by Rev. József Kászoni, Guest Minister

A sermon given July 8, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Good morning! It is good to see so many of you this morning in church. Thank you for coming, and for listening to my sermon even though it will be perhaps a little strange to you with my pronunciation and my accent.

Ever since I can remember I have wanted to come and visit your very beautiful and really huge country, the United States of America. But I was born in a very strict and very Communist-ruled country called Romania, in the northwest part of Romania which is known as Transylvania. Here Unitarianism was founded and it was proclaimed for the first time in the whole world the act of toleration and religious freedom in the year of 1568, at a place named Torda.

Because I was not allowed to travel to North America after I completed my high school studies, I started my spiritual journey reading everything I was able to read about your beautiful country. I started reading the classical American writers like: Theodor Dreiser, Jack London, Ernst Hemingway, Jack Kerouac and many others. I read each of these works in my mother tongue, because at that time I did not know any English.

When I entered seminary studies, I discovered that other Unitarians were traveling to the United States in the 1920s from Transylvania and Hungary. This is how I happened to learn about a Unitarian minister who lived and traveled in the latter half of the 1920s to the Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California. (You may also remember this is where Tom Disrud and Marilyn Sewell graduated.) This minister’s name was Ferenc Balazs and he has become a hero for me.

After reading about Ferenc Balazs, I decided that I would come here and follow his path someday, when the political climate changed in Romania. I passed an entry examination for a scholarship in 1977, with the hope that pretty soon I would be able to study abroad. I still did not think it would be possible for me to travel to this country, yet I wanted to come. Then after the so-called Romanian revolution, in the year of 1989, it became possible for me to study outside of Romania. The very next year, I went to Manchester, United Kingdom where I spent a school year at the Unitarian Seminary. I was 39 years old, and that was when I started to learn English as a foreign language.

I wanted to celebrate my 40th birthday in this country, but I did not get here until the year of 1992, when I was 41. That was the first time I traveled to the United States and this is my eleventh trip in 2007.

And now let me share with you the work and the life of Ferenc Balazs, my hero as I said before, whom we remember this year on the 70th anniversary of his death.

Ferenc Balazs, 1901 – 1937

Although he was born in 1901, Ferenc Balazs was a thoroughly 20^th century Unitarian minister.  His work and ideas were remarkably ahead of his time.  Consider that in 1901 Leo Tolstoy was on his death bed, and Albert Schweitzer had not yet moved to the African jungles.

There were three significant outside influences on Ferenc Balazs’ life and work.  The first was World War I, which changed the lives of every Transylvanian.  At the end of the war Transylvania was given to Romania to fulfill a secret agreement that was made during the war between the Allies and Romania.  Over night all Transylvanians became immigrants in Romania, without ever leaving their homes.  The second influence was his working with, and marrying, quite a unique foreigner, the American Unitarian, Christine Frederiksen.  And the third was that early in his childhood Ferenc’s lungs were infected with tuberculosis.  The doctors recommended that it would be healthier for him to live in the countryside.  There were two possible jobs for “persons wearing pantaloons” (as intellectuals were called then, in the villages):  The superintendent for a wealthy landowner, and the minister.  Ferenc Balazs decided:  “Better in the service of the village, than in that of the count.”

After preparing for the ministry in the Kolozsvar seminary, Ferenc received two scholarships to study abroad.  The first was for two years in Britain, and the second for another two years in the U.S.  He completed a degree in theology as well as learning all he could about the American settlement house movement, and Danish agricultural and educational co-operatives.  He spent a fifth year returning home across the Pacific Ocean and studying Asian village life.  His memories of the remarkable journey are in his book Around the World.

Many of his contemporaries also made trips abroad – some studied in technical schools, some went to admire the Italian monument.  Those who got as far as Paris thought of themselves as Europeans, but Ferenc Balazs did not identify with Europe or America.  He did not like industrial society.  He wrote about the London slums:  “All that richness, welfare, power and glory – is it worth the misery and torture of so many millions?”  He spoke out against the inhumane American assembly line labor:  “In the ironing department of the washing factory, one worker operates two machines at the same time…hour after hour he spins around, raising his arms, while pushing handles with his leg, as if it, too, is a machine…  What is this forced rhythm good for?”

During his years in the U.S., he organized peace caravans that traveled from town to town – presenting speeches, preaching, dancing, singing folk songs, and speaking out for the rights of black Americans. 

He arrived in Asia as a representative of the Youth Congress for World Peace.  In Japan he was fascinated by people who lived in wooden houses and walked on “cat-back-shaped” bridges, “with their souls as balanced as the sacred mountain Fujiyama.”  There he joined Kagawa in declaring the importance of the universal, the human, as well as peace.

On the Korean radio he shared folk songs from home.

When he experienced the giant Chinese state, he spoke out against the missionaries who had crippled the souls of the Asians by teaching them unsuitable colonial religious dogmas in Portuguese or German, and having them wear trousers, “instead of” – as Ferenc said – “igniting them with enthusiasm, and watching with great joy how flames of different color, shape and reason are rising, on their own, in pillars towards the sky.”

