The Weight of History

July 30, 2000

As many of you know, Sabrina and I and Steve and K. C. Swallow recently returned from a trip to visit our Unitarian Partner Church in the village of Ujszekely, in the country of Romania. Ujszekely is located in the part of Romania known as Transylvania, an area of magnificent hills and plains which actually has nothing to do with vampires or their legends. In the distance one catches glimpses of the beautiful snow-capped Carpathian Mountains. Once a part of Hungary, Transylvania still has a deep-rooted Hungarian culture; among the ethnic Hungarians living in present day Romania are our Unitarian brothers and sisters, whose religious movement dates to the 16th century. Though officially Romanian, they still see themselves as Hungarian and they still speak their native language. In Hungarian, the part of Romania that they inhabit is known as "Erdeley."

Words cannot describe the beauty of Transylvania. It boasts some of the most fertile farmland in Europe. It is also an extremely poor place. Years of Communist Rule did nothing to advance the fortunes of Romania. It is a country whose more affluent past must be viewed through an overlay of dirt and poverty. One of the cities we visited, Timisoara, was once known as "the Vienna of the East."

Bucharest, the capital of Romania, was once compared to Paris. Today, by western standards, Romania is in some ways a grimy and backward place, though one of astounding beauty and deep history going back to pre-Roman times. Nonetheless, progress has been made since the 1989 revolution which toppled dictator Nicolai Ceaucescu, and, depending on political developments, the potential for future improvement looks promising.

While in Romania, we were privileged to visit with both ethnic Romanian and Hungarian people. Though relations between these two largest ethnic groups--there are also thousands of Gypsies living in Romania--are placid on the surface, it is clear that tensions do exist between them. The mayor of Cluj-Napoca, the geographic capital of Transylvania, and a traditional seat of Hungarian culture (though known to them as Kolosvar), has been particularly vehement in his opposition to the Hungarian minority. Not so subtly, he has attempted to remove from Cluj most traces of its Hungarian ancestry.

As outsiders, we were for the most part spared from these inter-ethnic tensions. All Romanians demonstrate a tremendous hospitality and zest for life; perhaps as a result of their recent history of oppression, they know how to have fun with few resources. They enjoy good food and drink, laughter and company, and are willing to go out of their way to please their western visitors.

While in Ujszekely visiting with our Partner Church minister Zsolt Jakab and his wife Borika, we had an opportunity to briefly observe village life. (By the way, in addition to their two year old son Bence, they now have a six week old boy named Abel, born five weeks before our arrival.) First of all, I should mention that most of the villages in Transylvania remain rather isolated, in large part because of the condition of the roads. They actually defy description, as do most of the cars. A journey which in the United States might take two hours in Romania may take five. To get the full flavor, you need to go there and see for yourself.

Life in the villages remains much as it has been lived for the last several hundred years. Though there is rudimentary electric power and running water (and recently natural gas), village homesteads are probably pretty much unchanged since feudal times. Communism did little to change this pattern. Each home in the village has its own enclosed garden and barnyard, where animals and vegetables, flowers and fruit are cultivated. These little farmsteads produce most of what the village people need in order to survive, as there is very little if any commercial activity. There are also communal lands for use in grazing the villages' milk cows. There seems to be some mechanized farming on the larger plots of land, but much of the work is still done by hand as it has always been done. Gangs of men work the steep hillsides with their scythes, reminiscent of a scene from the 19th century or before in this country.

Zsolt's little farm consists of pigs, cattle, medicinal herbs, cooking herbs, vegetables, fruit trees, including the ubiquitous plum trees from which the native liquor palinka is made, grapes, and flowers. He and his ministerial colleagues complain that they must be both farmers and ministers, and that the farm work leaves little time for study and reflection, and undoubtedly this is the case. Idyllic as it looks, life in the villages is hard, and winters can be brutal.

On July 16, I preached in the beautiful little Unitarian Church in Ujszekely. Zsolt's younger brother Denes, a student with good English skills, served as my translator. He had come from Kolosvar where he lives with his girlfriend Eniko, especially to help out during our visit. Before I ascended the pulpit to preach, Zsolt placed his distinctive ministerial robe--more cape than robe, and heavy with the weight of tradition--on my shoulders, whispering, "Now you are a real Transylvanian Unitarian minister!" In recognition of the millenium, a special communion service was being held in all the Unitarian churches, and Zsolt invited me to participate. It was a very moving experience to hand out the little pieces of Hungarian bread to the congregants, who line up in order of age to receive the communion elements. Zsolt then shared with them the communal cup of wine in a ceremony with roots deep in the Protestant Reformation.

How to describe the experience of being in their church, with its almost five hundred year tradition of Unitarianism? Begin with the two church bells being rung by the official bell ringer, not just once, but three times: on the half hour before the service, the quarter hour before the service, and on the hour. The bell ringer actually ascends the steeple to ring the bells! Following the last bells, we made our ceremonial entrance into the already filled church. Steve and K. C. and Sabrina were given places of honor in the sanctuary. Later there would be an exchange of gifts, and music by a group of young women from the congregation.

All of the singing was acapella, there being no organist this day, and it is obvious that everyone knows the hymns. Zsolt impressed us all with his presence and oratory, though of course we could understand only the small parts that he asked Denes to translate for us. It was obvious that our presence in church was deeply meaningful for the little congregation.

