Expanding Horizons

More Stories from the Czech Unitarians

At a "packed" Shady Grove combined service this morning, Kris continues his narrative on Prague Unitarians - Czechian Unitarianism - its founder, Norbert Čapek and the influence of Tomáš Masaryk, who later became the Founding Father of Czechoslovakia. Kris also reads to us our seven (UUA) Unitarian Principles, which we are in the process of revising - followed by a reading of the nine Unitarian Principles of the Prague Unitarians. We also savoured fresh strawberries for reasons that Kris explains. And Brendan played some much-loved Mozart and Beethoven on the piano keyboard he brought with him.

Duration:: 27m
Broadcast on:: 04 Aug 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

[Music] You are listening to Expanding Horizons, the podcast of the Unitarian Church of South Australia, a home of progressive spirituality and free religious thought and action since 1854. The views expressed in these podcasts are those of the speaker and are not intended to represent the position of the church itself or of the worldwide Unitarian Universalist Movement. For more information visit UnitarianSA.org.au [Music] Well, I don't know if it's my harshly Irish heritage or not, but I find that when I want to tell a story it leads into another story and leads into another story. So I want to tell you some of the highlights of my thoughts after my visit to check here. But to do that I want to tell you the story of Norbert Chappec, the founder of Czech Unitarianism. But to tell his story, I want to tell you the story of Thomas Masarek, who was the first president of the Independent Czech Republic, in fact Czechoslovakia. So Thomas Masarek was born in 1850 and he was interested in philosophy, religion and politics, which I've done visiting Prague, probably not an unusual thing among many people. But he studied and became a professor of philosophy. While he was studying in Leipzig in the 1870s, he met his wife, she was there also studying. And her name Charlotte was an American Unitarian. So one of the unusual things, they were both tending towards socialist thought and feminist thought, which was unusual for the day. And when they married they took each other's surname, which was highly unusual in those days. So the first president of the Czechoslovak Republic was Thomas Garig Masarek and Charlotte took the name Charlotte Garig Masarek. So there was a strong Unitarian connection in the founding of the Czechoslovakian Republic. Now during World War I, there had been agitation for independence for Czechoslovakia or Czechia and Slovakia, I should say, for a long time. It had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and an utterly dominant Roman Catholicism throughout that empire, which had gone back to the Thirty Years War centuries before, obviously a monarchy. Within the monarchy there were more or less separate Austrian and Hungarian political systems. The young Thomas, apart from his studies, was elected to the Austrian part of the parliament. So he was active in politics and had dreams of an independent country for his people. World War I provided an opportunity and his travels were astonishing. He spoke to Russians, English, French and Americans at a high level. And when he was in America, he even was able to speak to Woodrow Wilson, the president, who came out with some extremely noble principles after World War I, if only they had been implemented. But that's another story. In any case, he received encouragement and approval, and Wilson's government in the US made the Czech declaration in 1918 saying that when World War I was finished, there should be an independent Czechoslovakia. And as early as November, 1918, the month that the war formally ended, Musserik was elected the first president. Now, it was kind of a guide to democracy. The constitution said there was a two-term limit for presidents, except for the first one. And Musserik ended up being president from 1918 to 1935. Yeah, 17 years. Okay. A stretch, they're all slightly. But it was fundamentally a democracy. Different parties got elected to the parliament and made coalitions and so forth. And really, it was quite a successful democracy when you consider what else was happening in Europe at the time, in Italy, Germany in the 20s and the 30s. Now, a measure of the man is the extent to which he was willing to speak up for those who didn't have a voice. I think this is one of the greatest marks of a person's character. In 1899, in the woods in Moravia, a young girl's body was found quite mutilated with a lot of blood. The police found several wandering homeless people in the forest, one of them was Jewish. At the time in that part of the world, back throughout Western Europe and Eastern Europe, there was extremely strong anti-Semitism. It's almost hard to imagine in a pluralistic society like Australia, where it's a conscious of racism and so forth. But this was widespread and put into shocking effect. So this young, homeless man, described in the papers as simple, these days we'd probably say he had mental health issues, was arrested and charged. Now, they found nothing in his home that could connect him to the murder. He himself said, "Yes, I was wandering in the forest. I was wandering in a different part of the forest." He had no alibi. So they said, "Aha, we looked at your trousers. There was a stain there, which the experts said could be blood, and it was wet as if somebody had tried to wash it off." And he had an innocent explanation for that. But in the state of science, there was no DNA testing or anything like that. They said, "This was proof that you were