Remembering at Memorial Day

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading this morning is a poem by the English poet Seigfried Sassoon, who fought in the trenches in the First World War. The poem is titled, “Suicide in the Trenches”:

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of run,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again….

The second reading was a poem by Elizabeth Bishop titled “One Art.” Unfortunately, copyright laws do not permit us to reproduce complete poems that are still protected under copyright.

SERMON — “Remembering”

Religions are pretty good at remembering. You might say that the central act of religion is to keep memories alive. In the Western tradition, Christianity has, for the past two thousand years, managed to keep the memory of a certain rabbi from Nazareth named Jesus; and for perhaps three thousand years Judaism has managed to keep alive the memory of the exodus from Egypt, when Moses led his people out of bondage and into the Promised Land. In Persia, the Parsees or Zoroastrians have kept alive the memory of the prophet Zarathustra for three thousand years. In India and the Far East, Buddhists have kept alive the memory of Siddhartha Gotama for some twenty-five hundred years. So religions are adept at keeping ancient memories alive.

Religions are also good at helping us keep more recent memories alive. I don’t mean just remembering our own narrow religious tradition, or the ways we remember the tiny little histories of our local congregations. I’m thinking more of the ways in which our religious communities help us to remember our own lives; to remember what is past and done but still lives on in our hearts.

We keep alive the memories of people whom we loved, whom we still love, but who are now dead; or who have otherwise passed out of our lives. I will say from my own experience that such memories are rarely without pain: it is only human to feel pain when you remember someone who has died. Our religious communities can give us a way to deal with that pain, perhaps even to make sense out of that pain. Most obviously, when someone dies, you hold a memorial service for that person. I know when my mother died several years ago, her memorial service helped me to deal with the pain and the grief. Not that such a religious service lessens the pain and the grief, but we human beings seem to welcome such ritual actions. Belonging to a religious community doesn’t necessarily lessen the pain and the grief either. But there is something about being part of a group of people who are willing to talk about death and pain and loss, especially where some or most of the people in that group have gone through their own pain and grief and loss. Being part of such a group helps you make sense out of death; not because the tenets of that religious community can adequately explain death; but because you are with a group of people who are willing to face death together.

One result of all this is that the buildings which house religious communities can wind up holding lots of memories. This church building in which we sit this morning has seen four memorial services in the past year, and hundreds of others in the 168 years during which it has stood here. These walls hold so many memories. In fact, these walls quite literally hold memories: the Tiffany mosaic behind me was given in 1911 as a memorial to Judge and Mrs. Oliver Prescott, by their three children, Oliver Prescott, Jr., Mrs. Frederick Stetson and Miss Mary R. Prescott. On the back wall of this room is a memorial, where families have put up plaques with the names of members and friends of this church who have died. We are literally and metaphorically the repository of memories; the memories of the generations.

I cannot help but add that one of the best reasons for supporting this church is to keep it as a repository for such memories. Obviously, a church building is far more than a repository of memories; it is first and foremost a home for a living community. But the members of that living community have their memories, and there is almost nowhere else in our society where we have a physical space where we can remember; the only other place I can think of would be cemeteries, but cemeteries lack the vitality that churches get from also housing a living community. In churches memories can remain as living memories; churches look backwards in memory, but also forwards to the next generations; and of course churches remain above concerned with the present.

I’ll say something else about this church. Here in this place, we make an effort to come face-to-face with the truth, even if that truth is less than comfortable. When it comes to memories, we remember, yes; but we don’t feel we have to sugar-coat our memories. Thus when we look back at our Christian heritage, we remember what is good about that heritage; but we also try to look unflinchingly on what it less than good about that heritage; we are willing to acknowledge that our Christian heritage has some unsavory episodes in its long history. This same attitude guides us when we look back at the past of our own church: we remember what is good about our church’s past, but we acknowledge that both good and bad things have happened here. And if you choose to do so, this church will support you if you choose to apply this same attitude when you look back at your own past: because we know that no human being is wholly good, we know that it’s acceptable to remember both the good and the bad things about the dead. In our faith tradition, we try to remain open to the whole truth of the world around us.

