Mom And Apple Pie

May 8, 2005

Rev. Dr. Frank Carpenter, D.Min.
St. John's Unitarian Universalist Church, Cincinnati, OH

Sermon

One of my memories of my mother was her love of gardening. At the back of the driveway next to the apartment building we lived in-across the driveway was a fire station-was a small garden where she would spend time. The flower I most associate with that garden, without any clear memory, is the common violet, the flower we see around so much to be almost a nuisance in some places.

I was reminded of my mother's love of violets in Rev. Kiss's yard in Naradszentlazlo at our Partner Church in Transylvania two weeks ago. Spring is a little behind there. Violets, poking their purple petals out of the greenery, were just coming out. One of the few words of Hungarian I learned was what they call the violet: "ibolya" Forsythia were just beginning to bloom. The Hungarian word for forsythia was too much for me, literally translating as something like, "flames of sunshine."

We arrived late at night in Szentlazlo, after a five hour drive from the Bucharest airport. It was dark as we drove up the road between the church and the Kiss home. On the hill side just below the church is the cemetery. There was an open grave that night, waiting for the funeral the next day. We asked about who had died. It was an older man whose wife had died two years ago. After that he had taken to drink, and then killed himself. The isolation of the elderly became one of the themes of our visit.

In order to find jobs, the young people are leaving the villages, going to the cities for jobs. Rev. Kiss's three daughters have left, the oldest two Csilla and Tundae are nurses in the nearby city. The youngest has emigrated to San Diego and visited us last month.

This was brought home to me when I visited one of the elderly women in the village with Rev. Kiss. She was very frail. Two years ago someone had burned her barn down, and she said that sometimes people who came to help her stole things. She was practically blind. What was deeply troubling her was that her daughter, who lives in a city a hundred miles away, was urging her to go into a nursing home near where her daughter lived. She did not want to go. Certainly her health suggested such a resolution. For me her struggle with leaving her home was a case of deja vue all over again and it surprised me to find it in that simple village house. From the beginning of my ministry one of the most vexing questions facing families is whether an elderly parent should move to a home for the elderly. There is no simple answer to that one.

The departure of the youth accentuates a sense of sadness about the green hills of Transvlvania. Knowing the youth were leaving the villages for the city and living in flats, made the sight of the drab, rickety high-rises that dominate the Romanian urban landscape more poignant. The old village lifestyle is still much in evidence, as horse drawn carts are as prevalent as cars. Besides horses, we saw farmers using oxen and water buffalo. The modern age intervened in various ways, blue plastic shopping bags strewn along bubbling brooks. Pot holes seemed everywhere, to the point we all laughed when we came upon three men working upon a pot hole and I declaimed that I had always wondered where potholes came from. And there seemed to be acres of desolate industrial plants.

At one point, our driver, sometime tour guide and Unitarian Minister Denes told a story. He has been driving for the Partner Church program since it's beginning fifteen years ago. One of the first American tours was with a minister and members of her congregation. They were, apparently, quite shocked by the primitiveness and poverty of what they saw. Denes's son-his daughter has her own news program on Hungarian televison in Budapest-asked his father about this response of these American people. Primitive, poor!

Denes reviewed Transylvanian history for his son. Tartars and Mongols had marauded through the countryside centuries before. Then the Communists ruled for decades. What could one expect with such a history, Denes asked.

When we visited the Unitarian seminary in Kolosvar, I was given a history of the Unitarian church in Transylvania. [A SHORT HISTORY OF THE UNITARIAN CHURCH IN TRANSYLVANIA (ROUMANIA), Cluj (Kolozsvar) "Pallas", 1937.] The first sentence reads, "Against the Mohammedan Turks Hungary has carried on a successful warfare for more than two hundred years." That was dated 1456. One of the ethnic tensions today in Transylvania is who was there first, Hungarians or Romanians? The Hungarians are not impressed when Romanians claim that they are the descendants of the conquering armies of Rome.

