THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
THE LATEST NEWS FROM VLAD DRACUL'S HOME TOWN
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young,
Preached September 14, 2003,
at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu.Most Unitarians, if they know anything about Unitarian history, only know that we came from Transylvania. The only other thing that people know about Transylvania is, indeed, Dracula. For some Unitarians this is an appropriate connection. When you hold up a cross or anything remotely holy, they go 'ah-h-h-h-h," just like "Dracula," This phenomenon is referred to as "cross cringe."
I have just returned from sabbatical, spending a little over two weeks in Transylvania, amongst other places.
Vlad Dracul was the son of a Hungarian king. Papa Dracul's claim to fame rests on two stories. The first is that he eliminated the crime problem by making all crimes capital offenses, that is, punished by death. No one is sure if it actually got rid of crime but all agree that it made a serious reduction in recidivism.
The second story is that he repelled an attack from the east by putting the heads of his enemies on poles in the pass through which the invading armies were to have to come. Vlad, son of Dracul, was given a governorship of an area in Transylvania and he used his father's impaling trick on his local adversaries. This was not cool. After two years, he was removed and imprisoned. It is said that he continued his impaling ways on the rats in his prison cell. Hence, he has come down to us as "Vlad, the Impaler" and it is he who was ostensibly the model for Bram Stoker's "Dracula."
There is a supreme irony going on in Transylvania. After more than ten years of freedom from Communist rule (or at least from the rule of Ceausescu), the Unitarian churches are still in the process of trying to recover from that extended forty or so years of suppression. And they were indeed suppressed. The Unitarians in Transylvania are ethnic Hungarians. The section of Romania that is referred to as Transylvania was taken from Hungary at the end of the first World War and attached to this somewhat strange political entity now called Romania. They have remained a suppressed minority.
The irony is that we western Unitarians look back at the Edict of Torda, 1568, as a watershed event in the history of religious freedom. Yet, most of what it symbolizes for us has not been characteristic of Transylvanian Unitarianism.
A major piece of that heritage was the individual choice in religious belief. This is the recognition that if God exists he knows whether you are putting him on. Therefore it is only what you really do believe that makes any difference; not what the authorities say you are supposed to believe. Even if by some miracle they happen to be right, they are still suborning perjury. They are trying to get you to lie.
The irony is that Unitarianism in Transylvania has become an inherited faith. They are virtually all born Unitarians. I asked one of the ministers there, "Are there any non-Hungarian-ethnic members of Unitarian churches?" She said yes, she had heard of a few, out of more than 80 congregations.
A second piece of the heritage we look back to is that religious communities should be lay-led congregations. That is to say, religious authority resides with "the people," not with the clergy and the hierarchy.
The irony here is that Transylvanian Unitarianism is almost entirely a clergy-led denomination. This is not too surprising in that it is also almost entirely a village phenomenon. Most of the Unitarian congregations are not in the towns and cities. They are in the small villages (about which I'll talk a little more in a moment). In the villages, the clergy were, and to a great extent still are, the only educated professionals. And so there has been a tendency to defer and allow-- indeed, at least passively require--the minister to be "the leader." He or she is expected to do and to run everything. This tends to reinforce the passivity learned under Communism.
Having said this I have to also note that every president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, our U.S. denomination, has been a minister, although there is no such requirement. Further, all Unitarian ministers have automatic delegate status at the General Assembly, the delegate assembly of the denomination. It is very easy to over-emphasize the degree to which we have learned this congregational polity lesson and actually put it into practice. However, every time the denominational headquarters in Boston tries to tell congregations what to do we suddenly rediscover congregation polity, and suggest that they might take a vacation.
This concept of Congregational Polity, is one of the major parts of that idea of religious freedom that has come down to us from Transylvanian Unitarianism. Again, the irony is that the locus of authority in Transylvania Unitarianism is the Bishop.
