Today is my first day back in the office after getting back from the big trip… basically, I’ve spent the morning sorting out snags regarding the Leadership Event. Remember that there is still space, if you’re interested in coming!!

I told you yesterday that I ended up hearing a lot of Hungarian while I was in Romania. The reason? Romania has a sizable Hungarian ethnic minority, mainly because in the great carving of Europe following World War I, Hungary lost the region of Transylvania to Romania. Despite the fact that many Romanians have since moved into that territory, many signs in the region still point to its Hungarian past… not the least of which is the people of Hungarian descent who still live there. David’s family belongs in this category, so I met many Hungarians while there.

Probably my greatest exposure to this community came with the Hungarian Baptist wedding I attended a couple of weekends ago. It was definitely a cultural experience—the wedding lasted for two hours, followed by a four-hour dinner!! Every hour, someone would bring a new course out. When we finished, we sat and talked until the next course came. Considering that only eight other people in the room spoke English conversantly (and we had already spent several days driving around together in a minibus), it was a fairly long four hours. And those of you who know how I am about waiting for food can only imagine my reaction to a dinner that lasts four hours.

Because the wedding was Baptist, there was no dancing or the like at the reception to keep us occupied between feedings. Though most Hungarians are Catholics, and most Romanians Eastern Orthodox, a small number of both groups are adherents to the Baptist faith. I discovered that these Christians are conservative in a way that makes even the more conservative American churches look downright progressive. I attended three different Baptist churches in Romania—all required men and women to sit separately, and for married women to cover their heads during services. Interestingly enough, none of the churches actually enforced these requirements with our group.

For me, this helped to avoid a quandary—my desire to respect the culture and its traditions versus my objections to such overt symbols of patriarchy within the church. The issue is difficult. On the one hand, I believe that feminism in other cultures has to be indigenous. The systems of power at work in Romanian society are not exactly like those functioning in American culture, and the responses to those systems are not going to be the same in Romania as they are here. Thus I don’t think it is my place to march into a Romanian church and demand that women throw off their head coverings—Romanian women have to come to that conclusion for themselves (and maybe there are other issues of greater importance for them anyway). At the same time, how do we remain true to our own personal convictions?

In any case, I enjoyed the wedding. David’s family was wonderful, his cousin the groom downright sweet in his obvious love for his bride. We had a great time, but I was thankful when they finally let us go to bed around 1:30 am.

“They are now justified by God’s grace as a gift, through the redemption in Christ Jesus.” --Romans 3:24.

Kelsey

Hi, I'm very intriguedby your amateur comment of Romanian history with regards to Transylvania - Transylvania (=Latin word meaning "over the forests"!!!has nothing to do with Hungarian) belonged to Romania since the Roman Empire , you need to learn that history goes a long way back and hasn't started with World War I like you implied. Also , please check your source before you state anything about any country's history - I'm Romanian, I've studied Romanian and world history and also linguistics (a reliable source of history). It's the only history book that doesn't lie , as people left thei iprint in the placenames they used. I stronlgy recommend looking into it!