bitterness and sorrow.  Their faithfulness to their religious values and aspirations has taken a beating in the last century.  Let me say it as one man put it at our last worship meeting in Okland three years ago.  We were sitting in the courtyard of the Youth House.  He gestured toward a bottle of palinka sitting on the steps.  He said:  “We are like that bottle.  For hundreds of years we were full --- full of faith, full of our own traditions, full of life.  For one hundred years that bottle has been emptying.  We had learned not to trust each other.  We had learned not to trust ourselves.  When you came, the bottle was almost empty.  But, you came.  And you are reminding us that we can fill it again.”

The story of our liberal faith is a living story.  It is alive in Homorodokland, your partner church.  It is alive in the Czech Republic.  It is alive in the Khassi Hills of India.  Unitarianism is alive in Nigeria, in Hungary, in South Africa.  It is alive in the Philippines.  The story of our faith is alive in Transylvania, where not only the Unitarians, but Romanians, too, are struggling to regain the sense of their worth, a sense of trust, and a hope for their future.

For us Americans it is a different struggle, one to regain the sense of what our democracy might mean.  I believe that the huge heart of the American democracy --- which experiment began in religious freedom, and was articulated with words crafted by many Unitarians --- I believe that this huge heart has become pinched in too many places by fear masquerading as religion, by greed in the clothing of economic progress, and by apathy pretending to be freedom.

The Transylvanian Unitarians, almost all of them ethnic Hungarians, have been infused with new energy by the presence of North American Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists who have made pilgrimage to them, and brought them gifts of money and expertise and concern and presence.  Their struggle is to remain alive.  It is a struggle because they have a very hard life economically, and because the Romanian government plan is to obliterate ethnic minorities in Romania.  The Transylvanian Unitarians have no choice but to live with their ancient religion close to the center of their being.

They welcome us not only for what we bring in our full hands, but also for our presence among them.  Our money is essential to so many projects and dreams of our partner churches, but also the presence of groups of North Americans is very visible to those that are watching.  It will be more difficult for the Romanian government to devastate ethnic minority culture if North Americans are around, watching.

What we North Americans are learning in this decade-long engagement, it may be too early to tell.  There are hints, however, that Americans (I can’t speak for our Canadian neighbors) are asking ourselves questions that arise from our engagement with our Transylvanian partners [and, by extension, out of our forming relationships with Unitarians in the Czech Republic, Poland, the Khassi Hills, and the Philippines. The Unitarianism or Unitarian Universalism of North America may grow stronger through asking ourselves to concern ourselves more, be more of a presence in the world outside our doors. 

We may grow to be a more vigorously accepting Unitarian Universalism, made so by engaging intellectually and emotionally with people whose Unitarianism is so very different from ours in ritual and practice, yet so very similar in values and ethos.  Perhaps we will develop more respect for our faith because, asking more of ourselves, digging down into our faith, we will find that it is richer, stronger than we had thought.  We might find ourselves having more faith in each other, more faith in what the longing for freedom can lead a people to create and sustain, and more faith in our faith to recreate itself across centuries and in each life, over and over again.

It may turn out that these burgeoning global relationships will take our several histories and make of them something quite new, once again.  They have no choice but to continue, with or without North American engagement.  And we, free as we are in North America, free to hang a flag and let it hang instead of working at our democracy, free to choose or to not choose, free to vote or not vote, free to attend to our freedom or let it go --- we may learn that while taking our amazing, beautiful freedom for granted, we might also ask more of it and of ourselves. And, in asking more, we might discover for ourselves a new vitality and a new mission.

I am proud of my grandparents’ courage to leave the old country --- Sophia and Kostan Yova, Gheorghiu and Maria Pescan --- they were quite bold to leave everything they knew to come here. Although Unitarian Universalism is my chosen religion, chosen now for 40 years, I am proud to claim part of that Transylvanian history as mine, as well. 

When I consider my grandparents leaving there, and when I consider the Transylvanian Unitarians steadfastness in abiding there --- I must consider that somehow I am paid for by both.  My grandparents who left and the Transylvanians who abide wanted the same things --- to make a better life, to live free of fear and want, and to leave for their children a faith that would serve.

A friend and colleague of mine, now in her late 70s, says that what she wants now, when she considers our religion, is “to be able to trust in some profound way that the work will be continued…Not the way I’ve done it.  But that [however it is done] that the work is important enough to be continued.”

That’s it.  Those who came before us, who in their own ways preserved the faith, have paid for us.  They held to our faith and kept it so that we might come to know the joy of its freedom and reason and redemptive good will.  We are paid for. 

That’s it.  We are paid for.  Our responsibility, then, since we cannot pay back the ones who went before us, is to pay for those who will come after us…by our work, by our steadfastness, by our faithfulness, and to protect and help preserve religious freedom where we can with gifts of our substance (we have so much), and our presence, and our love.

I was warned

When we crossed into Transylvania

To be careful of my speech…

Choose Hungarian over Romanian place names

Old enmities preserve old boundaries.

But at that table in my heart, strangers, not quite strangers,

We linger over coffee and sweets

Over brandy and conversation

Slip back and forth among languages

Stumbling, listening hard

Listening with respect, with love

For something not yet clear

But forming as we speak

Our few words in each other’s languages

Yet another language.

History will go on.

Armies will continue to arm

Flags will be hung and hanging pretend to mean freedom

    But could mean so much more.

Victims everywhere will still fall into their places

And, by the light of our matches and cigarettes,

We speak of an earth not yet made but dreamed of

dreamed of here

In the dark around this table

Where faith in life whispers across the borders.

Footnotes from Barbara: The sermon has those Romanian words in it, some of which have diacritical marks I did not put in, and which also need their definitions nearby.

I will try to do the diacritical marks.  I may have to send them to you snail mail and let you figure out how to do it on your computer....? I got the ç okay, but there is no way in my Keycaps to get the "t" and the "i".

Fata frumosa        pretty little girl

Taç  si minca        hush and eat

Draga micuta       dear little one

fi cu minte        be polite

Draga        dear one

The diacritical marks are a comma-like mark under the "c" in "tac", which makes it sound like "tahtch"; and the same comma-like mark under the "t" in "micuta" which makes the "t" sound like "ts", and a little upside down caret over the "i" in "minca."

for your information, the pronunciation for the phrases is:

fah'-tah froo-maw'-sa

tatch she mun'-ka

drah'-gah mee-coo'-tsah

fee coo meen'-teh