By remaining open in this way to the whole of truth, by accepting the wholeness of our memories, we are performing something of a counter-cultural act. One of the things I’ve noticed is that the society around us sometimes tries to mold the past into a more comfortable image. I see this tendency in people’s personal lives; when, for example, people blame a personal weakness on their parents instead of taking personal responsibility for their own actions. Or when, for example, rather than apologizing and saying “I’m sorry,” we see people hiding behind lawyers and law suits. We see this tendency at a national level as well; when, for example, any critical statement about United States foreign policy in Iraq and the Middle East is said to be unpatriotic and even treasonous. And we see this in our own religious institutions; when, for example, people refuse to acknowledge past problems and misdeeds in religious institutions, preferring instead to remain silent or to deny that anything bad ever happens in a church.

Our society seems to encourage an attitude of refusing to accept responsiblity for oneself; and I see this in part as a failure of memory. When I carefully search my own memory of my own actions, I find many examples of times when I was less than a good person; and I find that the society around me offers me too many ways to excuse myself. When I look back at the history of my beloved Unitarian Universalist religion, I find instances of racially segregated churches, instances of sexism, instances of misconduct on the part of ministers, and — my personal pet peeve — instances of bias on the basis of socio-economic status. And when I look back at the history of my country, a country in which I have pride, a country which I love, I find less-than-savory episodes: I could start with killing native Americans, work my way up through the slavery of Africans, and so on up to the present day. All these things represent in part a failure of memory: if you forget that 95% of the Indians in New England died within 20 years of the arrival of European settlers, you can forget about any possible problem.

I don’t mean to imply that we each have to take all the burdens of the world on our shoulders; nor do I mean to imply that any one person has to bear the full burden of responsibility for, let us say, slavery. Nor am I saying that I want you to go out and remember only the worst things about yourself, or to remember only the worst things about someone you love who is now dead. But what I am saying is that we need to remember as honestly as we possibly can.

The first reading this morning gives an example of what I mean. The poet Siegfried Sassoon served with the English military in the trench warfare in the First World War, and he writes of a young soldier who, while initially carefree, gets worn down by the trench warfare and commits suicide. Sassoon writes: “He put a bullet through his brain. / No one spoke of him again.” That, my friends, is a failure of memory.

Which brings us to our second reading, the poem by Elizabeth Bishop, which says:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, faster:
places, names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

None of these will bring disaster. And what Elizabeth Bishop is telling us is quite simple: you can’t cling tightly to everything. Indeed, in this life of ours, we had better master the art of losing, for there is much to lose, as Elizabeth Bishop says at the end of the poem:

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Say it!) like disaster.

The art of remembering is an art of holding on; and it has to be coupled with the art of losing, or the art of letting go. We need them both. We need to be able to hold on to memories; but at times in our lives, we need to be able to let go again.

There is a difference between the failure of memory, of which I spoke a moment ago, and the art of letting go. The failure of memory in the way I’m talking about it is really a refusal to remember things correctly; it’s an attempt to create a past that never was.

The trick is to learn how to balance the art of remembering, of holding on; over against the art of losing, or of letting go. You can watch this happen inside yourself when someone you love dies. Elizabeth Bishop tells us that even when you lose someone you love, “the art of losing’s not to hard to master”; for when someone you love dies, you may feel at first as if you can’t possibly let go, and yet somehow you do, for you don’t really have a choice. And when you love is dying, or has just died, it surely does feel like disaster. And then you have to be careful to find the right balance: by not succumbing to that sense of disaster on the one hand, and by continuing to remember on the other hand.

I started out by saying that religions are pretty good at remembering, and I said that perhaps the central act of religion is keeping memory alive. A religious community gives each person in that community a context in which to hold memories; and a healthy religious community gives each person in that community assistance in letting go of memories when the time is right. To say this is merely to affirm a great human truth. When we human beings lose some person, or even some thing like an ideal or a place, when we lose that which we care for deeply, we are struck with grief. Yet we manage to move on, we manage to keep on living; and that means that some measure of grief has to slip away. Being part of a religious community is a way to help that very human process move forward in its course; because a religious community has seen this process happen over and over again, always with starkly individual differences, but always in the same grand human pattern.

