Pilgrimage

Lyn

Hi! I'm Lyn Cox, a member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Redwood City. In July and August 2002, I made a pilgrimage to Eastern Europe to visit some places important in Unitarian Universalist history and some places that are special to UUFRC.

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Redwood City is the partner church (or sister church) of the Unitarian Fellowship of Szekelyzsombor in the Homorod Valley of Transylvania, which is currently in Romania. The Unitarians of Transylvania are ethnic Hungarians, making them both an ethnic and a religious minority in Romania.

I've shared some pictures on this site, including photos from the International Association for Religious Freedom Congress in Budapest, Unitarian sites in Kolozsvar (known to the Romanians as Cluj), the village of Szekelyzsombor and the surrounding Homorod Valley.

In the cities and the villages, on the hilltops and in the valleys, I could see the after-shocks of a life under totalitarianism and the sudden introduction of another system. Many people I spoke with have mixed feelings about the changes.

I met young ministers who entered seminary just as the changes were taking place, committed to freedom and rooted in their homeland. The young people remember being afraid of being overheard criticizing the state, being afraid of showing off their ethnic and religious pride, being afraid to assemble with their Unitarian youth group. Now that there is freedom, the young people hope that the generation after them will be motivated to learn more than ever, to act in continuing the progress. In the mean time, they hold on while their wages as teachers and ministers shrink in relation to the cost of living.

I met older people who can't afford to live on the pensions they worked so hard to earn under the old system, because sudden inflation and wage gaps have not brought commensurate changes to the pensions. The promises of communism and socialism had been broken, and the older people feared that the promises of capitalism would not bear fruit in their lifetimes.

Village life has been threatened under both systems. Under the old system, the government tried to move people out of the villages to become factory workers. Under the new system, young people leave the villages on their own to find better-paying jobs, in other countries whenever possible.

Among the Unitarians, changes are happening, bidden or unbidden. I think young Unitarians, especially the ministers and youth group leaders, are bringing new ideas to the church. The partnership between Unitarian Universalists from the United States and Unitarians from Hungary and Transylvania has brought good things on both sides of the Atlantic. There are many differences between our movement in the United States and the church in Transylvania. Still, we are their closest cousins in the west, and families should get together every so often.

My pilgrimage to Eastern Europe was my first trip off of the North American continent. Seeing the places that I had studied in Unitarian Universalist history class was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I could see that they really existed, that history happens in a particular place where there are rocks and trees and actual people living there. For the Unitarians of that region, the religious edicts of the sixteenth century are living realities, something they talk about frequently. Events of five hundred years ago still affect their daily lives.

On the other hand, I could see how history moves on. The site of the Diet of Torda, which proclaimed religious freedom, and the pulpit of Francis David, who got the Unitarian movement going in Transylvania, are no longer Unitarian. Smog from communist-era cars sticks to the walls of places that are holy in our memory, adding another layer of tangible history. Theology, too develops. Even in a place where monuments and buildings remind people of their roots and an unbroken line of tradition, theology changes. Francis David passed along a little bit of wisdom: Semper Reformata, always reforming.

Of course, some things change slowly. The men and women sit in separate sections in church. Modern farm equipment has reached Transylvania slowly, and so hay and straw are still heaped in careful stacks rather than roped bales or rolls. Older women are still greeted with "kezicsokolom," which means "I kiss your hand." Still, change happens.

And so I, too, am always re-forming. My pilgrimage changed me in ways that I can't yet articulate. I learned to rely on the kindness of strangers, to experience a lived theology of hospitality, to appreciate the beauty of a land in relationship to which people have long memories. I even learned a little Hungarian. The road to the Homorod Valley is a rough one, but worth it. If you go, please send them my regards, but leave my heart there where you find it.