Please click the link to watch Rev. Cynthia Snavely’s video recording of this sermon.

Way, way back when I was 13 or so and attending confirmation classes at the United Methodist church in which I grew up, one of our homework exercises was to write a prayer for a Sunday service. There were guidelines. It had to include praise of God, thanksgiving to God, confession of sins, asking God’s help for ourselves, intercession asking God’s help for others, and finally a dedication of ourselves to God.

That is quite a different kind of prayer from what the poet Mary Oliver describes when she says, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed….” I think I prefer the kind of prayer that is a simple paying of attention.

In his essay “The Roots of Unitarian Universalist Spirituality in New England Transcendentalism,” the Rev. Dr. Barry Andrews quotes Theodore Parker, who says, “The fulness of the divine energy flows inexhaustibly into the crystal of the rock, the juices of the plant, the splendor of the stars, the life of the Bee and Behemoth.”

It seems natural to me, then, that Norbert Căpek, who founded the Unitarian Church in Czechoslovakia, would look to natural elements as he sought to create a ritual for his congregation.

Reginald Zottoli begins his piece “The Flower Communion A Service of Celebration for Religious Liberals” this way: “The Flower communion service was created by Norbert Capek (1870-1942), who founded the Unitarian Church in Czechoslovakia. He introduced this special service to that church on June 4, 1923. For some time, he had felt the need for some symbolic ritual that would bind people more closely together. The format had to be one that would not alienate any who had forsaken other religious traditions. The traditional Christian communion service with bread and wine was unacceptable to the members of his congregation because of their strong reaction against the Catholic faith. So he turned to the native beauty of their countryside for elements of a communion which would be genuine to them,” from The Flower Communion.doc).

There is a section from W. Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage that I have always felt explained some spiritual truths. Here is an edited version of the passages:

“Philip thought this over for a moment, then he said: ‘I don’t see why the things we believe absolutely now shouldn’t be just as wrong as what they believed in the past.’

“‘Neither do I.’

“‘Then how can you believe anything at all?’
“‘I don’t know.’

“Philip asked Weeks what he thought of Hayward’s religion.

“Men have always formed gods in their own image,’ said Weeks. ‘He believes in the picturesque.’

“Philip paused for a little while, then he said, ‘I don’t see why one should believe in God at all.’

“The words were scarcely out of his mouth than he realized that he had ceased to do so. It took his breath away like a plunge into cold water. He looked at Weeks with startled eyes. Suddenly, he felt afraid. He left Weeks as quickly as he could. He wanted to be alone. It was the most startling experience that he had ever had…. He was surprised at himself because he ceased to believe so easily, and, not knowing that he felt as he did on account of the subtle workings of his inmost nature, he ascribed the certainty he had reached to his own cleverness. He was unduly pleased with himself. With youth’s lack of sympathy for an attitude other than its own he despised not a little Weeks and Hayward because they were content with the vague emotion which they called God and would not take the further step which to him seemed so obvious. One day he went alone up a certain hill so that he might see a view which, he knew not why, filled him with wild exhilaration…. To Philip, intoxicated with the beauty of the scene, it seemed that it was the whole world which was spread before him, and he was eager to step down and enjoy it. He was free from degrading fears…He could go his way without the intolerable dread of hell fire…From old habit, unconsciously, he thanked God that he no longer believed in him.”

Philip has given up his belief in God and cannot see why any rational person hangs on to such a belief. Often, new Unitarians, such as Căpek’s Prague congregants or present-day Unitarian Universalists, give up an old faith such as Catholicism, and cannot—at least at the beginning of their spiritual journey into Unitarian Universalism—understand what others still find of benefit in it. But out in the beauty of nature, Philip is inspired. Out of habit, he prays.

Căpek felt his congregation still needed ritual. Zottoli says that Căpek “turned to the native beauty of their countryside for elements of a communion which would be genuine to them.”

To return to Rev. Andrews essay on the roots of Unitarian Universalist spirituality in New England Transcendentalism, he says, “First and foremost, (the Transcendentalists) looked to nature as a source of revelations concerning the spiritual life. Thoreau, who of the group came closest to being a nature mystic, noted characteristically in his Journal: ‘My profession is always to be on the alert to find God in nature, to know his lurking places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas in nature… To watch for, describe, all the divine features which I detect in Nature.’

