A Sermon for Transylvania

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Created on Sunday, 20 September 2009 01:00

Written by Gary E. Smith

I renewed my passport this week.  And, oh how I hated to mail the old one away.  Stockholm, St. Kitt’s, Antigua, London, Rome, Bucharest, Munich, Edinburgh, Prague, Tel Aviv, Paris, all these names stamped into the book, all the memories of ten years of travel, and memories in the passport for ten years before that, too, and all the stamps of places around the world.  Lots of stories, especially the last time I traveled abroad, late last October.  For as long as it’s existed, I’ve been on the watch list.  Gary Smith.  The ticketing agent has needed to make a special call while I wait or the agent needs to get a superior.  I could never print a boarding pass on my computer.  Check in at the airport, I was told.  Returning from Tel Aviv last Halloween, the immigration officer at Kennedy Airport looked at my passport and said, “Follow me.  We’ve been looking for you.”

I was led to a room from which I was not expected to exit until they told me, fingerprinted, my eyes were scanned, I was photographed.  After what seemed like a long wait, an officer asked if I was ever delayed in airports.  “Oh, yes,” I said.  “Well, we’re looking for a Gary Smith, same birth date, similar sequence of some numbers in your social security identification.  You won’t have trouble anymore.” The stamp with homeland security admitting me into New York on October 31, 2008 holds a memory.

It was not until I moved to Concord, a year and a half into my ministry with you, that I had need of a passport at all.  I simply hadn’t traveled outside this country, there being the three items of inclination, resources and opportunity, but as we heard Winslow tell us earlier, I was added to a delegation traveling to Romania shortly after the fall of Ceausescu, in the last days of 1989.  Traveling with then President of the U.U.A. Bill Schulz and Congressman Chet Atkins, and many others, we were in Bucharest when the fires were still burning, when the bullet holes in the buildings were still fresh, when the candles were still lit on street corners where people had fallen, where the graves were freshly dug.  This is only to say that my first need of a passport, an urgent need for an expedited passport at that, was not for a Grand Tour of the Continent, London, Paris and Rome, was not to visit some lovely Caribbean island, but was for a trip to Bucharest into a darkened runway to be met by armed soldiers.

We traveled by overnight train to Kolojvar in Transylvania, a second class sleeper car, triple bunks, the toilet a hole cut in the floor.  We were told that the Securitate had simply removed their uniforms but were present in the streets.  The villagers were hopeful but scared.  Will you understand if I told you I brought new definition to wide-eyed?  We had adventures; we met scores of fascinating people with fascinating stories.  My world was opening.

I won’t turn this into a travelogue, you will be relieved to hear, and I’m aware of the time so I will not make this a full-scale sermon.  Let me say that I’ve returned to Transylvania five more times since then, once with my daughter in 1997 to accompany Zsuzsanna Szombatfalvi, the daughter of the minister there, back here to Concord, where she lived with Eliz and me for a year, where she attended Concord-Carlisle High School, where she insinuated herself into my heart and into the hearts of many of you.

In Zsuzsanna’s bedroom in our home, she had a telephone, a luxury never afforded our own children while they were growing up. Sometimes in the evening, we could hear her talking, and then, in a little bit, she would come downstairs and tell us she had called my mother, then in a nursing home in Waterville, Maine, two lonely people, one with a Maine accent, one with a Hungarian accent, just loving each other.  She called my mother “Nana”, and my mother’s picture hung on the wall in her family’s home in Szekeleykeresztur for a long time.  I saw it there.

We returned in 2005 for Zsuzsanna’s wedding.  Her family embraced us as their family.  We sat at the reception’s head table with her parents.  I call her father my brother, and though we are not in close contact, I think of him and of Anna often and love them so.  Rodger Mattlage is telling them this today in words I gave him to read.

I could not have imagined when I was a child that when I grew up I would have a family and a congregation and a village in the most rural part of Romania, literally half a world away, who would love us, who would have our pictures on their walls, who would have our tears on their streets.  It would have been unimaginable.

Those of us who have entered into the hospitality of this Transylvanian extended family of ours have often been at a loss to find words for the experience, we have been unable to capture the grandeur of their hospitality, how we who have so much have found ourselves so humbled by receiving the shirt off someone’s back, the dish off their shelf, the food off their tables.  The choir will remember on one trip when they literally hired a brass band and then we danced together on a transcendent hillside in the summer evening’s fading light.

