I learned an important lesson about the resilience and durability of seeds. I was speaking with Bob James, one of the local farmers who participates in our weekly farmer’s market outside the church. He told me that his blueberries are quite popular and regularly sell out. He said the only downside of growing blueberries is that beetles will come and eat them before he has a chance to pick them. When he first discovered all these blueberries that were eaten, he felt disappointment and anger. As he looked at the blueberries closer however, he noticed something that gave him hope. He noticed the beetles had only eaten the husk, the outside of the blueberry. They left the seeds intact. So he put all these eaten blueberries on a drying rack, until their seeds were clearly exposed. Then he simply re-planted them. He told me with a grin – “Now I have more blueberries than ever, and I don’t mind those beetles so much.” I told him that I’ll probably use this story in my sermon, and he responded with: “Well, it’s about thinking you’re witnessing death, but you’re really experiencing the potential for new life.”
He paused, and then said “Well, you’re a minister, so you probably know something about that.” My response to that is – knowing something and living something are two different things.
This month we are honoring martyrs who have shown us through their living what an authentic and deep liberal faith looks like. We celebrate women and men who have dared to take the courageous path, to see life in the face of death. When I think of Norbert Čapek, I think of someone who challenged us to see beauty, and to prepare the earth for beauty. He challenges us to plant seeds.
Čapek’s life was one of both great loss and great gain. He originally started as a Baptist minister in New York City, and he had a successful career until he started reading about the kind of Unitarian faith that was born in 16th Century Transylvania. He was exposed to a faith that lined up with his own intuition, a faith that valued reason and the capacity of the human mind in discerning matters of truth. He started preaching a more liberal gospel that praised the natural world and unlimited wonder, rather than focusing on creeds and the reward of an afterlife.
This led to a heresy complaint which led to him leaving his ministry position. He wandered for years in New York, not sure what his next move would be. He and his wife Maya eventually found a Unitarian Church in New Jersey, and this gave Norbert a bold idea. Perhaps he could plant the seeds of this liberal faith in Czechoslovakia, near where his family was from. He brought Unitarianism to Czechoslovakia, and the church thrived. He then went to Prague where he founded the largest Unitarian church in the world at that time. At its height in the 1930’s, he had a membership of 3,200, of people who came weekly to hear of this new faith. Čapek was very much a minimalist when it came to service. He removed almost all the ritual from the liturgy. There was no prayer, no wine and bread, no stoles or robes. He gave what were considered mostly lectures, not sermons, about the nature of humankind and our responsibility as stewards of the earth. Members of his congregation asked him if he could bring back some of the ritual in his service, so he invented a new ritual called flower communion.
Instead of the traditional communion of the blood and body of Jesus represented in bread and wine, he invited his congregation in the early part of June to bring a single flower from their garden. At the door of the church he laid baskets where everyone was asked to place their flower. He preached on the blessing of harvest. He preached on the blessing of beauty through diversity, and how each of us contained a singular beauty just like the flower we brought. At the end of service, he asked his congregation to take a flower from the basket, a different flower than what they arrived with, signifying the gifts we give each other through our diversity. It is not a shared belief that makes us beautiful. It is our differences. It is the singular beauty of the individual that we celebrate, and together we create this rich, wild bouquet. This was the path of a liberal faith – diversity not homogeneity. Respect for singularity in the context of community.
It is important to note at this point that Čapek did not see himself nor did others see him at this point in his life as a political radical or dissident.
This was the 1920’s in Prague, and he was seen as an unusual, maybe eccentric, minister. But he was not considered controversial, and his sermons were not seen as especially social or political. He valued education and he supported initiatives to educate the citizens of Prague in a variety of disciplines, but this was not seen as a bold political move at this time. Flower communion began as a lovely ritual, but it did not express dissidence or an opinion that was contrary to the government.
All this changed 20 years later, at the beginning of World War II, as the Nazis were rising to power. It was discovered by the Nazis who had been spying on his activities that he was listening to foreign broadcasts on the radio, which was considered a capital crime. He was put in Dachau, which was the first concentration camp opened in Germany. He was put in the priesterblock with other clergy. They combed through his writings and sermons, and based on the content they found, charged him with the crime of treason for expressing views that celebrated human diversity. It is important for us to remember that Čapek did not have quick death in the concentration camp.
The priesterblock was known as a place of torture, where the clergy were used in medical experiments, and routinely tortured, especially on religious holidays like Easter. He was tortured routinely for a full year, before he died in a gas chamber in 1942. The president of the American Unitarian Association, Fredrick May Eliot, issued a national statement following Čapek ’s death: “Another name is added to the list of heroic Unitarian martyrs by whose death our freedom has been bought. Ours is now the responsibility to see to it that we stand fast in the liberty so gloriously won.”
What does it mean today for us to stand fast in the liberty so gloriously won? My sense it has something to do with seeds, which are related to Čapek’s flower communion. The beauty we apprehend and the values we treasure do not come from nowhere. They come from seeds, seeds planted by generations past which are resilient enough to survive the tumultuous passing of time. They are seeds that are given to us in the full trust that we will make full use of them. The husk of our values may be eaten temporarily by policy or by political and social conditions, but it is important to remember that the seed remains.
Čapek gives us as religious liberals a new definition of life out of death. It is not the kind of life that comes from wishful thinking, or a belief that demands that we suspend our capacity for reason. It is not a new life that is based on an intervention into the natural order. It is a definition of new life that is found by looking death squarely in the face, and in daring to look closer we see a natural truth – Death can eat the husk, but it never takes the seed. The seed of Norbert Čapek was planted in American soil the year following his death. His widow Maya came to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and shared Norbert’s flower communion with the Unitarian Church in Cambridge. From that encounter, nearly every congregation in this vast country celebrates human uniqueness and diversity, and the beauty of this season. Most people remember Norbert Čapek because of flower communion, not because of his death in a concentration camp, and perhaps that is as it should be. It shows that beauty has a life of its own, and that beauty is alive in the seed, and thus it’s still alive in our world. It continues to live to this day, in the place that we find ourselves. Death can take the husk, but it will never take the seed.