And a religious community can help us keep that balance between holding on and letting go. The reason we want to keep that balance is so that we can move forward in our lives — so that we can move forward together in our communal life as a church, as a community, and a country. We don’t want to get stuck. When someone you love dies, it’s easy to get stuck in grieving; and while perhaps we never stop grieving, we must also find a way to live out our lives, to live out what was best in the life of whomever it was who died. I’d say that’s the truest expression of grief.

So, too we must keep the balance between remembering, and letting go; so that we might move forward in our communal life, in our political life. On Memorial Day, we remember all those who died in military service of our great country; we remember them, and we recall the ideals they fought and died for. And by remembering, we can commit ourselves to work for the highest of those ideals — some of the old ideals may no longer apply in today’s world, and those we can let go of — but we remember the highest ideals.

In the Unitarian Universalist church of my childhood, I learned early on what those highest ideals were, and I learned them as religious ideals. Those ideals were, and are:– the ideal of humankind learning to live together as one interconnected, interdependent community;– the ideal of each and every human being having a voice in how he or she is governed;– the ideal of a world where a person’s essential humanity means more than their race or creed or national origin.

Our religion exists in part to keep those highest ideals of humanity alive. Our liberal faith has long upheld the ideal of democratic process, and the ideal that all persons are important and of worth, and most importantly the ideal that each and every human being is worthy of respect, and of love. We have not always lived up to our ideals, both in our own religious community, and in our lives in the wider world. But we hold on to those ideals, and we remain open to new and deeper understandings of those ideals. And on this Memorial Day, we commit ourselves once again to a world where all persons shall be known as our brothers and sisters.

May it be so.

Eco-moms

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

Bidding farewell to graduating high school seniors

Emma Mitchell, Director of Religious Education: Each year, a few young people from this church end their time in high school. Usually after they are through with high school, they head off to find a job, to join the military, or to attend college or further education. And most often that means that these young people move out of town, or have busy schedules that don’t permit them to come to church as often.

Our young people enrich the life of this church immeasurably. They bring their own perspective to church life, they bring their own talents and enthusiasms. Sometimes, they can help to challenge the assumptions of older generations, which can inject new energy and life into this church. So when the end of high school requires some young people to move on, it’s a real loss to the church.

But it’s also a time of excitement. We are so pleased that these young people are entering a new phase of life! They may not be around as much as in the past, but we want them to know that we will always be glad to see them here, that we hope they continue to be a part of this church. We want them to know, too, that we will support them as they make the big transition away from high school and into something new — we will support them in their dreams, and their emerging new lives.

This is our chance to recognize these people in what has become known as a “Bridging Ceremony,” bridging the gap between youth and adulthood.

Dan Harper, parish minister: First, I’d like to ask anyone who, like Emma and me, spent part or all of their growing-up years in a Unitarian, Universalist, or Unitarian Universalist church, to join us up here at the pulpit. [About a dozen people, or a third of the congregation, joined us at the pulpit.]

Next, I’d like to ask everyone who is in high school, and those adults who have served as youth advisors, to come stand up here in front of the pulpit.

Alyzza Callahan will be ending her time in high school and moving on to new things. Alyzza, would you please join us up here in the pulpit?

Welcome Alyzza! We welcome you into the community of adult Unitarian Universalists.

Those of us standing here at the pulpit also grew up as Unitarian Universalists, and we have either stayed, or we have come back. Know that you will be welcomed into other Unitarian Universalist churches (and if you aren’t welcomed, you can do what some of us did and demand to be welcomed in!). Know that you will always be welcome here — come back and visit, or remain here as members.

And I deliver this charge to all the adults in this church: whenever you meet a young adult who grew up in a Unitarian Universalist church, you have the privilege and the responsibility to welcome them here in this church — just as other Unitarian Universalist congregations will have the privilege (and responsibility) to welcome some of our young people into their congregations.