We are all more human than otherwise.
The human race—in color white and black, red, yellow, brown,
A vast rainbow bursting into view.

Yet for all—blood is red, the sky is blue, the earth brown, the night dark.
We are all more human than otherwise.

In size and shape—a varied pattern of tall and short,
Slim and stout, lovely and plain.
Yet for all there are fingers to touch, hearts to break,
Eyes to cry, ears to hear, mouths to speak.

In tongue a tower of Babel, a great jumble of voices
Grasping for words, groping for ways to say
Love, peace, pity, hope.
We are all more human than otherwise.

Faiths compete, claiming the one true way,
Saviors abound, pointing to salvation.
Not all can be right, not one—
They unite only in the urge to search.

Boundaries divide us, lines drawn to celebrate our diversity,…
Yet a mother’s grief, a father’s love, a child’s happy cry,
A musician’s sound, an artist’s stroke.
Batter the boundaries, shatter the walls.

Strength and weakness, arrogance and humility,
Confidence and fear, live together in each one of us.
Reminding us of freedom and finitude—
These we share in our common humanity.

We are all more human than otherwise.

 

The words are Richard Gilbert’s, and, as I read them this week, I thought of Szekelykerezstur, of the Szombatfalvi family, of Reka Gagyi, of the recent Youth trip, of the words we’d hear and the songs we’d sing today.  In our benediction we say “Go out into the world in peace,” and the “peace” part is good, but for me today, it is enough to remind myself what it means for me, for us, simply to go out, not stay here, to go out, not stay home, to go out into the world, not remain with only those like us, to go out into the world.

Go out into the world.  My passport stands for something.  I’ve met strangers.  I’ve learned to say “please”, “thank you”, “two scoops” and “help” in many languages.  I’ve learned to receive the hospitality of others, on more than one occasion been given my host’s bed.  I could go to Transylvania and stay in a hotel and eat in restaurants and hit the tourist spots, like Dracula’s Castle.  That would be a trip and I would be a tourist.

What you are hearing today is that it is possible to travel and be a pilgrim and call it a pilgrimage.  Webster has three definitions of pilgrim.  One, yes, those who settled in Plymouth in 1620.  Two, one who journeys in foreign lands.  We’re getting closer.  Three, this is it.  One who travels to a shrine or holy place.

Please do not misunderstand me.  I am not making Szekeleykeresztur a Brigadoon or a Shangrila (though I might have in the past).  Just as here, motorcycles go too fast, alcohol is too available to minors, there is bigotry to Gypsies and gays.  We are all more human than otherwise.

If we choose, our trips there can be pilgrimages if we find something holy.  Connor found the holy in hard work and music.  Jeanine found the holy in the kindness of others.  They might have other words, but it is in the awareness and in the gratitude that otherwise normal moments become sacred.  Here is what happened to me.

This was a visit sixteen years ago, this week.  Our small delegation was at the end of a day of visiting villages, traveling in a van with no shocks and little evidence of brakes.  We had sipped plum brandy and eaten sweet cakes, it is getting dark, the road is very bumpy, we are tired and ready for dinner and bed.  But we had one more stop.  It is nearly dark.  Against the fading light, we can see the steeple of the Unitarian church in this Unitarian village.  By the time we reached the village it was dark, and what lights there were came from tightly shuttered windows.

We pulled up to the parsonage, the driver got out, came around the car in the well-rehearsed routine we knew so well, and slid open the door for us to get out.  We could not see the hand in front of our face, a few shadows and the closed large gate leading into the minister’s yard.  There in a moment of carsickness and exhaustion and tested patience, there out of the darkness and an absolute silence came a moment that for me was one of the most holy of my life.

There on a three mile dead end road in northwest Romania in a place called Transylvania, at the end of a very long day when I wanted most to be under some covers fast asleep came a moment that knocked me to my knees.  Out of the darkness and the silence came the sound of a kazoo.  The music was “Spirit of Life, Come Unto Me,” the song we sing each week before the prayer.

Now the gate is open and the light spills out of the kitchen door unto the sweet face of an eight year old girl, the minister’s daughter, who was greeting us with the song taught to her by Bedford friends three months earlier.  The Bedford congregation had brought kazoos for every child in the village and though they could not share language, they could share music.  We are all more human than otherwise.

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