Patrick Comerford
We are in Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar, and the week began with the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity (Trinity XIV, 10 September 2023). The Calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship today recalls Saint Cyprian (258), Bishop of Carthage and Martyr (15 September).
The Jewish High Holy Days begin this evening. Rosh hahSanah (רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה) is ‘the head of the Jewish year’ and begins at sundown on the eve of Tishrei 1, which this year is this evening, 15 September 2023 and ends after nightfall on Tishrei 2, 17 September 2023.
Before today begins, I am taking some time this morning for prayer and reflection.
This week, I have been reflecting each morning in these ways:
1, Looking at a Unitarian church I know;
2, the Gospel reading of the day in the Church of England lectionary;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.
The Unitarian Church, Prague:
Czech Unitarianism say it can trace its roots back to religious dissent as early as the 11th century and that Czech Unitarians draw on the thinking of both the Hussites and Socinians. The Czech Unitarian symbol was inspired by the seal of the Czech education Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670), the last bishop of the old Church of the Moravian and Bohemian Unity of the Brethren.
After the Enlightenment in the 18th century, Unitarianism spread throughout the region and its influence began to be felt in areas of philosophy, literature and politics, and the Unitarian Church in Moravia and Silesia was founded in 1777 in regions in what is now the Czech Republic.
Modern Unitarianism in the former Czechoslovakia was founded 100 years ago by the Revd Norbert Fabián Čapek (1870-1942) 100 years ago. He was born into a Roman Catholic family in Radomyšl, in southern Bohemia, joined a Baptist church at the age of 18 and was soon ordained a minister.
Čapek travelled widely as a Baptist preacher, from Saxony to Ukraine in the east. However, his religious views became more liberal and anti-clerical. His writings attracted unfavourable attention from the German authorities, and in 1914 he and his wife, Marie, and their eight children fled to the US.
In the US, Čapek edited a Czech language newspaper and was pastor of the First Slovak Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey. His wife died soon after they arrived in the US, and Čapek married another Czech expatriate, Mája Oktavec, in 1917.
Čapek faced two heresy trials in the US and Slovak Baptist ministers tried to expel him from the Baptist association. He resigned as a Baptist minister in 1919, and Norbert and Maja joined the First Unitarian Church of Essex County in Orange, New Jersey, in 1921 before returning later that year.
Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk, the wife of the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, was born in the US and was a member of the First Unitarian Church in Brooklyn. She influenced Masaryk’s thinking, and it is said Masaryk had on influence Capek while he was still a Baptist minister.
Čapek formed the Prague community of the Liberal Religious Fellowship on 9 April 1922. The new Unitarian congregation rapidly and bought a large building near the Charles Bridge which they named ‘Unitaria.’ The early services included lectures, the minister wore no robe or vestments, and there were no elaborate rituals, hymn singing, ornate decoration, or formal or prescribed prayers.
In a parallel development, the early Czechoslovak Hussite Church, formed in the aftermath of World War I, also had many clergy who espoused a rationalist and Unitarian Christian theology, although this thinking was later abandoned.
Some members felt that the congregation lacked a spiritual dimension. In response, Čapek created the Flower Celebration or Flower Communion, and the first Flower Ceremony was held in Prague at the Czech Unitarian Church in Prague 100 years ago in June 1923. Each member would bring a flower to the church, where it was placed in a large central vase. At the end of the service, each would take home a different flower. The Flower Ceremony is celebrated by Unitarian Universalists worldwide.
Maja Čapek was ordained in 1926. With support from the American Unitarian Association and the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, Norbert and Maja Čapek acquired and renovated the meeting space. The Unitarian Church of Czechoslovakia or the Religious Society of Czech Unitarians was officially recognised by the Czech state in 1930.
The movement spread rapidly and attracted thousands of people to venues in Prague. The congregation in Prague became the largest Unitarian congregation in the world, but the German occupation and the Communist regime almost destroyed it.
During World War II, Norbert Čapek was invited back to the US but he chose to remain in Europe. However, Maja went to the US in 1939 to raise funds for relief efforts in Czechoslovakia, and she served as minister in the North Unitarian Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts, from 1940 to 1943.
Norbert Čapek and his daughter were arrested in March 1941 by the Gestapo, who confiscated his books and sermons. He was sent from Pankrác Prison to Dachau in 1942. He was held in the ‘Priesterblock’, where he was tortured and eventually gassed late in 1942.
After his death, the president of the American Unitarian Association, Frederick 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.’ Incidentally, Frederick May Eliot was a first cousin of the poet, TS Eliot.
Meanwhile, when Bishop Jan Schwarz was in office as the seventh Patriarch of the Czechoslovak Hussite Church (2001-2005), that church was divided between rival factions, with some refusing to accept his patriarchy and threatening division. He resigned when he was called before the church’s Episcopal Central Council in 2005, and later joined the Religious Society of Czech Unitarians.
Today, the Revd Dr Petr Dolák Samojský is minister of the Prague Unitarian Congregation in the Czech Republic. The head office of the Religious Society of Czech Unitarians is still at its original address in Prague’s Old Town and it includes congregations in Prague, Pilsen, Brno, Teplice, and other towns, as well as the International Unitarian Church of Prague.
The International Unitarian Church of Prague meets at the Unitaria Meeting Rooms, 5 Anenská, close to the Charles Bridge. It is a community of American, English, Czech, French, Irish, Russian and New Zealand people who meet in person or online on the first, second and third Saturdays of the month at 11 am and online each Wednesday at 7pm.
The Revd Mark Shiels, the minister of the International Unitarian Church of Prague, lives in London and Prague, and works as both a psychotherapist and a minister. He has served Unitarian congregations in London, the Wessex area and Cork. He is a psychotherapist and teacher, with a background in both the business and charitable sectors, and an MPhil degree from the Irish School of Ecumenics at Trinity College Dublin.
Luke 6: 39-42 (NRSVA):
39 He also told them a parable: ‘Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will not both fall into a pit? 40 A disciple is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully qualified will be like the teacher. 41 Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? 42 Or how can you say to your neighbour, “Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye”, when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbour’s eye.’
Today’s Prayer:
The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Holy Cross Day Reflection.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday.
The USPG Prayer Diary today (15 September 2023, International Day of Democracy) invites us to reflect on these words:
Thank you, Lord, that we have the freedom to express ourselves and bring about democratic change. May we remember all who live in countries where this is not possible.
The Collect:
Holy God, who brought Cyprian to faith in Christ,
made him a bishop in the Church
and crowned his witness with a martyr’s death:
grant that, after his example,
we may love the Church and her teachings,
find your forgiveness within her fellowship
and so come to share the heavenly banquet
you have prepared for us;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post Communion Prayer:
God our redeemer,
whose Church was strengthened by the blood of your martyr Cyprian:
so bind us, in life and death, to Christ’s sacrifice
that our lives, broken and offered with his,
may carry his death and proclaim his resurrection in the world;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The best-known ritual of Rosh haShanah is the blowing of the shofar, a musical instrument made from an animal horn. The common greeting in Hebrew on Rosh Hashanah is Shanah Tovah (שנה טובה), ‘Have a Good Year.
Yesterday’s Reflection
Continued Tomorrow
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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