Emerson also looked to nature for spiritual insight and moral instruction. As he observed in one of his lecture(s) on “Human Culture,” ‘…Our feeling in the presence of nature is an admonishing hint. Go and hear in a woodland valley the harmless roarings of the South wind and see the shining boughs of the trees in the sun, the swift sailing clouds, and you shall think a (person) is a fool to be mean and unhappy when every day is made illustrious by these splendid shows. Then falls the enchanting night; all the trees are wind-harps; out shine the stars; and we say, Blessed by light and darkness, ebb and flow, cold and heat, these restless pulsations of nature which throb for us. In the presence of nature a (person) of feeling is not suffered to lose sight of the instant creation. The world was not made a great while ago, nature is an Eternal Now.’”

The poet Mary Oliver is not a Unitarian Universalist, but her poetry resonates with many of us. UU minister Fred Hammond writes that “One possibility to her being, as I have heard here and elsewhere, the unofficial poet laureate of Unitarian Universalists is Mary Oliver is not afraid of the questions. Kathleen McTigue writes regarding Oliver’s theology, ‘By that word [theology] I mean not only what her poems reflect of her beliefs about God, but what they reflect about a host of other religious questions: What is holy? Who are we? What are we called to do with our lives? What is death, and how do we understand it when we turn our faces toward its inevitability? These questions matter to all of us. And the answers in Mary Oliver’s poems feel so resonant and so true….’” (from The Theology of Mary Oliver | A Unitarian Universalist Minister in the South).

One of Oliver’s pieces in the back of our hymnal is her “Morning Poem.”

“Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches–
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead—
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging—

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted—

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.”

I titled this sermon “Prayer,” and then I said that we would also celebrate our flower communion today. I think of the word prayer broadly and expansively. I think the flower communion ritual is a prayer. I think taking time to be idle, to stop our incessant doing and simply pay attention, is prayer. I think both our hymns and the choir anthem we sing and hear this morning are prayers. I think when we purposefully determine how we will live our lives that too is a prayer.

In Zittoli’s essay on flower communion, he says, “The flower communion was brought to the United States in 1940 and introduced to the members of our Cambridge, Massachusetts, church by Dr. Capek’s wife, Maja V. Capek. The Czech-born Maja had met Norbert Capek in New York City while he was studying for his Ph.D., and it was at her urging that Norbert left the Baptist ministry and turned to Unitarianism. The Capeks returned to Czechoslovakia in 1921 and established the dynamic liberal church in Prague; Maja Capek was ordained in 1926. It was during her tour of the United States that Maja introduced the flower communion, which had been developed in the Prague church, at the Unitarian church in Cambridge. Unfortunately, Maja was unable to return to Prague due to the outbreak of World War II, and it was not until the war was over that Norbert Capek’s death in a Nazi concentration camp was revealed,” (from The Flower Communion.doc).

According to the Wikipedia article on Norbert Căpek, “In March 1941, Norbert and his daughter were arrested by the Gestapo, who confiscated his books and sermons. He was charged with listening to foreign broadcasts (a capital crime), and after being held in Pankrác Prison, was taken in 1942 to the Dachau concentration camp, where he was imprisoned in the ‘Priesterblock.’ He was tortured and eventually gassed late in 1942.

“When news of his death reached the United States, the American Unitarian Association president, Fredrick May Eliot, wrote, ‘Another name is added to the list of heroic Unitarian martyrs, by whose death our freedom has been bought. Ours is now the responsibility to see to it that we stand fast in the liberty so gloriously won.’”

Our closing hymn this morning, “Mother Spirit, Father Spirit,” has words written by Căpek.

UU minister Kimberly Debus, on her website “Notes from the Far Fringe,” says, “This is one of our most haunting hymns—both melody and lyric work together to create an air of mystery, wondering, and mysticism. It is the plaintive call of the seeker, questioning all, finding solace in each other. It is a hymn uniquely suited for us—it is theism and humanism, nature and community, all rolled into one. I know that its author, Norbert Capek, did not live to see the fullness of the modern Unitarian Universalist movement (he was killed by Nazis in Dachau during WWII)—but his prescient lyric speaks deeply of those questions we wrestle with today.

Debus continues, “I often imagine this should be a round—and then I realize we’d miss the lyrics if we sang it that way. But I hope others sing it; it is familiar to me and yet I find I don’t use it in my own services. Is it because of the binary language (mother/father)? Is it because of all the assumptions that there is a god? Is it, despite the landing on our hands and hearts, too theistic? As a minister, I both want to challenge our assumptions and give space for our particularities. Does this go too far? Not far enough? Many questions to ponder.

“All I can ultimately say is that for me, this hymn speaks deeply to the questions I wrestle with all the time: ‘what to give you, what to call you, who am I?” (from STLT#8, Mother Spirit, Father Spirit – Notes from the Far Fringe).

To ask those questions; to struggle with a wide possibility of answers; to choose answers; to sit with no answers; that—to me—is prayer.

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