BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH
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  • BUUC Home
  • Events
  • About the BUUC
    • Our History
    • BUUC Committees >
      • Executive Committee
      • Worship Committee
      • Membership Committee
      • The Women's Alliance
      • Flower Committee
  • Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
  • Stewardship and Gift Policy
    • Saints We've Known
    • Charitable Giving and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
  • Sermons 2022-23
    • A Waste of time
    • The Seventh Principle
    • Make Light of It
    • A Turn of the Screw
    • America: Part II
    • What Do You Expect?
    • Good Mourning
    • Beyone Repair?
    • No Signal
    • Absolutely, Maybe, Definitely Not
    • Do Guardian Angels Exist?
    • Right Here
  • Our Covenant
  • Minister's Welcome
  • Religious Exploration
  • Music & Choir
  • We Rise: Social Justice Resources
  • Newsletters
  • Church Calendar
  • Unitarian Universalism
  • Driving Directions
  • Photos of Us
  • Making the BUUC Accessible
  • LOVEUU
  • Community Resources
    • Mental Health Providers, Worcester MA
    • Southern Worcester County Parent Guide
  • Contact Us
    • Sermons 2021-22
  • Sermon Archives
    • Finding Joy in Uncertain Times
    • The Arithmetic of Joy
    • Of Muck and Martyrs
    • Doing Dishes
    • Idle Worship
    • The Fear of the Refugee
    • It's Not Just You
    • If We Choose
    • Lazy Busy
    • A Most Human Season
    • Running on Empty
    • Alone Together
    • Come Home
    • Winter Warmth
    • How Big Is Your Circle?
    • Thanksgiving Life
    • Kurt Vonnegut: Humanist Hero
    • In Costume
    • Again
    • Borderland
    • The Geometry of Life
    • Transformation and Growth
    • Come Build a Land
    • Our Brains, Our Minds and Our Hearts
    • Gifts
    • Repairers of the Breach
    • The Times They Are A-Changin'
    • Mission Possible
    • It Matters
    • Thanksgiving Reflection
    • Shoes That Fit
    • Winter
    • Ignorance, Answers, and Bliss
    • Questions, Questions
    • Living to the Point of Tears
    • Lost in the Shuffle: UU's Less Popular Principle
    • On the Turning Away
    • A Matter of Degree
    • A Collection of Near Death Experiences
    • I Know Her So Well, I Think. I Thought.
    • Faith-based Resilience
    • To Abet Creation
    • Who Cares?
    • A Matter of Life and Depth
    • Pass/Fail
    • Enough
    • O Holy Light
    • With New Eyes
    • Coming Alive
    • Beyond Words
    • Becoming
    • A Miracle Even Thomas Jefferson Could Embrace
    • Fear Not!
    • The Miracle of Change
    • Meeting Grace
    • R-E-S-P-E-C-T
    • Serving with Grace
    • The Pursuit of Happiness
    • When Heresy Met Sally
    • The Souls of All Living Creatures
    • What Are You Looking For?
    • Beloved
    • Let Me Count The Ways
    • Happiness
    • Chosen
    • Faith and Belief
    • Room To Grow
    • Blessed Fools
    • Don't Be a Superhero
    • Getting There from Here
    • Unfinished Business
    • Universalism's Origen
    • Yearn to Learn
    • Beauty Saves
    • Commentary on Freedom
    • Being Human: Religious Community in a Plastic Age
    • Questionable Certainties and Faithful Doubts
    • Commentaries on Murphy's Law
    • Children of a Lesser God
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Life Incarnate
    • So You Want to Be Happy
    • A Year's End Resolution
    • Where Stars Are Born
    • Thanking Eve
    • Anger, Our Teacher
    • Everlasting Punishment
    • Comprehending Moral Imperatives in a Me-centered World
    • Promises Kept
    • Dancing With The Stars: Science and Religion
    • Two Steps and Missteps: Church Membership for Human Beings
    • Light of the World
    • Dear God
    • Imago Hominis
    • CESA: Reflections on Drug Addiction
    • Falling in Love Again
    • How Does Your Garden Grow
    • Repent! No Guilt Trip Required
    • Go Out into the World
    • Thanks-living
    • Life and Not Life
    • Guilty As Charged
    • Dare To Hope
    • Don't Forget To Chew
    • Break the Silence - Stop the Violence
    • Living Among Strangers
    • What Is Religion Anyway?
    • East of Eden
    • Praying Attention
    • Wholly Human
    • The Healing Power of Forgiveness
    • All I Want for Christmas
    • Let It Be...Let It Go
    • Why Not?
    • People Like You
    • Vulnerable Trust
    • Thin Places
    • Now What?
    • Courageously Humble
    • The Last Butterfly
    • The Good, The Bad, and The Whole
    • Sacred Souvenirs
    • Made Whole
    • This Wild and Precious Life
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Where Our Future Can Begin
    • Taking Stock: Managing Our Spiritual Inventory
    • To Convert Life into Truth
    • Are We There Yet?
    • Family Matters
    • Ordinary Saints
    • All I Wanted Was Everything
    • Giving Thanks
    • To Be or Not To Be
    • Entering the Christmas Story
    • A Great Light
    • What's Real?
    • Troubling the Water
    • The Amazing Mr. Wedgewood
    • Lend Me Your Ears
    • Work That Is Real
    • Happy Melba Toast Day
    • The Great Pacific Garbage Dump
    • Plastics, Benjamin!
    • Surprise Beginnings
    • A Place at the Table
    • Norbert Capek’s Flower Communion: A Call To Honor Life
    • Voices of God
    • Hold On To What Is Good
    • The Little Stone Church That Rocks
    • What Would Jean-Luc Do?: A Tribute to Humanist Hero Gene Roddenberry
    • From Who am I? to Whose are We?
    • Turning
    • Spirituality
    • R & R
    • Spritual F-Words
    • Does Anyone Really Like Herding Cats?
    • Prepare to Be Amazed
    • The Greatest Gift
    • The Impossible Will Take A Little While
    • Taking Sides: Journey to the Center of the Universe
    • Help Wanted, Apply Within
    • Two Truths & Plastics and Water Don't Mix
    • The Third Conversation
    • Good People >
      • UU You >
        • Twitter and Covid and Wall Street, Oh, my!
        • I Do Believe in Spooks >
          • Holy Homophones >
            • What's in a Name?
            • So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye!
            • Open-Mindedness, As Assigned
            • Going on a Journey
            • Cheap Love
            • Nonproductive Delight
            • The Persistence of Memory
            • Thoughts about the Historical Jesus
            • Lindens and Tiarella and Bearberry, Oh My!
            • Season's Greetings
            • I Still Have A Dream
            • Peace Corps - A Lesson in Caring
            • Spiritual Engineering
            • Thanks for the Memories
            • Our Stories, Ourselves
            • Anxious Gardeners
            • The Best Sermon Ever!
            • UUnited
            • We Are Courageous
            • A Right Way to Be Wrong
            • Sacred Ideals
            • This Wild and Precious Life Revisited
            • 20/20
            • Home
            • What About Now?
        • Fragile
        • Time Ravel
        • Now Is Not the Time for Hope
        • The G Word (It's Probably Not what You Think)
    • No Thanks, I'll Walk
    • Be the Change
    • I Don't Know
    • What Lies Within
    • Guest Perspective
    • Growing Panes
    • De Colores
    • Roots and Wings
BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH

Norbert Capek’s Flower Communion:  A Call To Honor Life
Reflection given at  Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
May 18, 2014
By Rev. Craig M. Nowak

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  Familiar words, I trust to some of us here today...words found in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.  Perhaps you’ve uttered them or some version of them yourself in moments of despair or anguish.  I think of these words sometimes when I read or hear the news.  Indeed, I’ve often felt that the news, with headlines that highlight things like growing income inequality, cowardly politicians in a world desperate for leadership here and abroad, growing violence against women, children and GLBTQ people in Africa and other places at the hands of religious thugs, callous disregard for worker safety like the miners in Turkey, and draconian laws in our own country that shame our criminal justice system...when I  read or hear these I think the news should come with a warning: Read at Your Own Risk; Contents May Be Hazardous To Your Spiritual Health. 

Let’s face it, some days hope can be hard to find.

And then we are reminded of people like Norbert Capek.  As the story from our reading tells us, Capek, a Unitarian minister in Prague, created a ritual called 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.”

Years later, this seemingly benign sentiment would come to brand Capek a threat to the Nazi occupiers of his homeland.  In 1941 Capek’s apartment was raided by the Gestapo. 

Caught listening to a BBC broadcast, Capek was arrested and his books and sermons were confiscated.  Capek, a man who called his congregation to honor life, was found, according to Nazi court records, too dangerous to be allowed to live.

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.

On that day Norbert Capek might have cried out, “My God, my god, why have your forsaken me?”, but instead he left us these words:

“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.”

Norbert Capek possessed what one might call a mature spirituality, evident especially in his awareness of, and commitment to honor the sacred in himself and others.  Armed with these he could not be defeated even in death.

Most of us will not experience life or death in as dramatic a way that Capek did, but we all will struggle to find hope and making meaning for our own lives and the wider world in which we live.  One of the primary roles religion has typically played in human societies is to bring people together for a common purpose including to find hope and make meaning in this life about which we know surprisingly very little.

While some religions seek to make meaning and find hope by looking outside or towards a place or time beyond the realm of humankind, Unitarians and Universalists have tended to seek and make meaning in the here and now...and find hope in human potential rather than pronouncements from the heavens.

For anyone who follows the news, Norbert Capek’s hope-filled message of freedom, human dignity, and love for one another, a message that understands human diversity as a blessing to be celebrated rather than a curse to be eradicated, is as radical today as it was some seventy years ago.  All the more important then, this ritual we celebrate today.

In a world that continually attempts to reinforce the message that some people matter and many others do not, Flower Communion calls us to remember and practice a different message...one that calls us to honor life in all its diversity...a message that says every person, no matter what shape, size, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, class, creed, age or ability carries within them the spark of the divine...a spark that when ignited within the soul burns with a passion for the possible, shines as a beacon of hope even in the most desperate of times, and pierce the mind’s defenses and illusions to illuminate the miraculous in the ordinary.

Flower Communion is more than an aesthetically pleasing ritual and celebration, it is an affirmation of our highest ideals.  Norbert Capek’s wife, Maja, put it this way:

“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.”

A beautiful sentiment. A risky practice.

Let us not forget, that this historically Unitarian and Universalist conviction, this affirmation of human worth and dignity which today in the relative comfort and peace of this nation may please our mind, and warm our heart, cost Norbert Capek and many like him, past and present, their lives. 

Today then is a day to both remember and recommit to the faithful practice of our highest ideals,  to lend a hand to those who might join us, and forgive ourselves and others as we stumble along the way, assured, in the words of Norbert Capek, “It is worthwhile to live and fight courageously for sacred ideals.” Today is a day to risk heeding our call to honor life.

Amen and Blessed Be

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