Of Muck and Martyrs
Reflection
Flower Communion Sunday
May 2022
Rev. Craig M. Nowak
If you enter the main glass gallery at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, NY through the door intended as the gallery’s exit, you will find yourself venturing backward in time starting with the present century. Before long, after you’ve passed collections of contemporary, modern, and Art Deco glass you will arrive at a display case containing glass from the Art Nouveau Period in which sits, among other pieces, a small vase by the Swedish artist Betzy Ahlstrom from 1902.
The small, yet visually impactful vase exhibits not only aesthetic mastery, but technical as well. The top fifth is lavender-blue in color below which it is a dark, almost murky blue-green. Applied to the outside of the vase against the lavender-blue and just above the blue-green sections is a blob of white glass that has been exquisitely carved as a lotus blossom.
In many a classroom today, the most a student might be asked to consider about the lotus, or any other flower for that matter, is its biological classification…species, genus, family, order…and so on. But to people in the past things like flowers and animals, indeed all aspects of the natural world were alive and held significant, symbolic meanings.
The lotus, for example carries rich, varied meaning in the Buddhist tradition. Broadly, it symbolizes fortune, purification, and faithfulness. Each of which is related to the material reality of the lotus, including its resiliency and where and how it grows.
Think about where you’ve seen lotus flowers in nature whether in person on in pictures. What kind of water do you usually see them in?
Not the pristine, turquoise waters of the Caribbean.
No, for the most part we see them growing in murky, almost opaque, if not always dirty, then often dirty-looking water.
Indeed they begin life down in the muck at the bottom of the pond or river, from which they must rise, making their way through murky waters until they eventually break the surface and blossom into the beautiful flower humanity has long admired.
If that isn’t an apt metaphor for life as a spiritual practice, I don’t know what is.
A likeness not lost on Buddhists who see mirrored in the life cycle of the lotus, the practitioner’s journey from illusion to enlightenment.
That the lotus begins life in muck and must often travel a murky path in order to blossom is worth remembering.
For too often those who purposely give attention to the spiritual aspect of our lives and of living become quickly impatient or despondent over what we experience as our “pesky” humanity, including that of others, and all the limitations and vulnerabilities being alive, let alone being human, entails.
Indeed many initially pursue a more intentional spiritual life in the hope of severing ties with those aspects of ourselves and our nature that trouble, challenge, irritate or embarrass us. And there’s plenty of people, books, and churches that will help you try to do just that. Even politicians and judges get in on the act, attempting to legislate and rule away a humanity they won’t or can’t accept.
It won’t work, though. What is likely, however, is that you will become insufferable and sanctimonious enough in the process to alienate many of the other humans around you. But your actual humanity, not to mention that of others? That’s not going anywhere. “Resistance”, as they say, “is futile.”
Resignation, rather than resistance, is probably the most frequently made choice in response to our humanity and the messiness of human nature, but that’s what’s largely given us the world we inhabit today. And I’m not suggesting the world we inhabit today is all or even mostly bad, but it’s not something to be especially proud of, either, given what it could be.
Enter the lotus.
The lotus offers us something different. It challenges us to ask, “How can I use this mess I call my humanity or human nature to grow, to learn something about what it means to be human sharing a planet with other humans and non-humans?”
And whereas the desire to separate from challenging or troublesome parts of ourselves or simply giving in and giving up in the hope of making it through life mostly unaffected by it train us to constantly monitor our outer lives, life above the surface, for threats, if you will, the lotus shows us the truly important work of becoming and being alive to what we are is done below the surface. In murky waters where it is not always clear which way is up and the illusionary luxury of certainty must be surrendered to the palpable uneasiness of faith.
A lotus won’t bloom above the surface that hasn’t first journeyed below it. And neither will we.
The history of our Unitarian Universalist faith is written with the lives of countless people, whose inner journey through murky waters has beautifully manifest itself visibly in the world in the form of justice, compassion, mercy, inclusion, healing, recovery, education, inspiration.
Most are unknown to us today, but a few have achieved fame by circumstance rather than design. One such person is Norbert Capek. Capek, who, as we know from the story this morning, created the ritual we today celebrate as flower communion. And he is about as close to an official saint as we have in Unitarian Universalism.
Capek conceived of and introduced flower communion in 1920’s central Europe 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.” His language and his vision can seem, in some ways, dated 100 years later, but recent and ongoing events in this country and around the world should caution against judging too quickly his an era of oppression past.
By 1941, the Nazi occupiers of Capek’s homeland had had heard enough of his ideas about liberty and the unity of all. Capek was arrested by the Gestapo and tried by the Nazi’s. Deemed “too dangerous to be allowed to live,” he was sent to Dachau.
And there he found himself shoved back into the muck, back into the confusion, the ignorance, and illusions from which humankind suffers and that can and does give rise to racist, xenophobic, hate-filled ideologies not merely in individuals alone, but in human institutions, and even whole nations.
Yet even from there he emerged to journey again, rising through life’s murkiness and breaking the surface once more, living the spirit of flower communion by writing, preaching, and consoling his fellow prisoners. Like the lotus, legendary not only for its beauty, but resilience, Capek continued to journey within and bloom in the world, bearing witness to life’s sacred beauty amidst its unthinkable opposite. Yet we risk sentimentalizing his life and his practice if we fail to remember he did this at great cost.
Nobert Capek died a martyr.