After the service, which lasted a little over an hour, the men of the church retired to Zsolt's back porch--the parsonage is directly next to the church--to count the offering and to finish the communion wine! Steve and I agreed that this was a practice we could easily adopt.

In the afternoon, after an unbelievable multi-coursed lunch, we took a walk through the village, and later that evening we went to visit with Zsolt's parents, Denes and Eva, who visited with us here in Newburyport last summer. Denes Jakab is the minister in Szentabraham (St. Abraham), a village perhaps ten miles away, but which, because of the condition of the roads, takes about forty-five minutes to reach by car. Another wonderful meal ensued, as we reacquainted ourselves with our friends. We visited a new church in the village of Magyarandrasfalva, a joint project of the Unitarians and a Reformed congregation, with wonderful ceiling tiles painted by Zsolt's youngest brother, Andras. We saw the cows being driven home for the night by Gypsy boys, as they have perhaps been driven home for a thousand years.

This is just a beginning of my experiences in Transylvania, but will perhaps give you a flavor. Along with Romania, our trip also included stops in Budapest and Prague. Perhaps because it was my first trip to Europe--let alone Eastern Europe--I came away with a profound sense of what for lack of a better term I will call "the weight of history." I felt it especially in the old synagogue in Budapest, where only a handful of Jews now live in a community which before World War II numbered over 100,000. I felt it in the Hungarian National Gallery, where scenes of pillage and rape and war were the dominant themes in a country which has been overrun numerous times and where Muslim decoration survives in the great national Church of St. Mathias. I felt that weight in Romania, in the ethnic tensions between Hungarians and Romanians, which date back centuries, and in the beautiful run-down buildings of Timisoara and Kolosvar/Cluj-Napoca. I felt it in the great Orthodox churches, and in the Church of St. Nicolas in Prague where Mozart came on several occasions to play the organ. I felt it in Turda, in Transylvania, in the Catholic church where in 1568 David Ferenc (Francis David) argued for religious tolerance for his Unitarian brothers and sisters, and actually won the day, resulting in the famous "Edict of Turda" which made Unitarianism one of the four national religions. (One negative consequence of that Edict was that the Orthodox church, now the majority church of Romania, was not included, a fact which, as you can imagine, has never been forgotten!) And I felt it in the Unitarian Church in Kolosvar, built in the 18th century, which shelters the rock upon which David supposedly stood to preach and from which he converted the entire city to Unitarianism.

I felt that weight of history also in Prague, in Wenseslas Square, where so much of recent history has been acted out, from the annexation of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis in 1939 to the failed Czech uprising in 1968 to the fall of the iron curtain and the "Velvet Revolution" of 1989. Here Soviet tanks rolled to quell an uprising, and here student Jan Palach self-immolated himself in protest of the Soviet rule.

And I felt it, finally, in St. Vitus's Cathedral, twice sacked, first by the Hussites and later by the Calvinists. Begun in the 14th century, the magnificent Cathedral has witnessed an unbelievable cavalcade of history. Hitler heiled! outside its doors in the palace square. It has stood atop its great hill through wars and rumors of wars, and still it stands.

As I have reflected on these places and events and so many more that I encountered during my brief visit in Eastern Europe, it has occurred to me that we are very fortunate in this country not to have that weight of history which is so omni-present there. For there is definitely a negative side to all that history, and we see it still acting itself out in the ethnic conflicts of former Yugoslavia and in other places around the world. Memory there is long--too long, one might say. Here we celebrate our Yankee Homecoming, recalling that a mere three hundred and seventy years have passed since the planting of the Bay Colony. Newburyport is young by old world standards, and perhaps we do not always realize how fortunate we are that this is so. We can celebrate the past in a way that perhaps our European relatives cannot--though the native American ghosts of this place would caution us, also, to view our history through the lens of reality.

In a synagogue next to the old Jewish cemetery in Prague, the names of over 87,000 former Jewish inhabitants of the city's Jewish quarter are inscribed on the walls. It is a grim reminder of our inhumanity towards one another, and of the negative weight of history.

Of course, I will return to Europe, and to Transylvania in particular. And I will cautiously hope for our friends there a brighter future than they have known in the past. The young people we met everywhere give cause for hope, but the weight of history suggests that the human race still has a long, long way to go. The terrible twentieth century is just a blip on the screen of European history, and that is either hopeful or ominous, depending on how you choose to look at it.

Even in our own religious past, many of us find that the weight of history, be it only personal, family history, can be overwhelming. How difficult it can sometimes be to break away and to follow our own spiritual path, to leave an old faith behind and to set forth on our own religious journey. How much more difficult, then, where the weight of history is measured in centuries and millennia.

It is an interesting time to be alive, even to think and speculate about such things, and to be able to observe the hopeful signs that exist among the ashes of the past. More than once in my travels in Eastern Europe I heard the Phoenix myth mentioned as a metaphor for the future.

My prayer for each of us is that we will have an appreciation for the past, for in understanding the past there is perhaps hope for the future, both our own future and that of the whole human race. But I also give thanks that to a large extent I have been spared that profound weight of history under which so many of the world's people labor and suffer. May we give thanks for this great gift of life, for experiences which lift and enlighten, and for friendships across borders of language and culture and geography which make us appreciate it. And for every encounter which takes us beyond ourselves and beyond our own selfish interests, to the experience of oneness with all, let us be ever grateful. So be it. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock