Flower Communion
Preacher: Reverend Andrea Abbott
Today is flower communion and today I would like to take a look at the lives of two men who both died in German concentration camps. The first is Norbert Capek, the Unitarian minister who began the custom of flower communion in Prague. The second is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German minister who early on recognized the evil of the Nazi regime and who was, like Norbert Capek, outspoken in opposing it. This is a quick look at each of their lives.
Norbert Čapek was born into a Roman Catholic family on 3 June 1870, in Radomyšl, a village in Strakonice District in southern Bohemia. As a boy he wanted to join the priesthood, but soon became disillusioned with the church. At the age of 18 he left Catholicism for the Baptist church and was ordained a minister.
Čapek traveled widely as a Baptist evangelist, from Saxony in the west to the Ukraine in the east. In Moravia he was influenced by the free Christianity and the Moravian Brotherhood, and his religious convictions became progressively more liberal and anti-clerical. His writings on many topics made him the subject of government investigation and 1914 he and his wife, Marie, and their eight children fled to the United States.
In the United States, Norbert became editor of a Czech language newspaper and served as pastor of the First Slovak Baptist Church in Newark. Widowed shortly after his arrival in US, Čapek met and married another Czech expatriate, Mája Oktavec, in 1917. She was a graduate of the School of Library Science at Columbia University and worked in the New York Public Library.
Pursuing an increasingly liberal religious perspective, Norbert was tried for heresy by the Baptist authorities and so he resigned as a Baptist minister in 1919. Norbert and Maja discovered Unitarianism, and in 1921 they joined the First Unitarian Church of Essex County (in Orange, New Jersey). Together, they decided to bring Unitarianism back to their homeland, newly independent after World War I. The couple returned to Prague in 1921.
The new Unitarian congregation they formed in Prague, called the Liberal Religious Fellowship, grew rapidly. The early worship services generally consisted of lectures. The minister wore no robe or vestments; and the congregation dispensed with elaborate rituals, singing of hymns, ornate decoration, and formal or prescribed prayers. Some members felt that the congregation lacked a spiritual dimension. In response, in June of 1923 Čapek created the Flower Celebration (aka Flower Communion): each member would bring a flower to the church, where it was placed in a large central vase. At the end of the service, each would take home a different flower. This symbolized the uniqueness of each individual, and the coming together in communion to share this uniqueness.
Maja Capek was ordained as a minister in 1926. With financial help from the American Unitarian Association and the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, Norbert and Maja acquired and renovated a medieval palace for a meeting space. In 1930 the Unitarian Church of Czechoslovakia was officially recognized by the Czech government.Although he was invited to return to the United States during World War II, Čapek chose to remain in Europe. In 1939 Maja went to the US to raise funds for relief efforts in Czechoslovakia; she also served as minister in the North Unitarian Church in New Bedford, MA, from 1940 to 1943. In March 1941, Norbert and his daughter were arrested by the Gestapo, who confiscated his books and sermons. He was charged with listening to foreign broadcasts (a capital crime) and, after being held in Pankrác Prison, was taken in 1942 to the Dachau concentration camp, where he lived in the “Priesterblock”. He was tortured and eventually gassed late in 1942.[1] Many in the camp attested to his many acts of kindness and help for his fellow prisoners.
When news of his death reached the United States, the American Unitarian Association president, Fredrick May Eliot, wrote, “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.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born 4 February 1906 – 9 April 1945) in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland. He was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian, anti-Nazi dissident. His writings on Christianity’s role in the secular world have become widely influential, and his book The Cost of Discipleship became a modern classic.[1] His father was psychiatrist and neurologist Karl Bonhoeffer. His mother was the granddaughter of a noted theologian. Most of his family became involved in the anti-Nazi cause and, in addition to himself, his brother and two bronthers-in-law were executed by the Nazis while a sister was imprisoned but survived.
Bonhoeffer went to the United States in 1930 to study and teach at New York City’s Union Theological Seminary. He studied under Reinhold Niebuhr and met Frank Fisher, a black fellow seminarian who introduced him to Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where Bonhoeffer taught Sunday school and formed a lifelong love for African-American spirituals. He heard Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., preach the Gospel of Social Justice and became sensitive to not only social injustices experienced by minorities but also the ineptitude of the church to bring about integration.[4] Bonhoeffer began to see things “from below”—from the perspective of those who suffer oppression. He observed, “Here one can truly speak and hear about sin and grace and the love of God…the Black Christ is preached with rapturous passion and vision.” Later Bonhoeffer referred to his impressions abroad as the point at which he “turned from phraseology to reality.”[3]
Though he was given an offer to return to the United States, he returned to Germany and became active in the movement within the Protestant church there to oppose Hitler. He and others founded the Confessing Church in opposition to the silence of his colleagues. However, most of the church remained either silent or supported the Nazi party. Feeling that his voice fell on deaf ears, Bonhoeffer left to preach in London. In 1935, Bonhoeffer was presented with a much-sought-after opportunity to study non-violent resistance under Gandhi in his ashram, but decided to return to Germany in order to head an underground seminary for training Confessing Church pastors. As the Nazi suppression of the Confessing Church intensified, Bonhoeffer’s authorization to teach at the University of Berlin was revoked after he was denounced as a “pacifist and enemy of the state”. Around this time, Bonhoeffer published his best-known book, The Cost of Discipleship, a study on the Sermon on the Mount, in which he not only attacked “cheap grace” as a cover for ethical laxity but also preached “costly grace”, the true sacrifice demanded by Jesus.
