Norbert Capek was his name. He was a Czechoslovak
ex-Catholic, ex-Baptist liberal religious heretic who finally found his home as
a Unitarian minister. He is our most recent true Unitarian martyr. He dreamt of
a new religion, unheard of in his country, founded not on dogmas, but as he put
it “on the divine spark, which is in each person’s, own soul”.
His life story and depth of spirit captured my
heart. The message of hope and freedom and joy he brought to his people in a
time of orthodoxy, intolerance and oppression is one we need to hear now.
Especially in this climate of increasing religious fundamentalism and political
fascism.
Norbert Capek’s parents were not well educated and didn’t
have much money. He was sent to live with his uncle and aunt in Vienna when he was 14 and
worked as a tailor until he was 18. When his relatives discovered that he no
longer practiced Catholicism and even worse, had been secretly baptized, they
kicked him out. But instead of going back to his parents, Capek, with a fire in
his soul, became a missionary for the Baptists.
At the time the state religion of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire was Catholicism. Anyone practicing another form of
religion was subject to harassment and often violent attacks, while the police
looked the other way. “Baptist” was not even recognized as a religion to check
off on official forms.
Even within the Baptist tradition Capek’s ideas
became progressively more liberal -- so much so that the Catholics and
Evangelicals were hinting at heresy. The Austrian censors increasingly refused
to print his articles. It came to a head when even his Baptist colleagues and
members of his congregation turned on him and began to question his orthodoxy.
In 1914 a friendly police commissioner tipped Capek
off that he was on the Austrian blacklist and suggested he get out before he
was taken to jail. At this point he was at the end of his rope. He and his
family were often sick due to lack of food. So he and his wife and nine
children left Bohemia, grateful for an offer
to serve a small Baptist church in New
York City.
But Capek did not escape trouble with the Baptist church
by coming to the United
States. Later that year he was tried for heresy,
but was exonerated. Five years later he left the Baptist ministry. He concluded
in his diary, "I cannot be a Baptist anymore, even in compromise. The fire
of new desires, new worlds, is burning inside me." More than once Capek was
told that his extreme liberal views were really Unitarian.
After leaving the Baptist church, to earn a living
for his family, he became a journalist. As the editor of various journals,
Capek continued to be quite outspoken in his anti-clericalism.
In order to find a new spiritual home, Norbert and
his wife Maja sent their kids out, like scouts, to explore the different
churches in the neighborhood. The kids would come home and tell their parents
what they learned in Sunday school. When Maja and Norbert finally liked what
they heard they decided to check out the church for themselves. That church
they then ended up joining was the Unitarian
Church in Orange, New Jersey
in 1921.
The minister of the church introduced them to the American
Unitarian Association president, Samuel A. Eliot. Capek convinced Elliot that Eastern Europe was hungry for the good news of liberal
religion. With financial backing from the AUA the family went back to Prague and started a
Unitarian congregation.
In just 20 years the Prague church became the largest Unitarian
congregation in the world -- with 3200 members. Like some in our congregations
today the people in that congregation were spiritual refugees from many different
backgrounds. Theologically they formed a very liberal humanist (yet theistic)
congregation who tended to distrust religious language and didn’t like ritual. Sound
familiar?
Capek believed it was important to have some kind
of a ritual to celebrate this diverse community. He created what he called the
Flower Festival and held the first Flower Festival Service in 1923.
Capek felt that orthodox Christianity’s doctrine of
human depravity was itself sinful. In a sermon he called the human soul “the
spark of God”. He writes:
There is in every soul a thirst for something that is higher
and greater than all science and all art…. We call it by different names but in
essence it is nothing other than a hidden cry for…harmony with the Infinite.
God is…the soul of our soul and the life of our life…Closer than breath and
one’s heartbeat is [God]… Every person is an embodiment of God and in every one
of us God struggles for a higher expression…. We light the spark of God within
ourselves when we serve others and bring a bit of glow and joy to other people’s
lives.
"Religion,"
he said, "can never die because human beings cannot but be religious,
regardless of the form of [their] religion."
Norbert’s wife Maja was always a partner in the
work and in 1926 was herself formally ordained a Unitarian minister. In 1939
she came to the United
States to lecture and raise money for the
fledgling Czech Unitarian network. It was then that she introduced the flower
communion at the First Unitarian parish in Cambridge.
When the war broke out she couldn’t go back to Europe,
so she stayed in the United States
and served as a minister in several congregations in New
England. I imagine it must have been heart-wrenching for her to have
been cut off from any news about what was happening at home.
Frederick May Eliot invited Norbert Capek, along
with his daughter and son-in-law to come to the United States as a
ministers-at-large for the AUA. They declined, choosing instead to minister to
their people in those terrible times.
Back home, the Germans were closing in. The Gestapo
was now closely monitoring Capek -- sitting in on his church services and
listening to his sermons. At his 70th birthday party Capek’s congregation gave
him a radio. It was a capital crime to listen to foreign broadcasts, but Capek
did it anyway. Every evening in secret, he would tune into the BBC for news of
the war.
