Reading: written and presented by Anne Sharpe
I will share a brief overview of this church’s Partner Church Committee mission and objectives.
The Partner Church Committee’s mission is to develop a long-term mutually supportive relationship with our fellow Unitarians in Transylvania, Romania, and in the Khasi Hills of India.
The Committee’s objectives are
• To strengthen the bonds of friendship between members of our congregation and the people of Szekelykal, Romania, and Nongtalang, India.
• To promote an exchange of people and ideas
• To provide funds and other forms of assistance to help the Unitarian Churches of Szekelykal and Nongtalang.
• To provide funds and other forms of assistance to both village communities to improve the quality of life of all inhabitants and foster economic development by enhancing the educational opportunities in both village communities
• To improve the health and well being of the people in each community
• To deepen our understanding of the roots of our faith
• To foster mutual tolerance and respect among ethic and religious groups in Transylvania and the Khasi Hills
• To strengthen human rights and religious freedom in Romania and India
Reading: written and presented by Peggy Steele
The North American UU Partner Church Council was founded in June 1993 to focus the energy generated by dozens of individual UU congregations which had formed partnerships with Unitarian churches in central Europe following the collapse of communism in 1989. The Partner Church Council now supports the partnerships of hundreds of North American UU congregations with churches in Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Khasi Hills of India, the Philippines, and Poland. For almost 20 years UUs in the US and Canada have been helping to build a global community of Unitarian Universalists.
Our Urbana congregation was among the early members of the worldwide partner church movement. In 1992 Rev. William Saunders, accompanied by Gail Hueting, Jim Heins, Claudia Gross, and David Gross, visited the Unitarian church in the village of Szekelykal -- located in the Transylvanian region of Romania -- to initiate the relationship between our two churches which continues to this day.
Four years later Brigitte Pieke, another member of our congregation, visited Szekelykal with her daughter Samantha. They were warmly welcomed. Brigitte described the village in 1996 as having dirt roads, cows going back and forth to pasture in the morning and afternoon, chickens and horses everywhere, two telephones in the entire village, beautiful handcrafts, and wonderfully warm and caring people. A third visit was made by Axel in 2004 while he was on sabbatical. We hope another Urbana UU can visit Szekelykal soon, but there are no definite plans as yet.
Our friendship with the Unitarians of Szekelykal has grown over the years through the sharing of information, gifts, and photographs. Email has been the primary form of communication until recently when we’ve also been able to connect via telephone. Szekelykal is in the ethnically Hungarian region of Romania. Since none of our local Partner Church Committee members speak Hungarian, we are grateful for the help of Steve and AJ Herzog who have been our translators.
Generous financial donations from our congregation have helped the church in Szekelykal remain a viable and vital center for spiritual growth in the community. Over the years we have helped with many building and repair projects, including installation of a furnace in the minister’s house, construction of new pews in the church building, and electrification of the church bell.
In addition to visiting Romania during his 2004 sabbatical, Axel also traveled to the Khasi Hills in northeast India, on the northern border of Bangladesh. The Khasi Hills are home to almost 40 Unitarian churches and fellowships, some of which were established as long ago as the late 1800’s. In fact, the 125th anniversary of the Unitarian church in the Khasi Hills takes place in 2013. There are about 10,000 Unitarians in the area currently. This remote area is exquisitely beautiful with peaks, gorges, waterfalls, and orchids. But many of the people live well below the global poverty level.
Deeply impressed by what he experienced there, Axel encouraged our church to consider establishing a second partner church relationship with a village in the Khasi Hills. Soon we adopted the church in the village of Nongtalang, one of several Khasi churches overseen by district minister Rev. Helpme Mohrman. We were delighted when Helpme was able to visit us here in Urbana a couple of years ago.