Readings

The first reading was a poem by Adrienne Rich, titled “Mother-Right.” (Unfortunately, copyright laws do not permit us to reproduce complete poems that are still protected under copyright.)

The second reading this morning is from the Hebrew scriptures, the book of Proverbs, chapter 4, verses 1-9:

1 Listen, children, to a father’s instruction,
and be attentive, that you may gain insight;
2 for I give you good precepts:
do not forsake my teaching.
3 When I was a son with my father,
tender, and my mother’s favorite,
4 he taught me, and said to me,
“Let your heart hold fast my words;
keep my commandments, and live.
5 Get wisdom; get insight: do not forget, nor turn away
from the words of my mouth.
6 Do not forsake her, and she will keep you;
love her, and she will guard you.
7 The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom,
and whatever else you get, get insight.
8 Prize her highly, and she will exalt you;
she will honor you if you embrace her.
9 She will place on your head a fair garland;
she will bestow on you a beautiful crown.

SERMON — “Eco-Moms”

At their best, religious scriptures make us feel uncomfortable; make us realize that we’re not yet the best people we could be; make us long to grow a better world from the compost of our present reality.

And the religious scriptures of the world have their limits. The religious scriptures I know have a tendency to ignore women: the writings of Confucius mention women maybe once; Buddhist scriptures are either abstractly remote, or focus in on a man’s world; the Bhagavad Gita of the Hindus tell men’s stories. The Hebrew and Christian scriptures are somewhat better: the Hebrew Bible has some powerful women characters in it, and a couple of books are even devoted to telling women’s stories; in the Christian scriptures, women have important roles to play, now and then. But: if we want to talk in newspaper terminology, women get far fewer column inches than men in all religious scriptures; which is hardly balanced reporting; worse yet, there’s a clear bias in the reporting in that women’s viewpoints and concerns are slighted.

Well, this is an old story by now. Even though a few conservative religious groups continue to insist that the world’s religious scriptures offer a perfectly balanced view of women, the rest of us know better. And over the past few decades, some of our best poets have created poems that rival religious scriptures for beauty, truth, and a capacity to make us feel uncomfortable.

The first reading this morning was by one of those poets, Adrienne Rich. Her poem “Mother-Right” challenges us to think about who mothers are, and what women are; and who men are, and what they are; and who and what children might be.

In the poem, a woman is running through a field; she has a child with her. In her long, slim hand, she holds the smaller, starlike, hand of a child. Her hair is “cut short for faster travel”; the child’s hair is in long curls that graze his shoulders. Together, they through the field.

Somewhere on the horizon a man stands, his feet planted on the ground. He is walking the boundaries (the boundaries of what, is not quite clear) and he is measuring. He is motivated by the belief that parts of the earth are his.

So the man is making boundaries, and the woman is running, running through the air, running through the field, running under the clouds and sky. How can there be boundaries to anything? Well, the man believes the things belong to him: the grass; the water; the air. But the woman is running over and through and under; her eyes are sharpened; she is making for the open.

She is making for the open.

Perhaps herein lies the woman’s wisdom: she is making for the open, making for the openness beyond boundaries. She is drawing her son along with her, and the boy is singing.

In the second reading this morning, from the Hebrew scriptures, Wisdom is personified as a person, as a woman. And “the beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever else you get, get insight.” Or as it is more felicitously rendered in the sonorous words of the King James translation: “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding. Exalt her, and she shall promote thee: she shall bring thee to honour, when thou dost embrace her. She shall give to thine head an ornament of grace….” This old religious text, this old collection of folk-wisdom and proverbs, was written down to pass on wisdom to young men; but hidden in these old proverbs is challenging advice to men and to women: don’t just trust in men’s wisdom, trust in the wisdom of women, too. Wisdom, who is a woman, shall give to thine head an ornament of grace, like the child’s curls grazing his shoulders.

