On the Mountaintop at Deva… -- Tom Daugherty

Greetings to the Bedford Unitarian Parish!

When Rich and Nancy offered me the opportunity to journey with them to Abásfalva and also see the Transylvania area of Romania, I jumped at the chance - and it was to be a “pilgrimage” no less. I had only a vague notion of what a “pilgrimage” meant, and knew even less of the Unitarian Partner Church program. And, certainly I had no idea what the Unitarian Universalist Church is about. All I had heard was Garrison Keillor's jokes.

What I can tell you now, without going into all the details, is that the trip was one of those life-changing experiences that I would not trade for money. The people of Abásfalva opened their homes and their hearts to us - I've not experienced anything like that in all my travels throughout the world. And I learned from other Bedford Parish folks on the trip what Unitarianism really means. It means generosity of spirit and money, tolerance of others and their strange habits (and there were some really strange people with us on the trip and we met even more in the village), and an abiding sense of responsibility for others who need help. It's the only group of religious folks I've ever spent time around that didn't make me feel uneasy about expressing my real feelings on just about any subject - didn't have to hold back for fear of offending. Maybe most of all it meant a sense of family with the others in the group - it was easy for a conservative George Bush Republican from the Midwest to move amongst those folks and truly enjoy their company. Maybe I'm a closet Unitarian. I need to be careful with whom I whisper that in Indiana.

For me, the highlight of the trip was the hour we spent together at the cell in the castle ruins where the martyred Francis David died. John Gibbons gave a fascinating and moving talk on the price of religious freedom and how we Americans must realize that others before us, both in Romania and the United States, have died so that we can worship in any way we see fit without worry of persecution. And he pointed out that the Unitarians of Transylvania have only recently begun to be able to do that and that we need to understand what they've gone through for generations to get to this point. I was in tears before we left that mountaintop.

-Tom Daugherty (Rich's brother) from the Parishioner, Sept 12, 2001