Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Buddhist
DREAMING OUR FATHERS Norbert Capek & the Unitarian Universalist Flower Communion

DREAMING OUR FATHERS Norbert Capek & the Unitarian Universalist Flower Communion

Last updated on: June 18, 2017 at 9:52 pm by James Ford

DREAMING OUR FATHERS Norbert Capek & the Unitarian Universalist Flower Communion 2017-06-18T21:52:24-07:00 James Ford

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

DREAMING OUR FATHERS
Norbert Capek and the Unitarian Universalist Flower Communion

James Ishmael Ford

18 June 2017
Unitarian Universalist Church
Long Beach, California

A Story

Norbert Capek was born in Bohemia, in what is today the Czech Republic in 1870. He was raised Catholic. But following a religious exploration he became a Baptist minister. Norbert was a social activist and realizing the governmental authorities had begun to investigate him, he and his wife and their children fleeing persecution, immigrated to the US. They landed in New Jersey.

His wife died soon after they arrived. Later he met and married another Czech immigrant, Maja. She was a librarian. They courted and married. In the meantime Norbert was tried twice for heresy in the Baptist church.

They sent the kids off to explore the Sunday school programs at nearby churches. The Unitarian church was their unanimous preference. They threw themselves into their Unitarian lives..

At some point Norbert and Maja decided they needed to bring Unitarianism to the Czech people. And in 1921 they did. They founded a church in Prague. In 1926 Maja was ordained as well. Their church was a very spare Unitarianism, and while their own spirituality was a bit more complicated, the presentation was of the purer rationalist humanism of that day. The service had no music and centered pretty much only on the sermon that Norbert gave.

They really wanted to hold up the value of the rational, applying clear thinking to all aspects of life. But, also as Norbert ministered among the congregation, he saw there was something lacking. There is in addition to that thing we symbolize as “mind” there is something we call “heart.” Reaching for a more complete religious community, Norbert created a simple spring ceremony.

People brought flowers to the church. They were gathered together. They were blessed. And then people were given the flowers, now a different one for each person, who took them home. There was something in this ceremony that fed the hearts of people. Those who participated found it seemed equally important to the sermon that was feeding their minds. Something rich had happened.

Richard Henry writes, “Norbert Čapek celebrated the ‘hidden cry for harmony with the Infinite’ in every soul. ‘Every person,’ he wrote, ‘is an embodiment of God and in every one of us God struggles for higher expression.’ ‘Religion,’ he said, ‘can never die because human beings. . . cannot but be religious regardless of the form of [their] religion.’ Religion should, before all else, provide that ‘inner harmony which is the precondition of strong character, good health, joyful moods and victorious, creative life.’ ‘It is my ideal,’ he wrote, ‘that unitarian religion in our country should mean a higher culture. . . new attitudes toward life and practically a new race. . . . In short, unitarian religion should mean the next advanced cultural level of a certain people.’ The church’s task, he felt, ‘must be to place truth above any tradition, spirit above any scripture, freedom above authority, and progress above all reaction.’”

Norbert was thinking about this and what next. When the 2nd World War overtook them. Maja and most of the children returned to the United States. Maja became the minister of the Unitarian church in New Bedford. She also wrote constantly, telling Norbert to come back to America. But, he kept on with the congregation, serving them, preaching of human dignity and reason and human rights while also cultivating expressions of beauty and grace.

I don’t know, but I believe he planned on coming to America. But, he just needed to do a little more for the people he was serving. Just a little more. Then in 1941 the Nazi’s arrested him and his eldest daughter. The official charge was “listening to foreign radio broadcasts.” The real crime was preaching against authoritarianism, and in favor of all people.

He was sent to Dachau, was tortured, and in 1942, executed. The official cause of death was “heart failure.” In fact he died in the gas chambers. Richard Henry tells us, “His faith enabled him to endure his own martyrdom with an equanimity and heroism confirmed by survivors of the concentration camp in Dachau who knew him there.”

In the meantime Maja began celebrating the flower communion in New Bedford. And the celebration spread. Today almost all UU congregations celebrate it in the spring, frequently as the final service of the “formal” church year.

