I’m recently back from adventures in Canada and the USA which included a Unitarian flavour. The primary purpose of the trip was to attend the wedding of a good friend in Montreal. Not only to attend the wedding, but to co-officiate at it! Being as yet, only a “rogue minister”, as the bride’s mother liked to say, we needed to enlist the help of a chaplain from the Unitarian Church of Montreal to make sure it was all good and legal.
Following all the wedding excitement Julie Anne and Jeremy headed off to exotic places on their honeymoon and left me with their apartment and car and I decided to make use of the opportunity to drive down to Bedford, Massachusetts to visit the Unitarian Universalist congregation there. I had met a member of their congregation at the Unitarian church in Oxford earlier in the year, and through that meeting had entered into a correspondence with their minister, John Gibbons about the possibility spending a year in Bedford as their student minister. My academic advisors in Oxford were keen that I shouldn’t break my studies here and so the plan have been put on hold until I’ve finished with all the ‘book-work’.
So I jumped into Julie Anne’s trusty wagon (Bernice, by name) and headed for the U.S. border. Within about 20 minutes, I was snarled up in chaotic Montreal holiday-weekend traffic, driving on the wrong side of the road and realising that my fuel gauge was in the red zone, and as I gibbered nervously at the steering wheel, if I could have teleported back to my starting point, I would have had no hesitation in abandoning the trip right then! However, eventually I got out of the mess of suburban Montreal, found a gas station (about 10 miles off the highway – they don’t seem to have such things as highway service stations) and was on the open road. U.S. border control was pretty straightforward, despite the fact that I was driving a car that didn’t belong to me and I didn’t seem 100% sure where I was going.
The road took me through the spectacular scenery of Vermont and New Hampshire and after about seven hours I rolled up outside the beautiful imposing white building of the Bedford Unitarian Universalist Church. I fell exhausted from the car, and was immediately embraced in a big bear hug by a man saying “welcome to Bedford, Maud” – I was a bit dazed and took me a few moments to realise that this was Rich Daugherty, the great friendly bear of a man who I had originally met in Oxford. He laughed loudly and told me he knew it was me as soon as he saw me driving wildly up the wrong side of the main street of the town! I was a bit freaked out at first, as I began to wonder how much of my journey through four states had been on the wrong side of the road. However, as he began to introduce me to people, and regale them with stories of how he had picked me up in a pub in Oxford, I decided that much of what he came out with, needed to be taken with a large barrelful of salt.
I was given a tour of the church, which was full of the clamour of a wedding reception, following the wedding of the church’s director of religious education and a minister from a nearby town – both women. Rich told me that they proudly flew a rainbow flag outside the church in support not only of the same-sex marriage law, which has recently be enacted in Massachusetts but in support of all kinds of diversity.
I was taken out to dinner with Rich and his wife, Nancy, the minister, John and a visiting minister from California, who co-incidentally had done a pulpit exchange with Peter Hewis, my tutor at Oxford, thirty year ago – the world of Unitarianism is very small! Later, I met up with my hostess for the weekend, Natalie, an energetic and delightful seventy year-old member of the congregation, who was able to talk as I don’t think I’ve ever before heard anyone talk (and she assured me she hadn’t even kissed the Blarney stone on her many visits to Ireland). By the end of the weekend, Natalie and I had exchanged nearly our entire life stories and I felt like I was saying good-bye to a favourite aunt who I’d known for years.
I was not the only visitor to the Bedford congregation that weekend. Since 1994, the church in Bedford has enjoyed a strong partnership with Unitarians in the small village of Abásfalva in Transylvania. This relationship is sustained by regular pilgrimages, exchanges, and mutual projects. Áron, the son of the Unitarian minister in Abásfalva, came and lived with a family in Bedford while going to college there, and the weekend that I was in Bedford his mother had arrived from Romania for the wedding of Áron to an American woman the following weekend. I got a wonderful insight into the workings of this decade-long partnership project as, after a barbeque on Sunday afternoon, an informal meeting was held to exchange news, through an interpreter, about friends, building projects and general goings-on in both Abásfalva and Bedford. This was no ordinary church social justice project, but an exchange that had significantly affected the lives of all of those involved.
I left Bedford on Monday morning with a great feeling of connection to this close-knit community of liberal spiritual people and very much hoping that plans for a year as their student minister come good in the end.
Maud Robinson August 2005

Meeting at Bedford church Unitarian Universalist Church, Bedford