“De Colores”
Reflection for Flower Communion Sunday
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
May 21, 2017
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Love is the most dangerous force in the world.
Wait. What?
You heard correctly. Love is the most dangerous force in the world.
You’re forgiven, of course, if you thought otherwise. Indeed, watching, listening to or reading news and social media, the words and actions of political and too often religious leaders, our own friends or friends of friends, family members and even at times, ourselves, it is easy to arrive at the assumption that hatred in all its countless extreme and subtle variations is the most dangerous force in the world.
But consider the story of Norbert Capek, the Czech Unitarian minister who created the ritual we call flower communion. A ritual he described as,
“A new experiment in symbolizing our liberty and unity (originally brotherhood)...in which participants confess that we accept each other as brothers and sisters without regard to class, race, or other distinction, acknowledging everybody as our friend who...wants to be good.”
In creating flower communion, Capek sought not only to bring the native beauty and variety of springtime in Prague into the church, but to open the hearts and mind of the congregants to the beauty and variety of all the colors, “de colores", as we sang together just a moment ago, of humanity.
Years later, this seemingly benign sentiment would earn Capek a death sentence. In 1941 Capek’s apartment was raided by the Gestapo. He was arrested and his books and sermons confiscated. Capek was later found, according to Nazi court records, “too dangerous to be allowed to live.”
His crime? Love.
Capek was sent to Dachau, where he continued to write and preach and console his fellow prisoners. Survivors of the camp would later testify Capek could not have been sent to a place where he was more needed.
On October 12, 1942 Capek was sent to the gas chamber.
As a species, we seem to have a problem with love and love’s messengers. Remember what happened to that guy Jesus? We say, most of us anyway, that we like the idea of love and some of us even claim to love some of the messengers of love.…and too often more than their message. So what gives?
Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day” provides us a clue. Most people focus on the last line of the poem, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” And why not focus on that question, it is an essential spiritual question. But there’s something else, further back. In the midst of the poem’s existential questioning, the poet turns to focus on a grasshopper which Oliver observes, “…has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.”
I read in an interview Mary Oliver once gave that this brief encounter with the grasshopper in the poem is in fact drawn from an actual experience Oliver recalled of a grasshopper eating a piece of frosting that was on her hand from a friend’s birthday cake. In pausing to notice and reflect on this little creature in the poet’s hand, a realization emerges, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention.” And here Oliver reminds us our existential anxiety is relieved and spiritual growth nurtured not by mastering specific religious forms but by paying attention.
Paying attention is really a form of listening. And listening the most basic form of love. Love then, is more than a feeling…more than an idea…it is both a means of discerning and practicing truth, that deeper than literal reality, which challenges us to confront and move beyond fear and distraction. In short, love changes us.
Recently I was listening to a podcast of On Being with Krista Tippet which also airs weekly on NPR. For some time now she’s been engaged in something called the “Civil Conversations Project” in the hope of promoting greater understanding between people of differing points of view. Her guest for the podcast I’m referencing was Glenn Beck, the conservative radio and television personality perhaps best known for his histrionics.
Now, I admit I found the interview difficult and by the end I was not truly convinced Beck fully believed what he said concerning the need for people to listen to one another, but he made this observation which, while initially bothersome, stayed with me, “Jesus and Hitler had one thing in common, and that is they could both look somebody in the eye who was hungry or in despair and say, “I will feed you.” And it’s important to listen to what their solution is, but most people don’t. And one will lead you to an evil path, and one will lead you to a good path. But it is exactly the same entry point.”
What I hear in this is a call to heed love’s discerning power. Which is really a call to step back, to know, as Mary Oliver writes, “how fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields…”
The lightness of Oliver’s lovely imagery risks minimizing the profundity of discerning love’s life saving power except that she follows it with a question, really a challenge, echoing history’s great religious teachers, “Tell me, what else should I have done?…What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-50 NRSV)
A teaching…a response to Oliver’s question whose spirit our choir along with Barb Hale and Kirk Upton reminded us during a musical offering a couple of weeks ago, is not confined to one religion alone and more plainly stated is really a call for us to love…to pay attention to that which gives, promotes and affirms life and to align our lives and relationships accordingly.
Norbert Capek did just that and his flower communion bears witness to this. As his wife Maja, explained,
“No two flowers are alike, not two people are alike;
yet each has a contribution to make;
each would help to make this world as beautiful
as a colorful bouquet.
Organized and growing into a true community.
We are ready to serve one another,
The nation and the world.
By exchanging flowers we signify that we are willing,
in the spirit of tolerance and patience,
To march together in search of truth,
Disregarding all that usually divides humankind.”
Flower communion then, on the one hand, is a symbolic rejection of racism, heterosexism, agism, ablism, nationalism, ethnocentrism, classism and the like…the instruments of fear and distraction… employed and assented to both knowingly and unwittingly to secure the power of a few over the many. More, flower communion is an affirmation of human diversity… multiplicity held in tension in Unity, a reflection of the larger world of which we are part and for some the God in whose image we are created.
That this affirmation emerges out of love… from paying attention lends it a resiliency that transcends individual lives and entire generations, making it the most dangerous force in a world where fear and distraction are the powerful’s best defense.
In closing I offer these words, left to us by Norbert Capek before he was executed, as testimony of the danger love poses to all the barriers we erect mentally and physically…in our hearts and in our minds…our neighborhoods and our nations,
“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 welcomed into the choir of heroes.
He who overcame the fetters giving wing to the mind is entering into the golden age of the victorious.”
