Just before getting back to a regular schedule (with a little less summer spontaneity) I’m taking a trip to Transylvania next week, and Jamie Petts and Skyla King-Christison are coming too. We’ll be attending an International UU Women’s Convocation gathering in Koloszvar with U-U women from many different countries, and making a very short visit to our partner church in Bozod Korispatak. I was the newly-called Associate Minister of the Fellowship in 1995, and also a member of the UUA Board of Trustees, when the Partner Church program began (first called Sister Churches) and my family and I traveled to Transylvania to begin this partnership. Members of the Fellowship have nurtured and continued the partnership for nearly thirty years now, through changes of ministers in both congregations.
I’m so glad that Jamie and Skyla are both interested and able to come to this gathering, as a way of helping sustain this partnership and other of our international UU connections into a new generation. Transylvanian Unitarianism is our ancestral home, our lineage. It was a product of the Reformation in the Catholic Church in the 15th and 16th centuries – it was the so-called Radical Reformation which moved away from trinitarianism. Unitarians in Transylvania (now Hungary and Romania) kept this liberal tradition alive through centuries, through dictatorships and communism, through war and peace. We have much to learn from them today, from the present-day Hungarian Unitarian Church.
This visit is part of that ongoing learning. And, from Sept. 20 – 30 our Partner Church minister, and her son will be visiting us! Rev. Katalin Szasz-Cserey and Mate look forward to being here again (for Mate, his first trip to the US), to spending time in Oregon and with us, and to continue the learning and the partnership. There will be lots of opportunities to get together with them, including an all-Fellowship Hungarian Dinner on Friday Sept. 27.
I’m grateful to worship team member Susan Sanford for hosting the September 8 Sunday Service at the Fellowship, which will include the annual Joining of the Waters ceremony. It will be an intergenerational service. I hope you’ll plan to be there. All are invited to bring a small amount of water from somewhere important to you, to share in the ceremony.