He was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Tegel prison for one and a half years. Later he was transferred to a Nazi concentration camp. Like Capek, he helped his fellow prisoners and won the admiration even of many of the guards. After being associated with the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, he was quickly tried, along with other accused plotters and was executed by hanging on 9 April 1945 as the Nazi regime was collapsing.
These two men were two out of many people who opposed a regime and a man who are bywords for evil to this day. They were separated in age by at least a generation and were from different cultures but both were men who struggled with their faiths. Neither passively accepted what they were expected to believe. For both men an active engagement with their faith was essential. I would also say that both resisted the impulse to create idols of religious dogma or political leaders. Both were often misunderstood and often were supported by very few. These were also men who came to different conclusions, at least as far as their response to their spiritual struggles. Capek’s beliefs were born when he questioned the dogmas of the Christian church. His beliefs became the primacy of freedom, free intellectual inquiry, and of the necessity to defend that freedom to search and to question. His conviction led him to believe in the worth of all individuals, no matter their beliefs or their ethnicity or culture. Love, truth and service were his beliefs and he acted on those beliefs even at the cost of his own life. For him, to have turned his back on the horrific events that were sweeping through Europe would have meant that he would have betrayed everything that mattered to him and so he lived out his convictions.
Bonhoeffer’s beliefs returned him to the Christian gospels, especially to a radical reinterpretation of the demands that Jesus asked of his disciples. In a time when he saw his own church bending in the wind of evil, he clearly articulated the cost of truly following Jesus. He pointed out that Christianity called for moral and ethical rigor in people’s lives. He wrote that “cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves…grace without discipleship…Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again…It is costly because it costs a man his life and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.”
Men and women are born when they are born. All times do not call for great heroism, for great decisive acts. May we hope that we will never be tried as many people have been tried in times that call for great sacrifice. And yet, even in comparatively peaceful time and places, there are always ethical decisions to be made, always temptations to take the easy way out, to close our eyes to injustice, to find excuses for unkind or harmful acts.
Norbert Capek and Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not find in themselves the stuff of heroes overnight. They both had a long journey before they risked their lives against the might of the Nazi regime. They had no reason to oppose the cruelty which was not directed at them but at people of another religion. As ministers, educated men, they could both have compromised, both have ignored the madness descending on Germany, could have minimized its harm and gone on with their lives. Both men had the opportunity to avoid harm, to live in the United States, but both turned away from that easy path. But they had spent many years before seeking a faith that would make almost impossible demands on them but was also the only faith that could sustain them. They were prepared for the needs of their age because they had grown such a faith.
We, ourselves, are the gardens that we must tend for the flowers of our lives to grow. Evil comes upon us when we have not tended our gardens. Evil comes upon us when we have not reflected, have not taken time to discern, when we do what we have always done, when we do what others do. Evil comes upon us when we are not as honest with ourselves as Capek and Bonhoeffer were with themselves. When we do not weed the gardens of our minds, they will become overgrown with rank weeds. When we do not nourish the gardens of our minds, the soil is barren. It is necessary to cultivate, to till, to let in air and light; these things are as necessary to our minds as to a garden. This is a church which asks us to struggle with what we believe, a church which asks us to be active participants in our beliefs. We may come to different conclusions, but we need to walk the same path with each other, that of reflection and questioning, sometimes painful questioning and a searching look at our own motivations and desires.
When I read about people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Norbert Capek, I can’t help but wonder if I could be as brave, as resolute, if I could be so strong in my principles that I would die for what is right. But of course that’s the wrong question. That’s a fantasy question and in fantasy, I am brave and resolute, strong in my convictions. The right question is, am I now doing what my principles tell me to do? Am I willing to live by my principles? This is the trickier question. It requires me to be honest with myself, to face my shortcomings and times where I have failed, and to have the courage to learn from that and begin again. Our principles are tough to live by. They do not let us off the hook easily. And perhaps we come together to strengthen ourselves in living them. Because, if we do, we will find that, as Norbert Capek says in the hymn we are about to sing, “Take our breath and let our voices sing our parts. Take our hands and let us work to shape our art.” We will, ourselves, be, truly, flowers of life.