May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
Reflection for Flower Communion Sunday
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
May 21, 2017
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Love is the most dangerous force in the world.
Wait. What?
You heard correctly. Love is the most dangerous force in the world.
You’re forgiven, of course, if you thought otherwise. Indeed, watching, listening to or reading news and social media, the words and actions of political and too often religious leaders, our own friends or friends of friends, family members and even at times, ourselves, it is easy to arrive at the assumption that hatred in all its countless extreme and subtle variations is the most dangerous force in the world.
But consider the story of Norbert Capek, the Czech Unitarian minister who created the ritual we call flower communion. A ritual he described as,
“A new experiment in symbolizing our liberty and unity (originally brotherhood)...in which participants confess that we accept each other as brothers and sisters without regard to class, race, or other distinction, acknowledging everybody as our friend who...wants to be good.”
In creating flower communion, Capek sought not only to bring the native beauty and variety of springtime in Prague into the church, but to open the hearts and mind of the congregants to the beauty and variety of all the colors, “de colores", as we sang together just a moment ago, of humanity.
Years later, this seemingly benign sentiment would earn Capek a death sentence. In 1941 Capek’s apartment was raided by the Gestapo. He was arrested and his books and sermons confiscated. Capek was later found, according to Nazi court records, “too dangerous to be allowed to live.”
His crime? Love.
Capek was sent to Dachau, where he continued to write and preach and console his fellow prisoners. Survivors of the camp would later testify Capek could not have been sent to a place where he was more needed.
On October 12, 1942 Capek was sent to the gas chamber.
As a species, we seem to have a problem with love and love’s messengers. Remember what happened to that guy Jesus? We say, most of us anyway, that we like the idea of love and some of us even claim to love some of the messengers of love.…and too often more than their message. So what gives?
Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day” provides us a clue. Most people focus on the last line of the poem, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” And why not focus on that question, it is an essential spiritual question. But there’s something else, further back. In the midst of the poem’s existential questioning, the poet turns to focus on a grasshopper which Oliver observes, “…has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.”
I read in an interview Mary Oliver once gave that this brief encounter with the grasshopper in the poem is in fact drawn from an actual experience Oliver recalled of a grasshopper eating a piece of frosting that was on her hand from a friend’s birthday cake. In pausing to notice and reflect on this little creature in the poet’s hand, a realization emerges, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention.” And here Oliver reminds us our existential anxiety is relieved and spiritual growth nurtured not by mastering specific religious forms but by paying attention.
Paying attention is really a form of listening. And listening the most basic form of love. Love then, is more than a feeling…more than an idea…it is both a means of discerning and practicing truth, that deeper than literal reality, which challenges us to confront and move beyond fear and distraction. In short, love changes us.
Recently I was listening to a podcast of On Being with Krista Tippet which also airs weekly on NPR. For some time now she’s been engaged in something called the “Civil Conversations Project” in the hope of promoting greater understanding between people of differing points of view. Her guest for the podcast I’m referencing was Glenn Beck, the conservative radio and television personality perhaps best known for his histrionics.
Now, I admit I found the interview difficult and by the end I was not truly convinced Beck fully believed what he said concerning the need for people to listen to one another, but he made this observation which, while initially bothersome, stayed with me, “Jesus and Hitler had one thing in common, and that is they could both look somebody in the eye who was hungry or in despair and say, “I will feed you.” And it’s important to listen to what their solution is, but most people don’t. And one will lead you to an evil path, and one will lead you to a good path. But it is exactly the same entry point.”
What I hear in this is a call to heed love’s discerning power. Which is really a call to step back, to know, as Mary Oliver writes, “how fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields…”
The lightness of Oliver’s lovely imagery risks minimizing the profundity of discerning love’s life saving power except that she follows it with a question, really a challenge, echoing history’s great religious teachers, “Tell me, what else should I have done?…What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-50 NRSV)
A teaching…a response to Oliver’s question whose spirit our choir along with Barb Hale and Kirk Upton reminded us during a musical offering a couple of weeks ago, is not confined to one religion alone and more plainly stated is really a call for us to love…to pay attention to that which gives, promotes and affirms life and to align our lives and relationships accordingly.
Norbert Capek did just that and his flower communion bears witness to this. As his wife Maja, explained,
“No two flowers are alike, not two people are alike;
yet each has a contribution to make;
each would help to make this world as beautiful
as a colorful bouquet.
Organized and growing into a true community.
We are ready to serve one another,
The nation and the world.
By exchanging flowers we signify that we are willing,
in the spirit of tolerance and patience,
To march together in search of truth,
Disregarding all that usually divides humankind.”
Flower communion then, on the one hand, is a symbolic rejection of racism, heterosexism, agism, ablism, nationalism, ethnocentrism, classism and the like…the instruments of fear and distraction… employed and assented to both knowingly and unwittingly to secure the power of a few over the many. More, flower communion is an affirmation of human diversity… multiplicity held in tension in Unity, a reflection of the larger world of which we are part and for some the God in whose image we are created.
That this affirmation emerges out of love… from paying attention lends it a resiliency that transcends individual lives and entire generations, making it the most dangerous force in a world where fear and distraction are the powerful’s best defense.
In closing I offer these words, left to us by Norbert Capek before he was executed, as testimony of the danger love poses to all the barriers we erect mentally and physically…in our hearts and in our minds…our neighborhoods and our nations,
“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 welcomed into the choir of heroes.
He who overcame the fetters giving wing to the mind is entering into the golden age of the victorious.”
May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
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