He shared what he learned with his congregation in
the subtle form of parables and stories -- things the Czechs would understand,
but the Gestapo officers wouldn’t catch on to. In this way he was able to continue
to preach against oppression and minister to his congregation.
He did eventually get caught. He and his daughter
were both arrested for listening and spreading news of the war. Capek was sent
to Dresden for
11 months and then, just when his term was almost up, Hitler cracked down --
and orders came to send him to Dakaow his papers were stamped “return
unwanted”.
UU minister Richard Gilbert writes: “While [Capek]
was in Dakaow his courage in the face of torture and starvation was a source of
inspiration to his fellow prisoners. While in the camp he led (his companions)
in worship, using the Flower Communion ceremony as the ritual. Each prisoner
brought what flowers they could find in the camp to a service. At the end they
took with them a different flower than the one they brought, to symbolize their
sense of community… After the war,
survivors testified that the Unitarian minister could not have been sent to a
place where he was more needed."
His inspirational presence encouraged the others in
the camp to endure. One survivor wrote: “If it hadn’t been for Capek I probably
wouldn’t be alive now, nor would others who survived.”
Norbert Capek was executed on October 12, 1942. Before
he was put to death, he wrote this prayer, reflecting on his own life and the
state of his spirit:
It is
worthwhile to live and fight courageously for sacred ideals.
Oh blow ye
evil winds into my body's fire;
my soul you'll never unravel.
Even though
disappointed a thousand times
or fallen in the fight
and
everything would worthless seem,
I have lived
amidst eternity.
Be grateful,
my soul, My life was worth living.
He who was
pressed from all sides
but remained victorious in spirit
is welcome in
the chorus of heroes.
He who
overcame the fetters giving wing to the mind
is entering
into the golden age of the victorious.
Norbert Capek created the Flower Festival ritual to
bring the people of his congregation together. His church, like most of ours,
had members from many different religious backgrounds. He wanted a spiritual celebration
that would not exclude anyone, but would celebrate the whole community.
Unitarian Universalism is a garden, wild with theological
diversity. Members come in many varieties: Humanists, Pagans, Christians,
Buddhists, Jews, Theists and Atheists and many combinations in between.
We are most definitely not a monoculture garden --
that is, a garden made with only one kind of plant, stripped of its wild
spirit. Most gardeners will tell you that a “vast field of identical plants
will always be particularly vulnerable to insects, weeds, and disease” -- that
is, susceptible to extinction. (Not to mention boring.)
It is in times of extreme religious conservatism
that our liberal religious community becomes all the more precious. As the
German occupation increased in Prague,
Capek expected the numbers in church to dwindle. Instead he found the
attendance swelling. Many people walked sometimes for hours to the Unitarian
church on Sundays. Indeed, the spiritual community becomes life-giving.
So many people I’ve talked with, especially when I
was in the Midwest, testify to feelings of
relief and gratitude for having found Unitarian Universalism. In a sea of
religious fundamentalism -- it is in this denomination that they are free to
express and discuss and grapple with their theological ideas without fear of
judgment.
There are some times when words cannot adequately capture
meaning. That becomes the time for symbolism, for ritual. I don’t think it is a
coincidence that the Flower Communion is one of the very few rituals that most
Unitarian Universalist congregations participate in annually. It is so simple
and yet expresses so much about who we are as a community. A spray of many
colors, textures, shapes and sizes mixed up together yet held collectively by a
common container.
“Rituals of communion in all their many forms share
a power and blessedness that transcends words yet reveal the truth of who we
are. And that’s what we’re about today, noticing within a small ritual act
something at the very core of our being, of what we are and what we can be.”
We put our little flower in a vase, it gets mixed
up with flowers already placed there for those who have forgotten or missed the
announcement, or are visiting us today, because that’s as it should be too. We
always welcome new friends to join us. Then we pick a different flower chosen
carefully and brought by someone else and we take it home. It is so simple…
But that’s the way it is, simple and complex at the
same time. We are all mixed up together. With all of our diversity of thought
and belief we find ourselves drawn together by the Unnameable Mystery.
I have led the flower communion several times now.
I love the celebration of the beauty inherent in diversity. Each time I
participate I find myself at first simply marveling at the splendor of the
bouquet and how the ritual binds us one to another.
As it goes on I begin to ponder the fact that UU congregations
all across the continent and even throughout the world also celebrate the
flower communion and I realize how amazing it is to be connected in this way to
Unitarian Universalists worldwide.
And then I consider that the flower communion has been
celebrated by hundreds of congregations for over 70 years. And that this simple
ritual was life sustaining for people in a Nazi
concentration camp.
When we take a moment to contemplate all the people
and all the history involved, this ritual becomes so much more than a flower
exchange. It becomes a living vessel connecting us all through time.
May it be so.
Flower Communion, a sermon delivered at 1stUUPB by
the Rev. CJ McGregor on May 4, 2014.
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