Last Sunday, 10 UUCFers shared a pew in the 800-year-old church in our partner village, Szentgerice. The large bell in the tower began ringing 10minutes before the 11:15 service. The villagers began to arrive wearing their Sunday best. The women entered the church first and were seated; the men followed. When people sing in church in Szentgerice they push the sound out from the depths of their diaphragms. The power of their voices made the pews vibrate.

The many Unitarian congregations in Transylvania and Hungary have gone underground and resurfaced a number of times. In the Middle Ages Unitarian churches were closed and the culture and traditions of the faith had to continue in secret. The Nazi occupation followed by the Soviet occupation also meant Unitarian churches were closed and religious leaders and their families were punished or disappeared. The Communists closed Unitarian schools and made them into meeting halls for the Communist Party. The picture of Francis David and other prominent Unitarian figures was covered over by pictures of Stalin's comrades.

One of our guides was a 14th generation Unitarian. Her father had been a Unitarian minister during the Soviet occupation. This meant her mother was not allowed to work as a teacher for seven years, just barely scraping by on the tiny allotment of food and supplies the government allowed the family. The danger of having a Unitarian teaching the young people to think freely and act from their conscience was too great. Somehow after living through centuries of oppression the Unitarian faith, like grass through concrete, lives on in Transylvania.

In 2014, here in the US, it is scary for UUs to say we belong to something. Many of us avoid any sense of being committed to or labeled by a religion. It feels dangerous. No movement can represent everything one person thinks and all that they are. No religion can speak perfectly for anyone. It can be scary to commit to belonging, even to our religion. Perhaps we worry that if we commit to the Unitarian Universalist faith and identity we are claiming all other faiths are not as good, not as true.

I deeply admired the commitment of the Transylvanian Unitarians we met. Of course they are born into their faith, and social traditions make it harder to switch to something else. But there is something more to a faith commitment when it survives centuries of oppression. The Unitarians of our partner church have woven the Unitarian faith into their identity as individuals, families and communities. We UUs in the US can also claim that our faith is true for us, that it keeps us committed to our best selves and the vision of our best world. Committing to the UU faith, weaving it into our identity and our actions does not dismiss or diminish the truths of other believers. It does not trap us forever in one idea of truth or in one way of relating to one another. Our faith is alive and evolving and has been for centuries.

In faith,

P.S. If you want to hear more about the UUCF trip to our partner village, feel free to reach out during coffee hour to one of the people who went on the trip: Rob Barnovsky, Leslie Beard, James Forrest, Cameron Hudson, Karis Tschopp, Dick and Sharon Van Duizend and Dennis and Sue Zimmerman.