This all, of course, is the mythical poetical religious thinking that we Unitarian Universalists love so well. It’s a little mysterious, and it’s pretty hard to pin down in prose, or in a sermon. Maybe you just can’t measure it and put firm boundaries on it; you have to sort of run through it, looking for an opening. But we can tell there’s wisdom there; we might even be able to get a little closer to the meaning of that wisdom if we keep on going. And my experience with religion would indicate that we’ll know we’re getting closer to the truth, to the openness, when we start to feel a little uncomfortable. So let’s see what we can do to get a little uncomfortable.

One of the things that makes me uncomfortable is the image of the man on the horizon walking boundaries and measuring things. I love really good boundaries. I love to measure things. That’s just the kind of guy I am. What makes me uncomfortable is the thought that all that measuring and boundary-making might lead me to believe that the grass and the waters and the earth and even the air might be considered mine; or if not mine, someone else’s.

Whereas I know perfectly well that fields and earth and wind and air really can’t belong to anyone. Yes, yes, I know that in our society we carefully measure off the land, and you can buy a plot of land with a house on it, and call it yours; and pay taxes on it, and pay for the repairs to the house, and then when you move away or die the house and land gets sold to someone else who owns it. Or like me you can rent a home or apartment from someone else. We all know this perfectly well: if you have enough money, you can own land.

Poet Adrienne Rich gently challenges this notion of ours. She has that lovely cynical little line in her poem: “He believes in what is his.” Silly man: he may believe it is his, but there’s that woman and her son running through it like there are no boundaries. Because, you know, there really aren’t any boundaries except the ones we make up.

I would like us all to teach our children that sometimes we have to respect man-made boundaries (please note the use of the gender-specific pronoun). But I would also like us to teach our children that there are no boundaries, not really. For there is a great religious truth that all life is a unity. All life is a unity. True, we human beings are different from starfish, and thank God we are different from cockroaches; yet there is a unity which binds us together and makes us one.

Part of the reason we have gotten into the big ecological mess in which we are now thoroughly immersed is because we have been acting like boundaries are real. If I dump my factory’s PCBs into the Acushnet River, I’m dumping them past the boundaries we humans have created; which means of course that the PCBs just magically disappear. Out of sight, out of mind.

We really believe that, you know. And it really is a kind of primitive religious belief. By primitive religious belief I mean that a belief that takes religion far too literally, ignoring religion’s poetical mythical qualities. A primitive religious belief relies on superstition and suspension of reason to believe in it. I also know it’s a primitive religious belief, because when you challenge someone’s primitive beliefs, that person tends to get all cranky and dismissive. As when you tell the people running the factory that you can’t just dump the PCBs into the Acushnet River, those people get all cranky and dismissive, calling you an environmental crank. They suspend reason and rely on superstitious beliefs: no no no, there’s an invisible boundary line there, once we dump the PCBs into the Achusnet River, they can’t hurt us any more.

It’s sort of like when you’re a little kid, and someone says they’re going to give you cooties, and you create this invisible shield so you don’t get cooties. So we create invisible boundaries so we don’t get ecological cooties. Forget the fact that those PCBs are going to get into the fish and the quahogs, and that the terns and the seagulls are going to eat the fish and the quahogs full of PCBs, and so the PCBs will spread around the ecosystem until we find PCBs in human beings, too. Nope. No PCBs in human beings, ’cause we’ve got our invisible shields up. That sounds like a primitive religious superstition to me.

What we need today are moms who run through the mythical, magical, invisible-but-real boundaries, and show children the poetical mythical religious truth that all is one. We need Eco-Moms; that’s with a capital “E” and a capital “M,” superhero-style. Not that Eco-Moms wear the typical superhero costume of tights and cape: I’m thinking more along the lines of something designed by Coco Chanel, classic, simple, and suitable for every occasion. Eco-Moms have a variety of super-abilities: they have X-ray vision which allows them to see through the surface of things to an underlying unity; they can leap tall boundaries with a single bound, carrying a child safely with them; more powerful than anti-environmental rhetoric, they can stand up to silly superstitious beliefs; and they can teach their children to be whole human beings aware of their connection to the earth.

