"Courage in Both Life and Death"

READING

The Czech Unitarian minister, Norbert Capek, whose story I will tell today, was arrested by the Nazi Gestapo in 1941. He spent a year in Dresden Prison before being sent to Dachau. He wrote this meditation in Dresden, in 1942.

In the depths of my soul
There where lies the source of strength,
Where the divine and the human meet,
There, quiet your mind, quiet, quiet.

Outside let lightning reign,
Horrible darkness frighten the world.
But from the depths of your own soul
From that silence will rise again
God's flower.

Return to your self,
Rest in your self,
Live in the depths of your soul
Where the divine and the human meet.
Tune your heart to the eternal
And in the depths of your own soul
Your panting quiets down
Where the divine and the human meet,
There is your refuge.

-- Norbert Capek

SERMON

Passover and Holy Week add dark undertones to the spring season, complicating the joy of brighter, warmer days with foreboding about what is to come. The liberation of the Hebrew people has not yielded a peaceful end in the promised land. Their trials were only beginning. Palm Sunday, which marks the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem, also recalls the most harrowing chapter of his life – a week that includes betrayal, persecution, and death.

Against this backdrop of the conflicting themes of the season, I tell you about Norbert Capek. He began his life as a Christian, became a Unitarian, and ended his days in Dachau, a victim of the Nazi Holocaust. His story is one we should know. It fits well with this time of year.

Capek was born in 1870, in a small town in South Bohemia, later Czechoslovakia. His family was poor, and apprenticed him at the age of twelve to a tailor in Vienna. The move away from his village was traumatic and the work was unfulfilling; the young man turned to religion for sustenance. Although he was raised as a Roman Catholic, he grew disillusioned with the church early in life. As a young man he happened to make friends with a Baptist evangelist, who encouraged him to take up the ministry.

As Capek educated himself for the ministry, he learned about the history of Christianity in his part of the world. He discovered that the early Christians in Bohemia and Moravia had practiced a free religion, one that "valued the spiritual life above any teaching or dogmatics." This free religion was very different from what he had known either as a Roman Catholic or a Baptist.

The discovery shaped his theology at the same time as it made problems for him professionally. He became a religious liberal, and he was a poor match for the Baptist church. Capek garnered success as a preacher and writer, but wherever he went - and he moved often, there were those who regarded him as a threat. His ministry grew so controversial that he decided to leave Europe. He accepted a call to a Baptist church in New York. Within six months he was tried for heresy there, exonerated, and called yet again, this time to a congregation in New Jersey.

I present this rocky career to you because it shows how hard it must have been for Capek and his family. And yet these hard times did little to diminish his robust religious humanism or his love of life. By the time he became a Unitarian, he was forty-nine years old and had eleven children.

Two of them led him to a small Unitarian church in Orange, New Jersey. They had visited the Sunday school on their own with some friends. Capek and his wife joined them one Sunday. They quickly realized that they had found the faith they were seeking.

Norbert Capek eventually returned to Czchechoslovakia. With considerable support from the American Unitarian Association, he founded the Unitarian church in Prague. In twenty years the Prague church grew to some three thousand members, and Unitarianism established itself nationwide. He had finally made himself a home - and a success - in liberal religion.

Capek was a prolific writer of poetry, journal articles, and even hymns, one of which we will sing at the close of the service. Despite the gathering storm in Europe and his own shaky beginnings, Capek's outlook was always positive and uplifting. As his biographer, Richard Henry, observed, "his was a sun-drenched, pre-Holocaust faith." He preached that religion was "inner harmony, the precondition of strong character, good health, joyful moods, and victorious, creative life." Yet many regarded his message as inherently subversive. Free religion, as Capek practiced it, also sought political freedom. In his early days, Capek had campaigned hard for the independence of Czechoslovakia. When he returned there from his years in the United States, Czechoslovakia was free, but a new menace was rising to power. While Capek's church grew, so did the ambitions of Adolf Hitler.

Europe was in crisis. The Nazi occupation spread. Czechoslovakia had hundreds of thousands of refugees to care for. Unitarians in Prague and Boston worked together with the Quakers to raise funds for safe passage out of Europe and material aid to those who could not leave.

From the pulpit, Capek preached resistance to the coming occupation. "We are today," he said in 1938, "the only nation in the whole of Europe that is ready to resist oppression. . . . Confronting our descendants, we will never have to feel ashamed of the fact that as a small nation in the middle of Europe we were ready to defend human dignity, freedom, and justice from violence, lies, and lawlessness."

Within six months, the German army occupied Prague, slowly crushing the resistance with brutal attacks on the people. Most democratic institutions and universities were shut down. State-recognized churches, however, were allowed to remain open and the Unitarian community remained strong. Capek turned seventy and the church held a celebration for him. Their gift to him was a short-wave radio.

Capek's sermons continued to address the political climate. The Gestapo placed him under surveillance. Capek and his staff prepared for the time when the Nazis would shut them down. His wife left for the United States to raise funds for the refugees; they never saw each other again.

The Gestapo summoned Capek for questioning and released him. The next time, however, they abandoned all civility. A gang of secret police broke into his home and found him, in his study, listening to wars news from Britain on the BBC. Listening to a foreign broadcast was a crime under the occupation, and the Nazis arrested him, and his daughter Zora. They confiscated his radio and his writings as evidence of "high treason."

Capek spent a year awaiting trial in Dresden prison, where he wrote the meditation I read earlier in the service. In the end, he was convicted for listening to the radio. His daughter Zora was sent to Germany for forced labor; Capek went to Dachau. He spent the last fourteen months of his life there, and died of poison gas.

One of Capek's hymns, "View the Starry Realm," sings of the wonder of the universe. "Great you are," he wrote, "beyond conception, God of gods and God of stars. My soul soars with your perception, I escape from prison bars . . . . You, my guide through hate's fierce storming, courage in both life and death."

Not many of his writings from prison survived, but they suggest that his faith remained strong. In his last letter, written to his wife the night before the transport to Dachau, he declared, "I am faithful to my best and highest hope, resolve, and belief, wishing everyone well, believing in the future good of all of you: the family, the nation, humanity, and especially those most sorely tried."

There isn't anyone in this room who hasn't wondered what we would do if we were faced with a serious crisis, and asked ourselves what would happen to our faith. We hope that when we are up against the challenges of life, we will have the strength and equanimity to meet them. We think of our faith as providing those resources, and keeping us whole.

Norbert Capek had his share of conflicts. He must have wondered how to stay strong. When living by his principles became very dangerous, he was anxious and frightened for his family. But his life shows that courage - in life and in death - comes from the conviction that how we live makes a difference. Norbert Capek faced the consequences of his faith more than once in life. He experienced professional failure and success; traumatic separations from his family and sustaining love; public prominence and persecution.

He gave his life in service to our common faith. He died living by it. His story is now our story: how one of us, not all that long ago, showed us just how strong that faith can be.

This sermon is based on the biography "Norbert Fabian Capek: A Spiritual Journey," by Richard Henry (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1999). A summary of his life can be found at http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/norbertcapek.html. I used these sources to prepare this sermon.