Ferenc followed two paths in India.  He sat on the bank of the Sabarmati River, wearing only linen cloth woven by Gandhi and listened to the honest works of that simple man, who spun a prayer-wheel in his hands while teaching about passive resistance. Meanwhile, Ferenc was thinking:  “One who plays the organ with only one finger will not make a false sound.  Let us play the organ with all ten fingers, even though it means we will make mistakes from time to time.”

In another part of India, Ferenc delighted in watching Tagore’s shining face and the perfection of his soul:  Philosopher, poet, Hindu patriot and citizen of the world; teaching children, founding hospitals, cleaning water basins – Tagore was a practical village worker, just as Ferenc Balazs would become, when he immersed himself in Transylvanian village life.

These were the things Ferenc Balazs gladly remembered when, after his five-year journey around the world, he returned home to Kolozsvar in 1928.  He brought home with him both the youthful ideas of America, and the wisdom of ancient Asia.  He valued these two different reservoirs of humanity, and felt that both had quantity and depth.

“My real journey began only after I shook off the dust of my world travel”  That is what he wrote in his book, Under the Clod, which describes the six years that followed his five years abroad.  The “clod” he connected his life to bore the name of Meszko.  “Meszko” means limestone, but there was quite a lot of mud in the village as well.  It was there, in that Alabaster Village, that Ferenc Balazs, now together with Christine, managed to build up a new community and raise the cultural level of the village – not on foreign ground, but in his own country.

Ferenc sensed that his life would be short.  He knew he could not wait for the Depression or the fight then raging between the capitalists and the workers to be resolved.  His first step in taking this reality from the page and making it live in the lives of his own people was to make Meszko independent of the severely depressed world market, and then he wanted to go on with improvements for the whole Aranyos Valley.  He was convinced the entire area could become economically self-sufficient.

This was the Meszko-utopia, a dream dreamt by Ferenc Balazs.  And, working always together with Christine, he really began to fulfill it.  He seemed able to suspend his utopian aims, in order to fulfill the most immediate ones.  Although his threshing-machine plan failed, he organized a wonderful people’s college, where – with the help of local and invited lecturers – economics, law, and history of literature were taught.  In addition, the villagers learned world history and the village children (who could already speak both Hungarian and Romanian) began learning Esperanto.  In only four years he was able to create a choir and lending library, to enlarge and greatly improve the elementary and high schools, to build a new, architecturally significant church and parsonage, to commercialize the milk and egg production and sale, and to establish an association of development of the entire Aranyos Valley.  His life proved too short to bring electricity and piped drinking water for Meszko, but the dairy cooperative started in the 1930s is still operating today.

Ferenc Balazs had to fight selfishness, narrow-mindedness, and conservatism, both from the church hierarchy and from the people in the village.  He wrote about these struggles in his novel entitled Green Flood.  He was not dealing with organized workers, but with disorganized peasants.  He had to fight hard to make people understand their own needs and best interests, to help them see the way leading into the future.  He called the situation in the Transylvanian villages, “accelerated democracy.”  It was his fate “to be understood by few, to be a catalyst for more, and to be a pain for many.”

Still he did not give up this great fight of his life.  To fulfill his plans he was running to and fro, summer or winter, forgetting to wear anything on his head, with his shirt collar unbuttoned, with a hole in his shoe, and many holes in his lungs.

Was he a saint?  He would be the first to deny this; but he seemed pleased when others called him an apostle.  In one of this letters to Christine he described his life as “a dear apostle’s life.”

He is a hero for me because:

• He sacrificed his life for his people, especially the Unitarians in the valley where he lived.
• He left a wonderful Unitarian heritage developed in less than thirty-seven years.
• He wrote four wonderful novels about the struggles and experiences he lived with during his short ministry between 1930 and 1937.

In recent years, through the publishing of his writings, FB and his ideals and work, are becoming quite widely known in Transylvania and Hungary.  In the U.S. this is also happening through the publication (with a new translated edition) of Christine Frederiksen Morgan’s very special book Alabaster Village: Our Years in Transylvania.

The story of Ferenc Balazs is important to our understanding of Unitarian Universalism because it gives us an idea of a spiritual journey on the other side of the world. It is an example of what it meant to be Unitarian in Transylvania and Hungary almost a century ago. And it shows how history affected our spiritual community in the past and continues today.

Times are changing in our part of the world. Now, we can travel back and forth to your country and learn from each other. We do not have to rely on books alone. We can stay in touch with each other by phone and internet after our initial visits.

Here we are, a group of nineteen people: youth, young and older adults experiencing your Unitarian Universalism and exploring the beauties of this country. We discovered so far that we have a lot in common with our faith. We are all pilgrims in this world learning about our differences and our similarities. We can greet each other warmly and work together for a better world.

Thank you for receiving us in your families and for sharing your homes, hopes, faith, the beauties of Portland, and the state of Oregon. And many thanks for sharing right now the community of this church.

Now it is your turn to come and visit us in Budapest, Hungary because we want to share what we have over there; our church, our city and our community.

So be it. Amen.
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Copyright 2007, Rev. Jozsef Kaszoni. All rights reserved.