Norbert Čapek, author and composer of the hymn today’s service is focused on, was a Czech minister, born and raised Catholic, who found his way to Unitarianism via the Baptist church. He composed the hymn we just sang, “Mother Spirit, Father Spirit.”
I am an atheist. I’m sure I’m not the only one in the room. And this song does use the g-word. But it also refers to a spirit that could be father or mother, which is pretty radical for a European man writing before 1950. And the song does ask “What to call you?” Today, we might rather talk about a parent spirit to get past the gender binary. But this is a hymn of our faith’s history, rooted in a time and place. I can accept that. I don’t feel the need to correct it. So, when I sing this hymn, I sing to the sacred energy of the universe, that deep connection between lives, to the ineffable, to hope, to love.
I’ve loved this hymn since the first time I sang it. The haunting melody has a sense of unease to me. It doesn’t want to rest. It’s not about being settled or sure.
The words are contemplative. They are about looking for one’s place, about awe in the presence of the sacred. They invoke the sky, the forest, the ocean: vast expanses in which a single person is very small. They evoke confusion and fear. How can I understand this universe? How can one tiny person be anything in the middle of “vast and immeasurable time and space,” as our earlier hymn described it? The song talks about hearing the spirit’s cry, the call of the divine. And it asks what a person could possibly offer to something so great.
Čapek died in Dachau during the second World War. After his rise to power, Adolf Hitler quickly reneged on his public promise not to interfere with Christian churches. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Catholics were sent to concentration camps. Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to support the Nazi party, and Catholics did not vote for Hitler at nearly the rates of Protestants. Hitler sought to work with the German Christian movement, Protestants who were sympathetic to his views. He appointed a loyal friend and early member of the Nazi party as the bishop of the Reichskirche, the church of the Reich, which unified Nazi National Socialism with Christianity.
Initially, Hitler’s plan was to incorporate all 28 Protestant denominations then present in Germany into the Reichskirche, but this proved more difficult than anticipated. Eventually, Hitler gave up on working with the German Christians. In 1937, his Minister of Church Affairs equated National Socialism with “positive” Christianity and declared that Hitler was “the herald of a new revelation.” No one needed any faith in anyone or anything but him.
The Nazis closely monitored members of the clergy and imprisoned many in the camps for weak or vague reasons. In 1940, the German government transferred all imprisoned members of the clergy to Dachau. By the end of the war, the Nazis had imprisoned a total of 2,718 Christian clergy at Dachau, most of them Catholic. They treated these prisoners a bit better than the others—provided they were German—which may account for more than half of them surviving. Čapek was not one of them.
Čapek was born in 1870. He quit Catholicism at the age of 18 and became a minister in the Baptist church. Influenced by the U.S. social gospel movement, the Moravian church, and radical Christian movements from Czech history, his faith grew more liberal over the years. He fled Europe for the U.S. at the start of the first World War. In 1919, he left the Baptist church (after two attempts by other Baptist ministers to expel him). In 1920, he visited a Unitarian church in Orange, New Jersey. He described it as a place where people had clear heads and warm hearts.
In 1910, Čapek had contacted the American Unitarian Association seeking support for liberal religion in his homeland. In May of 1921, he finally got that support. When he returned to Prague the next month, he and his wife Mája established the Liberal Religious Fellowship, the first Unitarian church in what was then Czechoslovakia. Čapek created and celebrated the first flower communion in 1923. With the AUA’s help, he and Mája bought a palace they renovated and called Unitaria, which now houses a theater, the Bohemian Garnet Museum, and the International Unitarian Church of Prague.
In 1939, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. The AUA invited Čapek to return to the U.S., but he decided to remain in Prague. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 for listening to foreign radio broadcasts.
I see echoes of that time around us today. Right-wing movements are gaining support all over the world, including here in the U.S. Claiming to represent the majority, conservative politicians are working overtime to consolidate and keep power. And they have their religious allies, too. There are efforts to ensconce Christianity—a certain version of it—in public schools. Equating faith and politics, declaring some politicians are divinely protected…
I’ll stop myself here. I could go on for hours about how wrong I think this all is. I think I would be preaching to the proverbial choir.
Instead, let’s talk about the last verse of Čapek’s hymn. In that verse, we ask that spirit or god or sacred energy to work through us. To take our hearts and breath and hands and let us act for good. We are so small. But remember Tiny? Remember Miriam? We are small, but we are not alone.
Here, right now, we’re making connections with one another. Just by showing up today, in person or on Zoom, you’ve told the rest of us that we are not alone. You are here. The world is vast, and our problems are not small, but you are not alone. I am here. Later, Carol will say that we are one small part of the global UU faith movement. We’re not alone. That movement is here. And as religious liberals, we are not alone. Countless others of countless creeds are here.
Our Defending Democracy group, UU the Vote, Black Lives UU, UUs for Social Justice—all of these give me hope. Caring people in other churches, synagogues, and temples give me hope. The Poor People’s Campaign, a multi-faith movement against poverty, gives me hope.
So, Mother Spirit, Father Spirit, when we look at the world today and we feel scared, take our hearts. Mother Spirit, Father Spirit, when we hear the hate and venom that gets tossed around in the name of faith, take our breath and let our voices sing our part. And Mother Spirit, Father Spirit, when we see others struggling and suffering, when we see injustice, take our hands and let us work to shape our art.
May it be so.