Nongtalang is a frontier town right on the border between India and Bangladesh. Our partnership with Unitarians in Nongtalang helps to support the church and the village school they run. We have assisted them with finishing the school building, provided scholarship money for students, helped them to obtain computer equipment, and donated blankets for all members of the congregation. Our most recent monetary donation enabled the congregation to purchase electronic musical equipment for the church and a new phone.
Earlier this year, we supported a community capacity building workshop for the entire village of Nongtalang. Our own Brigitte Pieke and Peri Ceperley were very interested observers at the workshop. Being there helped them to gain important insights into life in the community and to become friends with many Nongtalang Unitarians.
The partner church relationship is not meant to be a purely monetary involvement or to create a financial dependency. It does, however, offer our congregation an opportunity to provide very real and much needed assistance to UUs in other parts of the world. It also offers the less tangible opportunity to open our eyes to the experience of UUism around the globe and to enjoy growing friendships with other UUs.
A Bridge Around the World
A Sermon Delivered on December 4, 2011
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
In my study at home, on a bulletin board over my desk, I have a favorite quote from the Tao te Ching posted. It says:
No need to leave one’s doorstep in order to see the world.
No need to run to the window to observe Heaven’s ways.
The more one rushes about the less one sees and knows.
The further and faster one travels the more one flees the Center.
The Sage is one who has arrived without ever having departed…
I have it posted there, because the truth conveyed in this passage is something of which I need to be reminded, again and again.
For a good portion of my life, I have wanted to travel far and wide in order to see the world and observe Heaven’s ways.
When I was a teenager living in Germany, I remember having a pressing desire to get out of town and away from home, as often and as thoroughly as possible. My best friend, Oliver, and I would lace up our heavy hiking boots, hoist bulky backpacks, hitchhike out into the countryside, and hike through the forests of southern Germany, or France. At the end of the day we would pitch up our tent in a remote and peaceful clearing, a solitary space we had all for ourselves.
Our travels were adventures. We felt like explorers in unfamiliar, uncharted territories. We savored a sense of wilderness and the unknown.
Of course, this was not always easy. Germany is, after all, one the most densely populated countries in Europe. So with great regularity, our experience of wilderness and adventure would be disrupted by senior citizens going for a stroll, or families with young children enjoying a Sunday picnic in the woods.
These more casual travelers struck us as ugly tourists, who spoiled our dreams of wilderness and adventure. They seemed interested only in the easy and superficial enjoyments of the outdoors, whereas we were committed to a deeper and more demanding experience of exploration.
Contrasting the approach of the explorer and the tourist, the author Paul Fussel writes, “If the explorer moves toward risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliché.” (“The Stationary Tourist” Harper’s Magazine, Apr. 1979)
Now, in hindsight, many years later, I imagine my friend and I were actually more tourist than explorer ourselves. And to any objective observer, our adventures would hardly qualify as an exploration of uncharted territory.
But nevertheless - we did experience a taste of something that felt risky, formless, and unknown. Memories of these teenage travels - the sights we saw, the people we met - remain with me to this day.
* * *
Our travels remind me that the experience of exploration - an appreciation of the unknown - can be found remarkably close to home. And similarly, it is possible to find something familiar and re-assuring in places very far from home.
Finding something familiar within the unfamiliar, and discovering the unknown in midst of what seems well-known - these are profound religious experiences with which women and men have grappled for millennia - but these insights and experiences take on new meaning today, in a world that is growing ever smaller.
In a book entitled One World - The Ethics of Globalization, the Australian ethicist Peter Singer writes,
“For most of the eons of human existence, people living only short distances apart might as well, for all the difference they made to each other’s lives, have been living in separate worlds. A river, a mountain range, a stretch of forest or desert, a sea - these were enough to cut people off from each other. Over the past few centuries the isolation has dwindled, slowly at first, then with increasing rapidity. Now people on opposite side of the world are linked in ways previously unimaginable…
As technology has overcome distance, economic globalization has followed. In London supermarkets, fresh vegetables flown in from Kenya are offered for sale alongside those from nearby Kent. Planes bring illegal immigrants seeking to better their own lives in a country they have long admired. In the wrong hands the same planes become lethal weapons that bring down tall buildings. Instant digital communication spreads the nature of international trade from actual goods to skilled services. At the end of a day’s trading, a bank based in New York may have its accounts balanced by clerks living in India.” (p. 9, 10)
* * *
As our technology advances, the world is growing smaller. And this has both ethical and spiritual implications. Globalization is creating new dimensions of economic opportunity and exploitation, new alliances that can foster political polarization and warfare, or peaceful and creative cooperation.
