His mother was a devout Catholic, his father agnostic. He became an acolyte at age 10 in 1890 at St. Martin’s Catholic Church. In the years that followed, he became disillusioned: his priest was a cynic.<\/p>\n
At 18, apprenticed to his uncle, a successful tailor in Vienna, Norbert discovered the Baptists and became a minister. He founded almost a dozen churches from Ukraine to Budapest.<\/p>\n
Yet, slowly, his faith became more and more liberal.<\/p>\n
He left Bohemia under government threat and accepted a call to serve a Baptist church in New York City… until one day in 1919. That day, he wrote in his diary: “I cannot be a Baptist anymore, even in compromise. The fire of new desires, new worlds, is burning inside me.”<\/p>\n
Norbert and his wife, Mája Čapek, joined a Unitarian church in New Jersey in 1921 because their children liked the religious education program.<\/p>\n
World War I ended. His home country now independent, he and Maja returned home to Czechoslovakia.<\/p>\n
His Unitarian church was the Prague Liberal Religious Fellowship. In just 20 years, his church had 3,200 members.<\/p>\n
The traditional Christian communion service of bread and wine wouldn’t meet the needs of his congregation, because his church — like ours — had people who believed different things.<\/p>\n
Čapek turned to the beauty of the countryside; to the beauty of flowers. In 1923, he developed the flower ceremony. He asked his congregants to bring a flower to church — from their gardens, the field, or the roadside. He invited each person to place their flower in a vase. There was the church community, no less unique for being united. Following the service each person could take a flower from the vase — a different one than they had brought.<\/p>\n
Čapek was a visionary minister with a church ahead of its time, a BOLD church, a church thinking beyond its doors, beyond what it thought possible.<\/p>\n
It was a church that was willing to take risks; to make tough decisions; to bear disappointment; and to build a new way…first by building a church, and that church could build up the world.<\/p>\n
That is our church. That was Čapek’s church<\/p>\n
For this the Gestapo arrested him in 1942. The Nazis accused Čapek of listening to foreign broadcasts and sent him to the Dachau concentration camp.<\/p>\n
Even in starvation and torture, he held a flower ceremony with his fellow prisoners, finding whatever flowers they could among the weeds of the camp. They testified to a beauty larger than themselves, and a love that would outlive them.<\/p>\n
The Nazis killed Norbert Čapek. But his spirit, courage and commitment live on today. Those qualities have passed, now, to us, to make them real.<\/p>\n
His wife Mája brought the flower ceremony to the Unitarian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1940.<\/p>\n
This past June 4 the Juneau Unitarian Universalist Fellowship celebrated the centennial of the Flower Ceremony and demonstrated an affirmation of our continuity with the generations of struggle for ever-widening liberty.<\/p>\n
This flower ceremony, lovely though it is, isn’t a diversion from ugly reality, but a gentle fierceness which proclaims that in the midst of sinister days there is always the light of beauty.<\/p>\n
We are here not to recall something that happened, but to remember something that is happening: to re-member — to put it back together again — and in that remembering, may we put ourselves back together again, each as a part of the body of this community: out of many, one.<\/p>\n
We celebrated this ritual of solemnity and joy.<\/p>\n
As Čapek asked his people to bring a flower and celebrate beauty, so did we.<\/p>\n
• Rev. Teri Schwartz is the worship minister at Juneau Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. “Living & Growing” is a weekly column written by different authors and submitted by local clergy and spiritual leaders. It appears every Saturday on the Juneau Empire’s Faith page.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" His mother was a devout Catholic, his father agnostic. He became an acolyte at age 10 in 1890 at St. Martin’s Catholic Church. In the years that followed, he became disillusioned: his priest was a cynic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":100248,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[131],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-100247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100247\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100247"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=100247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}