Living the Mission

Living the Mission: Lady from the Land of Transylvania

Dr. Judit Gellrèd

(Winter, 1999)

God has blessed me with many talents and with a keen sense of responsibility to make them yield many fruits. “Become what you can be!” has been my life’s principle. In this sense I don’t feel that my childhood and youth were wasted by investing them in the hard discipline of music training. The call to alleviate suffering urged me to choose medicine as a career, and neurology and psychiatry as my specializations, which most resembled ministry. At that time in my country women were not trained for ministry. The logical choice of study for me at that time was medicine.

Since my childhood, Albert Schweitzer and my minister father, Dr. Imre Gellérd have been my role models. And an overwhelming sense of love for God and for people has inspired my decisions and actions of service for others. Service is my true religion. The core principle I have followed when I changed careers was always to give the maximum of my capacity, to optimize the way of service — the “here I am Lord, send me!” principle.

I grew up under communist totalitarianism as a member of an oppressed and persecuted minority, but I rejected the role of victim. Being Transylvanian Hungarian in Romania compares with being a Tibetan in China. This realization and the struggle to maintain our cultural-religious identity has fundamentally determined my life-tasks. To demonstrate that excellence and fierce determination can occasionally defy political-social obstacles — even in communism, even as an openly religious person, the daughter of a martyred father — was my call. To carry on my father’s broken dream is my life’s task.

I am reluctant to surrender to impossibility when a worthy cause is at stake. Hardship and hard work have never discouraged me; in fact I typically chose a more difficult path any time I modified the course of my life. For me, this struggle itself holds as much meaning as reaching the goal.

I have always lived in a Christian and ecumenical environment and spirit. My mother and brother are Roman Catholic and my grandparents were Calvinist. After emigrating to Hungary I joined the country’s main Roman Catholic cathedral choir. For twenty years this church was my spiritual home. I can describe my religious life as Unitarian and Catholic.

There was nothing quite as fulfilling as being a physician — especially in Eastern Europe. Medicine was for the idealist, the most complex form of service.

I played my violin in psychiatric wards at Christmas, and, for six years, in a cancer research Neurology Department. I stood at the bedside of dying patients, praying with them in their last hours. In a communist country religious service for the dying and the presence of clergy would not have been welcomed. Younger patients had no religious background; but in their ultimate existential crisis in a desolate, inhumane hospital they needed someone to hold their hands, looks into their frightened eyes, and help them die in God’s peace.

While this was spiritually a highly satisfying medical career, I was always longing for theological education. But in my culture a medical profession was thought to be lifelong.

I met my husband, Dr. George M. Williams, a Californian and professor of Asian religions in 1987 during an international congress at Stanford University, married him in 1988 and moved to Chico, California. With this new empowerment, a new call arose: to try to rescue and revitalize my father’s church and mine in my homeland, devastated by communism. As a full-time volunteer for ten years, I have created the Unitarian Universalist (UU) partner church movement, linking two times two hundred churches in covenant relationship in Transylvania and North America. I have acquired a role of lay minister with a mission. One aspect of my work was guest preaching in UU churches all over North America and Canada. I have translated and published several books on Unitarianism. The latest and most important is my father’s life scholarship — A History of Transylvanian Unitarianism Through Four Centuries of Sermons.

The Partner Church Movement has revitalized the Transylvanian Unitarian church morally and economically and protected it politically. In the process, North American participating congregations have experienced an unprecedented spiritual transformation as a result of meaningful involvement in partnership. I serve as founding general secretary of the Partner Church Council, which has been recognized by UUA president, Dr. John Buehrens as “the largest and most significant grassroots movement of the century for Unitarian Universalists in America which keeps the denomination healthy”. In 1994 I was awarded an honorary doctorate by Starr King School for the Ministry, Berkeley, California, and in 1999 received the distinguished service award.

I view my ministry mostly in a global, international context.I wish to build bridges between traditions and to work for religious understanding and dialogue. I see myself as a potentially effective ambassador for human rights.

I consider it a great privilege and joy to be a student at Boston University in the MTS program. I have a new sense of call in academia. I wish to deal with my medical and musical background responsibly and to integrate them with theology. Writing is becoming my voice, slowly replacing activism.

Everywhere I go, I try to share anything I learn with my people. The calls are manifold. Sowing more seeds is my goal.

Dr. Judit Gellrèd