Not that every mom is going to have time to be an Eco-Mom. Lord knows moms have enough to do as it is. Yet perhaps there would be a few moms out there who could be Eco-Moms. The world could also use a few good Eco-Dads, to say nothing of Eco-Grandmas and Eco-Grandpas. Not only that, we need child-free people like my partner and me to teach children the same things. We adults need to teach children a way of Wisdom that leads us to unity and wholeness.

We’re facing an environmental crisis right now; we all know it at some level. We know this crisis is going to affect our children’s lives; we can be pretty sure that it will affect every aspect of our children’s lives. It’s equally obvious that we’re facing lots of other problems, too: war, poverty, violence, the plague of AIDS, population growth; but it feels like the environmental crisis is looming even larger all the time. And we know there’s a religious dimension to our situation: when we human beings are faced with seemingly unmanageable problems, we often try to make sense out of those problems through our religious beliefs.

Our Unitarian Universalist religion doesn’t give us any easy answers or quick fixes: no invisible shields for us; no denial of reality for us. In that sense, we have an uncomfortable religion. But ours is a ultimately a comforting religion, because one of our core beliefs is that we human beings can change the world for the better, if we choose to. I sometimes think we don’t believe that strongly enough. We can change the world, if we would just put our minds to it. When New Bedford harbor gets filled with PCBs, ordinary human beings have the power to get together, and declare the harbor to be a Superfund site, and start cleaning up that harbor. When a rich powerful real estate developer is trying to destroy sixty acres of wetlands and forest in the town of Fairhaven, ordinary human beings have the power to get together and stop that real estate developer. We can change the world.

When global environmental problems feel overwhelming, when you feel like nothing is ever going to change, remember that we can change things. We can change things in order to preserve this good earth for our children, and their children, and so on down to seven times seven generations.

When the going gets tough, leave behind your meek and mild-mannered day-to-day persona, slip into a nearby church, don your Chanel-designed superhero costume, and leap into action. Eco-Moms to the rescue! We all have it in us to be superheros, even if it’s only for a day.

Flower celebration, 2006

This flower celebration was led by Rev. Dan Harper and Emma Mitchell, Director of Religious Education. As usual, the material below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Homily and story copyright (c) 2006 Daniel Harper.

Story for all ages — The Story of the Flower Service

83 years ago, Norbert and Maja Capek were ministers of a Unitarian congregation far away from here in Europe, in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Most members of their congregation had left other religions to become Unitarians, and many of these people did not want to be reminded of the religions they had left behind. So Norbert and Maja Capek decided to create a new ritual for their congregation — a Flower Ceremony.

One Sunday in June, they asked everyone in the congregation to bring a flower to the worship service. When people arrived on Sunday morning, all the flowers were gathered together in vases, and Norbert Capek said a short blessing over the flowers. It seems to me that the flowers became symbols of what it means to be a human being: every flower was different, every flower was beautiful in its own way. And at the end of the worship service, everyone went up and took a flower, a different flower from the one that they had brought, took that flower home with them as a symbol of their connection to everyone else in the congregation.

We are going to have our own Flower Celebration, or Flower Communion, right here in our own congregation. In just a moment, we will all have a chance to come forward and place a flower in the vases on the table here. If you forgot to bring a flower with you this morning, or if you didn’t know that you were supposed to bring a flower, you will find extra flowers on the table over there, and you can come up, pick a flower you like, and place it in the central vase.

Because we value our children highly — for our children represent new beginnings and new possibilities — I am going to let the children be the first ones to place their flowers in the vase here. I invite the children to come forward now, and you may bring an adult along if you wish….

[Children come forward]

And now I invite everyone to come forward and place a flower in the vase here.

[All come forward]

This short blessing was written by Norbert Capek:

Infinite Spirit of Life, we ask your blessing on these, your messengers of fellowship and love. May they remind us, amid diversities of knowledge and of gifts, to be one in desire and affection, and in devotion to your will. May they also remind us of the value of comradeship, of doing and sharing alike. May we cherish friendship as one of your most precious gifts. May we not let awareness of another’s talents discourage us, or sully our relationship, but may we realize that, whatever we can do, great or small, the efforts of all of us are needed to do your work in this world.