The truth be told these earlier days of my retirement from parish ministry, when I’m invited into a pulpit I draw heavily on earlier sermons. Usually not whole sermons, you understand. But I do like drawing on anecdotes or other illustrations, and even broad directions as guides for the new sermon. And with twenty-five years under my belt, well, I’m rarely at a loss for such resources.

And, then, we come to Fathers’ Day. As I sat down to begin my preparations, I knew nothing immediately came to mind. Which is a little unusual. I mean, I always have something to say. But, no problem, there’s my blog. What this means is I have an easily searched archive of every one of the sermons that I’ve delivered from a written out text, which means, pretty close to every sermon I’ve preached over the past ten years.

And. Out of a full decade of archived materials, I could not find a single sermon or blog reflection that referenced “father’s day.” That surprised me. So, I tried searching with the apostrophe in both possible spots, as well as without one. Zilch. Not a single sermon, not a single blog posting on that subject. Actually, as I dug into it, I saw in this past decade, I’ve posted 3,849 times. And there was not a single reflection on father’s day, sermon or otherwise.

So, I wondered what would happen if I just searched for “father” all by itself. Well, it turns out 293 of my posts had that word in them. So I reviewed them. As it turned out I didn’t see a single posting that reflected on fathers in general. And, only one that specifically noted my own father. It was written a few years back noting his Sepetmber birthday. It was brief. Of James William Ford, I wrote:

“His was a rough life. Orphaned, passed around, institutionalized, run away, lived on the streets, petty crime, maybe greater crimes, prison, released into the Army toward the end of the 2nd world war, medic, badly, badly damaged, alcoholic, in and out of jail, dreamer, wisher, wanter of better and bigger things. Wanted to be an Irish Frank Sinatra. Wanted to be classy. Betrayed his family over and over again. And, he relentlessly told me how good I was, and how he loved me.”

Fathers and father’s day. No doubt a complicated subject. Not, of course, unlike that twinned holiday, mother’s day, and our relationships with our mothers. But, for various reasons father’s day has hung more in the shadows. It was conceived largely as a complement to mother’s day, and given most of its impulse by the greeting card cartel. So, in addition to the one hundred and thirty odd million cards that they are able to sell for mother’s day, the very next month they sell another ninety-four million cards in celebration of father’s day.

And, there’s more. For me and for many here, I suspect, the complexities of culture and everything that can be dropped into the term “patriarchy” poisons the water into which our celebration of fathers would be mixed. I’ve spent pretty much my entire ministerial career looking into my own heart, looking at the larger culture, and out of that acting from a desire to genuinely represent the truth that “women hold up half the sky.” And as we’ve been so immersed in a world where even our language is weighted with masculine terms as baseline, as normative, my work has been focused mostly on holding up women as whole and as strong and as leaders. And with that, as this is a spiritual project, casting light on all the many aspects of the feminine as divine.

And, let’s be frank. That work is not done. Nowhere near done. Although even at this moment we can see how we have all been enriched in this process. And we keep learning. All of us. Me, I’m really glad how this work has continued and has gone on to expose the deep problems with any binary reductionism of our sexuality. We not only all exist on a continuum rather than what our immediate physical attributes suggest, but how our basic identifies can and usually do fit in more than two places. We not only slide along that continuum, we encompass the whole glorious mess.

And. That fully acknowledged, I feel a need to pause and reflect just a little on fathers, on that particular spot on the continuum. What about fathers after the man as the head of household, after God the father? What about fathers as something more than a biological necessity to get the family thing going? (Well, with scientific advances, at least for the time being.)

So. My father. Your father. Our fathers. Those of us who are fathers. And that part of all of us which might be named father or fathering. What about it? And, as this is a spiritual reflection, and we have such limited time, what I really want to dig into, just a little, is what can we find in the idea of the father, in that specific part of our human identity that is worthy of our deeper reflection.

Both Freud and Jung had a field day with the idea of the father. We even have a term, “father complex” for it. And complex it is. With Freud there is a contention between a father and a son. Jung mixes it up a bit more and broadens the possibilities, for men and women, and for both good and ill. While I think Freud gets a bit of a bad rap that he only partially deserves, I find I’m nonetheless more attracted to the work of Carl Jung.