This is slowly changing in that the Bishop is now actually elected. However, the Bishop and his immediately appointed denominational officers continue, essentially, to run things. There is a Consistory, something analogous to our denomination's Board of Trustees, that is supposedly the decision making body at the denominational level. However, the Consistory is routinely ignored. They make decisions and they are not carried out. They ask for financial reports, but the reports bear little relationship to the financial realities going on. And when they complain about this they are simply ignored. Governance is not transparent.
There is, for example, a sizable chunk of downtown Koloshvar property owned by the denomination that is leased at a fraction of market value.
As the younger ministers and younger members of the congregations have come to political consciousness since the exit of the Communist regime, they have begun to raise questions. Having not experienced that two generations of domination and passivity, they are not happy with the current state of affairs. My experience of them in traveling around and talking with lots of folk was that they are ticked. So maybe some change will continue to happen.
The major challenge facing them is a challenge that is shared in many places all around our globe. It is a challenge I think those of us who live in the West do not -- maybe without an awful lot of help, cannot--fully appreciate. For generation after generation, the center of the life of much of the world has been the village. The village is essentially self-sufficient. The food that is eaten is largely raised there. People are in face-to-face relationships. They only deal with those city folk off when they absolutely have to. The people in the Transylvanian villages like Meskö (pronounced Mes-ker) where I spent part of the time I was there, are self-sufficient agricultural people. They take their surplus to the market in Torda to sell. But frankly, if the roads got closed the citizens of Meskö would survive just fine. This is essentially a subsistence, village market economy.
In the whole country of Romania there are only a handful of places that you would call cities; the rest are, at best, towns. There was an old joke in California that catches some of the feel of these villages. The old joke was that in the Sacramento delta area there was a small village that survived by taking in each other's laundry. It's almost like that.
Anyone who gets a job does not return to the village. The only place to get an education beyond about the sixth grade is to go into town and anybody who gets an education beyond high school doesn't come back to the village.
In fact, U.S. Unitarians are sponsoring a scholarship program to provide education for the best and brightest of Unitarian kids out in the villages. We thought we were doing them a great favor. Well, we are doing a great favor to the kids who get these scholarships, but we were doing no favor at all to the villages. They have not returned to live in the villages, and will not.
The reality is that this social institution is dying, will die, is passing out of existence.
If we think we can assist and somehow preserve this very ancient social institution, we are mistaken. This is not where the world is going to, from one end of this old earth to the other. It's not going to happen. If the cultural fabric is to survive, the village as a social institution must change. The younger Unitarians know this. Their elders are slower to "get it."
In some ways, the Transylvanian Unitarians are an indigenous people. They refer to themselves as the Seckley (pronounced Say-kay) people. They came with the Huns, hundreds of years ago. They have maintained the Seckley culture. You can tell from village to village what the ethnic makeup of those villages are from the gates on the front of the houses, the way the houses are built, the style of architecture. It is still just as consistent as can be. And they are dying. They are ceasing to exist, as is the case with so many indigenous peoples around the world.
The old village economy is not going to be returned to and its vestiges cannot survive. The old Communist central planned economy cannot be returned to either, yet the passivity that it bred remains in those who grew up under it.
The desperate need of our Unitarian congregations out in the villages is economic development. They need to make the leap of imagination that they cannot continue to be subsistence farmers. They need to find the capital and the organizational skills to make this happen. In a few places amongst our Transylvanian Unitarian churches this is beginning to occur. They need the will and the expertise to make economic development serve the needs of those villages and see them through the transition to whatever it is that lies the other side of the old village social model.
Current dairy farming practices do not meet European Union standards, so their products are not exportable. One U.S. Partner Church has helped develop a model dairy farm being put together out in eastern Transylvania. Kari Bartha has put together a foundation and is getting grants and buying land. They did their first project this past May. They brought folk musicians from all over Transylvania together for a successful mountainside concert at the foot of the Torda Gorge celebrating Hungarian folk culture. His dream is to create tourism. It may be one of the first places to begin to make income that will enable the village to shift the economic foundation of its communal life.