[All come forward during this.]

Now that we have gathered all the flowers together, I will read a short prayer written by Norbert Capek:

In the name of Providence, which implants in the seed the future of the tree and in the hearts of men [and women] the longing for people living in [human] love; in the name of the highest, in whom we move and who makes the mother [and father], the brother and sister what they are; in the name of sages and great religious leaders, who sacrificed their lives to hasten the coming of [peace and justice];– let us renew our resolution sincerely to be real brothers and sisters regardless of any kind of bar which estranges [one from another]. In this holy resolution may we be strengthened, knowing that we are [one] family, that one spirit, the spirit of love, unites us, [that we] endeavor for a more perfect and more joyful life. Amen.

Readings

The first reading is from a short biography of Norbert Capek, written by Richard Henry for the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society.

“On the 28th of March, 1941, [Norbert] Capek and his daughter, Zora, aged 29, were arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Pankrac Prison. Zora was accused of listening to foreign broadcasts and distributing the content of some BBC transmissions; Capek himself of listening to foreign broadcasts and of “high treason.” Several of his sermons were cited as “evidence” of the latter charge. Listening to foreign broadcasts was a capital offense under the Protectorate. Two separate trials were held, the first at Pankrac Prison soon after their arrest; the second, an appeal of the original decision, at Dresden in April 1942. The appeals court found Capek innocent of the treason charge, recommending that, given his age, the year between his arrest and the appeals trial be counted toward his jail time. The Gestapo, ignoring the court’s recommendation, nonetheless sent Capek to Dachau, Zora to forced labor in Germany. Capek’s name appears among prisoners sent on an invalid transport on October 12, 1942 to Hartheim Castle, near Linz, Austria, where he died of poison gas.”

Not long before he was put to death by the Nazis, Dr. Capek wrote this prayer:

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.

HOMILY — “Maja Capek, Flowers, and Totalitarianism”

You all probably know that our congregation dates back to 1708. It started out as one of the established Puritan congregations of the Massachusetts theocracy, but eventually the congregation gradually moved towards a more liberal Unitarian theology. So it is we often think of our congregational history as a single long chain of existence from those early beginnings nearly three hundred years ago; and so it is that we post bronze plaques at the front and the rear of this room listing all the ministers who have served this congregation.

Of course, life is rarely that simple; and the history of our congregation is more complex than the list of ministers would have it seem. For in fact, our congregation today is the carrier of the institutional existences of two other New Bedford area congregations: First Universalist Church, which had its start in the 1820’s, became a part of our church in 1930; and North Unitarian Church, founded by First Unitarian as a settlement house in the North End in 1894, affiliated with the American Unitarian Association as separate congregation in 1941, but when their building burned down in 1974, they essentially merged back into First Unitarian. Therefore, our single list of ministers should really be three lists of ministers: the ministers of First Unitarian, the ministers of First Universalist, and the ministers of North Unitarian.

I wish we had those other two lists of ministers posted on bronze plaques here in this room, because if we did I could point to the name of the minister whom I consider to be the most remarkable minister who ever served one of the three root congregations of our present congregation. That minister’s name is Maja Capek, who was minister of North Unitarian Church for the first three years of its existence as a congregation.

Maja Oktavek was born in Bohemia on April 8, 1888. She came to the United States in 1907 when she was 19 years old, obtained a degree in library science from Columbia University, and went to work for the New York Public Library. There in the library she met Norbert Capek, a liberal minister affiliated with the Union of Baptist Churches of Moravia and Slovakia. (In 1910, he had tried to get the American Unitarian Association to support his efforts to promote liberal religion, but to no avail.) Capek had escaped the Austro-Hungarian Empire because of his writings which promoted Czech nationalism, and were critical of the state-supported Roman Catholic church. Norbert and Maja were married on June 23, 1917.