Peter Singer says the success or failure of globalization hinges on “how we respond ethically to the idea that we live in one world.” (p. 13) And while the United States has been quite successful in finding ways to profit from the global economy, there is a price to paid.
As Singer points out: “Today… our greenhouse gas emissions alter the climate under which everyone in the world lives. Our purchases of oil, diamonds, and timber make it possible for dictators to buy more weapons and to strengthen their hold on the countries they tyrannize.” (p. 197)
More and more aspects of our lives - the natural resources we use, the goods we buy - contribute to global problems that demand global solutions. That is why we desperately need an ethical foundation for world community. The current urgency to cultivate a global ethic is a recent phenomenon in human history. But our awareness of this issue is ancient.
In the fifth century BCE , the Chinese philosopher Mozi was appalled at the brutality and destruction of war in his era. He wondered: “What is the way of universal love and mutual benefit?” The answer he found is that one must regard other people’s countries as one’s own. The ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes, in the fourth century BCE, envisioned a similar global ethic. When asked what country he came from, he replied: “I am a citizen of the world.”
* * *
Economically, environmentally, ethically and philosophically - we are not Americans or Romanians, Germans or Indians. We are all citizen of the world.
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. Injustice anywhere affects justice everywhere. This is a truth that carries religious meaning as well - as Dr. King demonstrated in word and deed.
We are profoundly connected with the world around us, and with people who live on the far side of the globe. This is a universal truth. The efforts of our Partner Church program help bring this truth home.
Building friendships with our Unitarian brother and sisters in Szekelykal and Nongtalang, provides us with opportunities to see corners of the world that may seem like uncharted territory to us. That’s certainly the experience I had when I visited them.
I had a distinct sense of the unknown, when I stood on the platform of a small train station in Romania, in a town whose name I couldn’t pronounce, puzzling over train schedules and ticket stubs, trying to make sense of my Transylvanian city destinations, which sometimes were written in Hungarian and sometimes in Romanian, and could be reached only by a combination of trains, none of which seemed to run on time.
I had a similar feeling, as I was wandering through the utterly unfamiliar busy streets of Shillong in northeastern India, trying to make sense of street signs written in Khasi or Hindi, hoping to find the way to the Unitarian church.
I certainly felt like an explorer on a risky pilgrimage through the unknown. Though compared to more experienced traveler, and probably in the eyes of the locals, I was simply another tourist.
Once I reached the Unitarian Church, however, I was suddenly neither tourist nor explorer, but rather an honored guest, a welcome friend. And in the midst of languages I couldn’t understand, and customs that initially seemed strange - I found a deep kinship of spirit.
Despite the unfamiliar sounds and sights of Khasi and Hungarian language and culture - I found in our common religious language, common religious history and common religious practice, an amazing avenue of connection.
As the Unitarians there opened their homes to me, shared meals, and told stories of their lives, their challenges and their joys - I found a religious home away from home. The people I met, their struggles and their stories, inspire me to this day.
* * *
We don’t need to leave our doorstep in order to see the world.
We don’t need to run to the window to observe Heaven’s ways.
The whole world is within reach right here and right now.
We are all citizens of the world,
inextricably bound to brothers and sisters around the globe,
their health and happiness inescapably tied to our own.
May we do our part to deepen friendship and understanding,
so we may find the wisdom and courage,
to help build a better world.
Amen.