They need political and ethnic coalition-building. They have got to make coalition with Romanian people who have been political enemies for generations. The government plays one ethnic group off against the other to maintain its political control. And the only way that the kinds of changes out in the villages and small towns are going to happen is by Romanians who are Reformed Protestants, (Eastern) Orthodox Christian, and Unitarian becoming political allies and cooperating together. They must break up this ethnic-religious division that has so characterized the life of Transylvania. They need to create conspiracies of common interest. They need the creation of grassroots social institutions, non-governmental organizations. Communism left none of those behind. There is virtually no such thing as voluntary organizations within that culture outside of the ethnically-defined religious communities.
One of the hopes is that they can achieve political and economic development without having to go through all of the stages that the rest of the industrialized world had to go through. They don't want to go through the most polluting aspects of the development of industrial civilization. They want to be able to leapfrog over all of that mess. This will require, among other things, that the West share manufacturing methodologies and techniques. It means a kind of help for which Western corporations are not famous. Can they pull it off? I don't know. But at least they are aware of the challenges before them and are talking in those terms.
But the disappointing thing is that so many of their elders, those over 35, really don't get it. They have lived so long under somebody's boot that they imagine that they can go back to the way things were in 1919. And, at the same time, they behave as if, like under Communism, the government will do it.
Religiously, they need, want, are willing to learn, how to reach out beyond the limits of ethnic Hungarians and actually begin being evangelical; converting people to Unitarianism so that the Unitarianism in Transylvania begins to become more of a chosen faith.
Transylvanian Unitarianism remains a heresy. It is theist. They do trust God and they refuse to define God. Some of you may recall Rev. Kinga-Reka Seckley, the very first of the Unitarian ministers from Transylvania who came to speak here. She has a delightful young son and is expecting another addition to the family in December. Fortunately, they have a new parsonage where they actually will be able to stay warm in the wintertime. When she preached here she made several references to God. Several of you came up to her afterwards and asked her to define "God." She was wearing that incredible black brocade robe that looks like all it needed was a standup collar and she would look just like Bela Lugosi. She looked down at her questioners and said, "No."
Theologically, they don't seem interested in our arguments about whether "He," "She," or "It" exists or not. And, curiously enough, Hungarian has only one word for all three of those personal pronouns.
Secondly, they hold an adoptionist Christology. They hold that "the God is One." (Which, as I understand it, is the correct English translation of the Hungarian, Egy Az Isten.) There is no way in Hungarian to turn the word "God" into God's name. The symbol of transcendence is one. And Jesus is not one of them. Though the nature of that which transcends human awareness was revealed through his life and teachings, Jesus is/was a human being.
The third piece of their heresy is what makes Transylvanian Unitarianism have the same difficulty that U.S. UUs have in trying to interpret ourselves to the Christian culture around us. That is that the religious community is understood not to be founded upon religious opinions, doctrines, creeds. It is founded upon something quite different. Within the religious vocabulary of western Christendom it is exceedingly hard to articulate. In this understanding, the foundation of the religious community is community itself. It is the willingness and the commitment to choose a quality of relationship within the connections that we share together. It is still a heresy.
The heritage of Unitarianism that comes down to us from Transylvania insists that this is not what the religious enterprise is about. As I said above, if God exists he knows whether you are putting him on. It is not coercible. It is not fake-able. You can't even do it just to get the goodies of being able to go someplace better after this life is over. It has to do with how we choose to actually live with one another in the day-to-day, face-to-face relationships and social institutions in which we are all embedded. It is easy to reduce that to ethics. This, the heritage refused to do. It did not say, "Religion is just a matter of doing good." It is a deeply personal, deeply interpersonal relationally-based understanding of what it means to be a human being.
The winds of change are blowing, but whether those changes that must happen can happen without some real wrenching is an open question.
It is a country of much beauty, many wonderful gentle people and an incredibly complex history.
I can't wait to go again !