However, to be clear, I’m not a Jungian. I do not in fact believe in the collective unconscious, nor any kind of Platonic or quasi or semi or even pseudo archetypal realm. However, that said, if we hold archetypes lightly, as identifiable patterns of relationships both within our individual hearts and within our communal lives, I believe there is something to see. And, this can reveal what we might want to correct and what we might want to hold up. So, there are things to explore.

From Freud and Jung people have spent a lot of time digging into the absence part of fathers and fathering. Certainly absent was signal feature of my own upbringing. And with that there’s another term “father hunger.” It has been examined from the perspectives of both women and men. For all of us that father hunger speaks to another aspect of absence: longing. There seems a great longing for that aspect of parenting we call fathering.

And here I find something deeply compelling. James Hillman is particularly important to me. Hillman, who, as long as we’re talking about complex relationships with one’s father, is an interesting example of someone who has taken his spiritual father, Carl Jung, and starting as his heir at the Jung Institute in Zurich, proceeded to dismantle much of his mentor’s work. That is until they invited him to leave.

Hillman spent some time thinking about fathers, and absence. He reflected on this idea of the missing father, physically for some, metaphorically for others, that captures so many of our imaginations. Hillman observed how this missing father, “is not (simply) your or my personal father. He is the absent father of our culture, the (to use a Jungian term) the viable senex who provides not only daily bread but spirit through meaning and order.” The “senex” in archetypal language is the “wise old man,” our image, usually although not exclusively, our positive image of what a man can grow into. The sad thing is that this figure is increasingly experienced as something missing.

That observation makes me think a lot of things. One is that longing itself. I know everyone in this room doesn’t feel this way, but I believe I am not alone in that sense of longing for the father. Maybe, probably, not the actual father of the flesh, my father in the flesh, besides being dead, is a complicated, and not entirely lovable figure. But, rather, with Hillman, I am interested in the father writ large. And our collective desires, our communal lives, and what we need. And what we seek, either consciously or unconsciously.

I think there is legitimately a longing for that senex figure, that wise man, and the traits that are traditionally associated with him. Specifically this father not only supports us physically, providing food and clothing and shelter, he embodies kindness. He offers sound judgments on events that are confronting us. He brings a unique wisdom to the matter at hand, whatever it might be. I like that this senex father image also carries with it hints of otherness.

So, the invitation is to look within and among us for those traits that our hearts long for. And what are they? That physical support symbolized by paying the rent and putting food on the table. That emotional support, which we find as perspective, and, to use a term not so common these days, grit. Of course we also want to avoid the bad father things. And, oh, my, there are such a lot of them. Cruelty. Heavy judgment. Abandonment. In some myths the father actually devours us. In others he is a fool.

So, cutting through these things that are not helpful, and going for the heart, going for that other style of parenting, another angle on nurturing. And with that a question: how do we own fathering as a part of our spiritual journey? In short, as we genuinely ask when we hold up women, when we hold up LGBTQ people, when we hold up people of color, when we hold up immigrants, when we hold up anyone who might be considered other: how do we become whole people? And the answer is by seeing, and by wise discernment of what is useful and what is not, and then integrating. Don’t worry we each of us have a whole lifetime for the project.

With that let me return to that story we shared earlier. Over the years I’ve thought a lot about Norbert Capek and his flower communion. First, I like the man who followed his own lights, moving from Catholicism, to the Baptist tradition, and then, finally, to a rationalist humanistic version of Unitarianism. But, then, when he saw that the lecture he was offering on a Sunday was not enough to feed the genuine hunger of the people he served, he turned to the beauty of nature, and a symbol of our individuality, and our commonality. And with that `he created the simplest of rituals. People bring flowers. They are mixed. They are blessed. And they are distributed.

And, that act and that man cannot be separated from the person the Gestapo arrested and who died in Dachau. Me, I find hints of the Christian story here. But, he didn’t die for our sins. He died staying on too long to be with the people he loved. An act freighted by the fact he functionally abandoned his family to do this.

What’s a father’s love? So complex, so complicated. Me, I think Norbert’s life and, well, his death, all taken together, may well contain a hint at the whole of it, and with that at the whole of our lives.

Open ended. Messy. Filled with mistakes and wrong turns. And something so beautiful, so beautiful.