Norbert tried to continue working as a Baptist minister in this country, but he and Maja were becoming increasingly liberal in their religious views. Then in 1920, they decided to send their children to the Sunday school of the First Unitarian Church of Essex County, New Jersey. The children loved it so much, Maja and Norbert attended the church; and Norbert and Maja liked it so much they became members of the congregation in 1921.

By this time, the Capeks had decided to return to their homeland. After the end of the first world war, Czechoslovakia had achieved independence, and once the Roman Catholic church was no longer supported by the state, many people left Catholicism, searching for a new and more liberal alternative. Maja and Norbert Capek founded the Prague Congregation of Liberal Religious Fellowship; I say that Maja and Norbert founded the congregation together, even though the standard histories give all the credit to Norbert; because we all know perfectly well that in those days, the wives of male ministers did as much work as their husbands while receiving none of the credit. And the Prague congregation, and Norbert, recognized Maja’s contributions, for Maja was ordained in 1926.

The Prague congregation searched for alternatives to the Roman Catholic worship that had dominated them before national independence. It was in response to that search that Norbert — probably with help from Maja — developed the Flower Celebration. The very first Flower Celebration was celebrated on June 23, 1923. The celebration was seen in part as a replacement of the Roman Catholic communion service:– stripped of all the weighty Catholic theological baggage, stripped of the Biblical references to bread and wine, the Flower Celebration became instead a way to celebrate the essential connection of all persons to one another.

During the next decade and a half, the Prague Unitarian congregation became the largest Unitarian congregation in the world, with over 3,200 members. That is more than twice as large as today’s largest Unitarian Universalist congregation. I believe liberal religion in Czechoslovakia in those years between the two world wars represented a new sense of freedom for Czechs; it represented the end of domination by the outside forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by the Roman Catholic church. But soon a new spectre of domination would rise over Europe.

In 1939, Maja Capek came to the United States to raise money to assist refugees trying to escape Nazi Germany. Not long after she left, the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, ending that small nation’s brief history as an independent country. It was not safe for her to return to occupied Czechoslovakia, and in 1940 she wound up settling in the North End of New Bedford, where she found a vibrant community of people from central and eastern Europe. Of course she immediately became involved in the Unity Chapel affiliated with First Unitarian’s settlement house, and soon she had arranged for North Unitarian Church to have separate institutional existence; and she became the first minister of North Unitarian Church.

But Norbert and their youngest daughter Zora remained trapped in Nazi Germany. Norbert and Zora were arrested on March 28, 1941; and Norbert was executed by the Nazis in the Dachau concentration camp on October 12, 1942.

I cannot help but think that the Capeks’ Unitarianism represented a threat to the tyranny and totalitarianism of Nazi Germany. Any religion that preaches the essential connection of all human beings must be a threat to tyrants; for tyrants maintain their power by driving people apart. Any minister who preaches that one spirit of love unites us all must also be a threat to tyrants; for tyrants push hatred on us, and love is always a threat to manipulative hatred.

I cannot help but believe that even today the Flower Celebration developed by the Capeks remains a threat to totalitarianism. When we celebrate flowers, we celebrate a spirit of beauty that feeds our souls, a spirit of beauty that encourages us to be better human beings, a spirit of beauty that encourages us towards new life. But the would-be tyrants try to seduce us with a lesser beauty:– an empty beauty that cuts us off from other people, a selfish beauty that tries to get us to consume selfishly, a hateful beauty that divides us along the lines of race and gender and class.

In this spirit we celebrate our own Flower Celebration this morning. We celebrate the true beauty of the world, as symbolized by flowers. We celebrate a beauty that seems fragile; but it is a beauty which is vibrantly alive, and like the grass that grows through concrete, it is a beauty that can quietly resist tyranny. We celebrate beauty, and we celebrate the freedom inherent in liberal religion: not just a freedom of mind, but the freedom of our hearts, the freedom of our spirits, the freedom of our bodies; we celebrate freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from violence.

The symbolism of this Flower Celebration is simple: we commit ourselves to spreading beauty in the world; a wild, free, raging beauty that will brook no tyranny, that will not allow domination of body or spirit or mind. May it be so.