Armies and marauders have been tramping over the green mountains of Transylvania for millennia. My travel reading for the trip is a book entitled MAPS OF TIME [David Christian, Berkeley, 2004]. It is subtitled "A Modern Creation Myth" and gives the scientific account of creation: from the Big Bang to globalization. A long book, not a bed time fable. At some point during the time in Szentlazlo I recall reading that the earliest signs of human settlement in the rise of civilization have been found in the Ukraine, which is just north of Transvlvania. From the get go, armies and marauders have been rampaging through this area. And what do you expect, asks our driver Denes.

What all these passages of armies has meant is that different national and ethnic groups have long spent a great deal of time and energy shoring up their group identity. I think this point is important for understanding our Unitarian Partner Churches. The differences are more than the fact that they are strictly Biblical. One thing which surprised me was to find out that Sunday morning worship is regulated by the bishop, and governed by a book of regulations. This meant that when Tom, Emily, Mary and I sang "Spirit of Life" for them and led them in singing it in Hungarian, it was not during regular Sunday worship, but afterwards.

We may see this as a denial of flexibility and individual freedom. But when you consider the history that Denes reminded his son about on those mountains, maintaining regularity of worship is but one way to strengthen group identity.

Ethnic tensions are far from disappearing. Just up the road from the Kiss's lives a gypsy family, which Tom and I passed when we went to see the spring. In Romania, the Hungarians are midway on the totem pole, Romanians being the dominant ethnic group and gypsies being lowest on the totem pole. As we waited to leave at the Bucharest airport, we read the English version of a local paper. There was an interview with an author about those Romanians who had helped Jews during World War II. The subject of the interview turned to the gypsies, and it appeared this author did not see much difference between Jews and gypsies. While he bemoaned Hitler's final solution approach for Jews, his solution for the gypsies in Romania was to move them out of the country. People do not hesitate to compare the status of gypsies in Central Europe with that of African Americans here. Rev. Kiss is friendly with his gypsies neighbors as they walk by his home in their colorful dress, yet many villagers keep a weary eye out for them.

Given this endless history of group conflict which has so influenced Transylvania, it is good to read the hopes raised by Julia Ward Howe for Mother's Day. "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies." Or, again, "Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience." [LINK] [LINK]

Howe issued her Mother's Day proclamation long after she learned of the brutality of battle during the Civil War, and as the Franco Prussian War waged on somewhere northwest of Transylvania. As I consider the years of carnage which have defined not only the history of 20th century Europe, but of the entire globe in the last century, how words such as genocide have been invented only to be neglected, as we consider the incalculable toll of human suffering that continues to mount daily in our world, it remarkable that we still have those calling to us with a higher vision. Is it still possible that we might end most forms of suffering?

For me it has often been woman who raise this question in our daily lives. One of the memories of my mother was of her work. She was the Executive Director of what was then known as a TB Association, which organizations have since morphed into Lung Associations. She would visit patients at TB sanatoriums and I would occasionally go with her. She died when I was 15, so I have little appreciation of her motivation for this work, but she seem to get great meaning and satisfaction from it. Visiting the sick and suffering was perhaps her calling.

The toll of human suffering, wherever we go is enormous. That is why it is so important that the word compassion is in our Principles and Purposes; the second reads, "Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations;"

I took our reading this morning on the history of our Principles and Purposes from a pamphlet entitled WITH PURPOSE AND PRINCIPLE [Edward A. Frost, WITH PURPOSE AND PRINCIPLE: Essays About The Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism; Boston, skinner House Books, 1998]. Rev. Richard Gilbert wrote the essay on the second Principle and I read from it now:

Compassion is the spiritual value that undergirds Unitarian Universalist ethics. Living compassionately is an act of thanksgiving, flowing form the blessings of life that we wish to share. The overflow of compassion in the individual leads to the quest for equity and justice.