And with that amen.

culture

unitarian

Unitarian Universalist

Previous Post

June 17, 2017

Remembering the Immortal James Weldon Johnson

Next Post

June 19, 2017 My Uncertainty Principle: A Modernist, Or, Perhaps Its a Post Post Modernist Zen Buddhist Priest Reflects on What's What

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category A Christmas Carol Abolitionist African-American Ahmadiyya Alan Watts Aldous Huxley Allen Ginsberg Amedkar Jayanti American politics American Zen Anaheim Zen Sangha Anglican Annie Besant April Fool Armageddon Art and Religion artificial intellegence Atheist Awakening B R Ambedkar Barlaam & Josaphat Beatnik Between Bhagavad Gita Bible biography birthday bodhisattva Bodhisattva Precepts Book burning Book of Common Prayer Book of Mormon Brahmo Samaj Buddha Buddhism Buddhist Buddhist Lord's Prayer Butterflies Calendars cartoons cat ChatGPT Chicken Tortilla Soup choices Christian atheism Christian mysticism Christian origins Christian Science Christian Zen Christianity Christianity and Buddhism christmas Christmas Truce Christopher Isherwood Church of Later Day Saints Cinco de Mayo circus covenant critical thinking culture D. T. Suzuki Dalit Buddhism Daniel Defoe Desert Fathers and Mothers dharma talk Dogen Donald Trump Dongshan's Five Ranks Dorothy Day dream Duty Easter ecology Edwin Arnold emptiness Empty Moon Zen Network Episcopal Church Eternal Now Ethics evolution existentialism Faith fantasy Fathers Day film film review fire Five Ranks Folk music food Form and emptiness Four Seals Francis of Assisi Francis Xavier Free thinker friendship George MacDonald Gerald Heard Glenn Taylor Webb God Good Friday Gospel of Gospel of Mark Gospel of Thomas grace Graduate Theological Unioin Graduate Theological Union Guanyin H R Blyth Hakuin Ekaku Hanamatsuri Hanukkah Harada Yasutani Zen Heart Sutra Henry David Thoreau Hermann Hesse Hinduism History and Religion history of religion Holy Spirit home Hospitality Icon Ides of March Isaac Newton Islam Islamic mysticism Jack Kerouac James Luther Adams Jiddu Krishnamurti Joan of Arc Johannes Gutenberg John Donne joke Judaism justice karma kensho King James Bible koan Koun Yamada Kyoto School Lewis Carrol Liberal Christianity Liberal Religion Life Plan Community Liminal literature Literature and Religion Liturgy Lord's Prayer Love Mahatma Gandhi Mahayana Martin Luther King Jr Mary Baker Eddy Mary Magdelene Mary Oliver Mayflower Compact Meditation memories memory metaphor money money and religioin Mormons Mother's Day movie review mysticism mythic Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church New Thought Nichiren Buddhism Nonduality not knowing Omar Khayyam Pacific School of Religion pagan Palm Sunday Passover peace Pentecost perennialism Phantastes Philip Kapleau philosophy Pilgrimage poetry Poetry and Religion politics Prayer Precepts Printing Press prophecy prophetic spirituality psychology Pure Land Queer religion queering religion Quietism Ram Mohan Roy rebirth recipe Relationships and religion religion religion and history Religious syncretism Resistance Retirement Retreat review Rissho Kosei Kai Ritual Robert Aitken Roshi Robert Ingersoll Rohatsu Romani religion Rosie the Riveter saints samadhi SanboZen Sangha Satyagraha science science and reigion science and religion science fiction seminary sermon Sesshin Sex and Religion Shinran Sikh Sikh tradition silence Social Justice Socially Engaged Buddhism Society and religion Soto Zen soul spiritual community spiritual practice Spirituality Sufism Suicide superstition Taoism Television Teresa of Avila Thanksgiving theological schools Theosophy Thomas Merton Time Transcendentalism Transcendentalist Trinitarian Trinity Uncategorized unitarian Unitarian Christianity Unitarian Universalist Universalism Vajrayana Vedanta Walking war Willa Cather William Ellery Channing wisdom women and religion women in religion World Teacher Writing zazen Zen Zen Center Zen inspired retriement zen meditation Zen Precepts Zen women

Select a Month September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who said, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them"?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Peter Stephen Paul John