The following post comes from Book 2 in my trilogy, IN THEIR IMAGE AND LIKENESS. I will let you know what it is released.
Honeybees and their pollination of flowers have played an integral part in serving humanity in more than their regenerative powers that have touched upon my life, just as they have touched the life of Reverend Norbert Capek of Prague in post-WWI. We have shared similar footsteps in life.
I have lived my faith journey out loud, which I share in this trilogy, with similar twists and turns to those of Rev. Norbert Capek. His mother was a devout Catholic, so was mine. His father was an agnostic, mine was a non-practicing Methodist. Rev. Capek became an acolyte at the age of ten in 1890 at St. Martin’s Catholic Church. I was teaching Catholic CCD at the age of fourteen at St. Michael’s Church.
When both he and I were eighteen years old, we discovered Baptists. This worked for him until the day he wrote in his diary, “I cannot be a Baptist anymore, even in compromise. The fire of new desires, new worlds is burning inside me.”[1]
These new fires of desire changed his world and mine. In 1921, he and his wife, Maja, joined a Unitarian Church in New Jersey. After WWI ended, he returned to his home country of Czechoslovakia, where his church, Prague Liberal Religious Fellowship, boasted of more than three thousand, two hundred members. In my retirement as a Universal Life Church minister, my ministry is my worldwide blog, www.lindahourihan.wordpress.com, serving the world by reaching 203 countries, territories, and protectorates, in over 117,425 views from people of every belief system.
In 1921, Czechoslovakia was part of Bohemia[2] in central Europe. It was both a kingdom in the Holy Roman Empire and a province in the Hapsburgs’ Austrian Empire. Rev. Capek’s ancestry and my ancestry meet here on my mother’s and grandmother’s side. Bohemia got its name from the Celtic people known as Boii, also a connection to my husband with his Celtic roots.
Rev. Capek’s Fellowship also comprised followers of varying belief systems. He was looking to unite Catholics, Protestants, and Jews in peace and harmony. He noticed nature’s flowers, although varying in color, style, and height, all thrived in the same garden, field, and roadsides of the world. He also noticed the activities of Honeybees, pollinating these flowers indiscriminately.
He traded traditional communion services of bread and wine for flower communions. In 1923, he started the first flower ceremony, where congregants would bring in flowers from their gardens, fields, or from roadsides, place them in a vase, and at the end of the service, everyone would take a flower other than the one they brought. The year 2023 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of this peace-loving tradition.
My life included Unitarian fellowship as a youth singing in their choir with my best friend for a couple of years in the 1970s. My mother and I went to a Saturday evening Mass, leaving Sunday mornings open. My mother asked the parish priest if this was OK, if I also went to Mass, which turned out just fine. I was impressed by the Unitarian’s liberating sermons. I also participated in their outreach programs, in the 1970s-1980s, including monthly meetings of the Northeast Food Co-op so I could buy organic and local foods, and attended bi-weekly Yoga sessions lead by the late Rexta Lions for twenty years with my mother. Both outreach programs took place in the Mendon Unitarian Church Hall.
Rev. Capek was a bold minister in his day with an equally bold congregation, taking a stand on beliefs and building a new church that could build up the world. The Gestapo took offence at such obvious magnanimous valor and arrested him in 1942, thirteen years before my birth. (I note here that my mother was the 13th of 14 children – twins died at birth- and each book in my trilogy has 13 chapters, as I dedicate all of them to my mother.) He was sent to the Dachau Concentration Camps on the grounds that he was listening to foreign broadcasts.
His resolve to bring people together with the flower ceremony continued amid his starvation and torture. His fellow prisoners would gather whatever weeds were blooming by the sides of the camp roads, elevating the beauty of themselves reflected in the flower ceremony. Honeybees also did not discriminate between the flowers and the weeds.
Although the Nazis killed Rev. Capek, the love, valor, and dedication of the deeper meaning of the flower ceremony lives on to this day, 100 years later. If it weren’t for the Honeybee, there would have been no pollination and no flowers to hold this life-inspiring celebration. Honeybees have been working for many thousands of years in human history.
[1] The Story of Norbert Čapek’s Flower Ceremony | WorshipWeb | UUA.org
[2] Bohemia | History, Location, & Facts | Britannica
NAMASTE