In October 1942 he was sent to the gas chamber, leaving us these words that are a travelog of sorts, tracing his inner journey through the muck and murky waters to a life abloom in and for the world,
“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
Flower Communion Sunday
May 2022
Rev. Craig M. Nowak
If you enter the main glass gallery at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, NY through the door intended as the gallery’s exit, you will find yourself venturing backward in time starting with the present century. Before long, after you’ve passed collections of contemporary, modern, and Art Deco glass you will arrive at a display case containing glass from the Art Nouveau Period in which sits, among other pieces, a small vase by the Swedish artist Betzy Ahlstrom from 1902.
The small, yet visually impactful vase exhibits not only aesthetic mastery, but technical as well. The top fifth is lavender-blue in color below which it is a dark, almost murky blue-green. Applied to the outside of the vase against the lavender-blue and just above the blue-green sections is a blob of white glass that has been exquisitely carved as a lotus blossom.
In many a classroom today, the most a student might be asked to consider about the lotus, or any other flower for that matter, is its biological classification…species, genus, family, order…and so on. But to people in the past things like flowers and animals, indeed all aspects of the natural world were alive and held significant, symbolic meanings.
The lotus, for example carries rich, varied meaning in the Buddhist tradition. Broadly, it symbolizes fortune, purification, and faithfulness. Each of which is related to the material reality of the lotus, including its resiliency and where and how it grows.
Think about where you’ve seen lotus flowers in nature whether in person on in pictures. What kind of water do you usually see them in?
Not the pristine, turquoise waters of the Caribbean.
No, for the most part we see them growing in murky, almost opaque, if not always dirty, then often dirty-looking water.
Indeed they begin life down in the muck at the bottom of the pond or river, from which they must rise, making their way through murky waters until they eventually break the surface and blossom into the beautiful flower humanity has long admired.
If that isn’t an apt metaphor for life as a spiritual practice, I don’t know what is.
A likeness not lost on Buddhists who see mirrored in the life cycle of the lotus, the practitioner’s journey from illusion to enlightenment.
That the lotus begins life in muck and must often travel a murky path in order to blossom is worth remembering.
For too often those who purposely give attention to the spiritual aspect of our lives and of living become quickly impatient or despondent over what we experience as our “pesky” humanity, including that of others, and all the limitations and vulnerabilities being alive, let alone being human, entails.
Indeed many initially pursue a more intentional spiritual life in the hope of severing ties with those aspects of ourselves and our nature that trouble, challenge, irritate or embarrass us. And there’s plenty of people, books, and churches that will help you try to do just that. Even politicians and judges get in on the act, attempting to legislate and rule away a humanity they won’t or can’t accept.
It won’t work, though. What is likely, however, is that you will become insufferable and sanctimonious enough in the process to alienate many of the other humans around you. But your actual humanity, not to mention that of others? That’s not going anywhere. “Resistance”, as they say, “is futile.”
Resignation, rather than resistance, is probably the most frequently made choice in response to our humanity and the messiness of human nature, but that’s what’s largely given us the world we inhabit today. And I’m not suggesting the world we inhabit today is all or even mostly bad, but it’s not something to be especially proud of, either, given what it could be.
Enter the lotus.
The lotus offers us something different. It challenges us to ask, “How can I use this mess I call my humanity or human nature to grow, to learn something about what it means to be human sharing a planet with other humans and non-humans?”
And whereas the desire to separate from challenging or troublesome parts of ourselves or simply giving in and giving up in the hope of making it through life mostly unaffected by it train us to constantly monitor our outer lives, life above the surface, for threats, if you will, the lotus shows us the truly important work of becoming and being alive to what we are is done below the surface. In murky waters where it is not always clear which way is up and the illusionary luxury of certainty must be surrendered to the palpable uneasiness of faith.
A lotus won’t bloom above the surface that hasn’t first journeyed below it. And neither will we.
The history of our Unitarian Universalist faith is written with the lives of countless people, whose inner journey through murky waters has beautifully manifest itself visibly in the world in the form of justice, compassion, mercy, inclusion, healing, recovery, education, inspiration.
Most are unknown to us today, but a few have achieved fame by circumstance rather than design. One such person is Norbert Capek. Capek, who, as we know from the story this morning, created the ritual we today celebrate as flower communion. And he is about as close to an official saint as we have in Unitarian Universalism.
Capek conceived of and introduced flower communion in 1920’s central Europe 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.” His language and his vision can seem, in some ways, dated 100 years later, but recent and ongoing events in this country and around the world should caution against judging too quickly his an era of oppression past.
By 1941, the Nazi occupiers of Capek’s homeland had had heard enough of his ideas about liberty and the unity of all. Capek was arrested by the Gestapo and tried by the Nazi’s. Deemed “too dangerous to be allowed to live,” he was sent to Dachau.
And there he found himself shoved back into the muck, back into the confusion, the ignorance, and illusions from which humankind suffers and that can and does give rise to racist, xenophobic, hate-filled ideologies not merely in individuals alone, but in human institutions, and even whole nations.
Yet even from there he emerged to journey again, rising through life’s murkiness and breaking the surface once more, living the spirit of flower communion by writing, preaching, and consoling his fellow prisoners. Like the lotus, legendary not only for its beauty, but resilience, Capek continued to journey within and bloom in the world, bearing witness to life’s sacred beauty amidst its unthinkable opposite. Yet we risk sentimentalizing his life and his practice if we fail to remember he did this at great cost.
Nobert Capek died a martyr.
In October 1942 he was sent to the gas chamber, leaving us these words that are a travelog of sorts, tracing his inner journey through the muck and murky waters to a life abloom in and for the world,
“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