involved in that." But more than that, the allegation was that he'd been seen with some other weird-looking Jewish characters in the forest and that they had engaged in a ritual murder to get blood, to prepare their Friday evening meal. Totally preposterous, abominable, but these were common stories actually in Europe for centuries before that Jews would prey on the blood of children and so on. I just say it again, completely disgusting, abominable thinking, but it was common enough in Europe for a long time. So, despite there being no evidence of this sort of ritual killing or anything like that, he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Now, Masarek, who wasn't a lawyer, who was a doctor of philosophy, devised and funded an appeal to the Supreme Court for this unfortunate Leopold Hilsner, who had been convicted. But he didn't have to do that, but he was standing up for the fact that he saw that injustice being done. Now, the appeal was unsuccessful, and Hilsner spent 19 years in prison before the emperor pardoned him, partly because of the lack of evidence leading to his conviction. Anyway, this is the story about Masarek, and I think that is a testament to his character. Now, how does he even come into the story? Norbert Chupic, I now go to his story. He was born later in 1870 and began in a Catholic family, like, I think, 99% of Czech families at the time. And he was really interested in the spiritual path in religion. The story goes that one night he had been visiting an uncle in Vienna, and he met two men, and he said, "Okay, what are we going to do tonight?" "We're going to go." And one of the men said, "Well, I'm off to the pub. Come and have a drink." And the other man said, "Well, I'm actually going to the Baptist Church. It's really quite interesting. Come and have a look." And Chupic decided, in that moment, to go to the Baptist Church instead of the pub. And that led him to become very interested in this Protestant religion, which was such a minority religion in Czechia at the time. And he went on to become a Baptist minister and preached as a Baptist minister, and in fact became president of the local Baptist Confederation in that part of Europe. So he was well regarded and he was dynamic and charming. He was a natural leader. In 1910, so this is now he's getting into middle age, he had developed more liberal and socially minded tendencies, thinking, "What is all this religion for? It's about helping people, if nothing else." And we get so hung up on the various religious doctrines and the sacraments and what they mean and what you have to do. All of that ritual stuff, what does it really matter? We're meant to be helping people. That's what it's all about. So he went to speak to Thomas Massaric, who was then a professor of philosophy, a good person to talk to. And I want Thomas, a more mature man, he asked the young Norbert various questions, "Well, do you believe in this or what do you think of that?" And at the end of the conversation, Massaric said to Chapik, "You're a Unitarian. You may not have ever heard of it, but you are." And Chapik obviously investigated that. And he corresponded with American Unitarians and sought their help in establishing some sort of Unitarian branch in Czechoslovakia. But it wasn't the right time. However, during World War I, Chapik and his wife travelled to the United States. And there's another beautiful story because they weren't sure, what should we do for religion? We've left behind the old Catholic thing in America now that we've got a choice of 72 different denominations, where should we plant our religious roots. And so they sent their children off to Sunday school to various different churches and they asked their children to report back. And we'd go, "What did they say? Do you feel good after that?" and so on. And anyway, the children said, "Ah, the Unitarian one. It's really good." So the Chapik's then went along themselves as a family and tried it out, and they felt that is what fitted them. So they were confirmed as Unitarians, 1921, and they were then able to get American help in setting up churches in Prague. So they went back to Czechoslovakia and Chapik, being clearly such a dynamic man, set up a church in... Well, I won't even say a church. It was a religious society, the Prague Congregation of Liberal Religious Fellowship. That was really the beginnings of the Unitarian church in Czechoslovakia. And he set up a number of other churches. There was still a satellite number of churches in Czechia and Slovakia. The church grew rapidly. The extraordinary thing about that time was that they'd come out of hundreds of years of highly dominant and insistent and pervasive Roman Catholic religion. You couldn't go anywhere without bumping into Catholic thought, Catholic action, Catholic people, and it was very difficult even to think otherwise. After World War I, with independence, Masarek, the first president himself, actually said publicly, "I want not only a new country. I want a new religion." Here was a president, a political man, who said, "I want to stuff a new religion based on humanism and ethical ideals, as well as socialist elements, thinking about welfare of the people at a time when there was no organized welfare for the people from the state." In this bubbling new world of religion in Czechoslovakia, where there was a huge exodus from the Catholic church, people were exploring all sorts of other options. Sorry, another diversion. But one of the halfway houses, not Unitarian, there were a number of modifications of Catholic thought that sprung up in various Protestant churches. One was the Czechoslovak Hussite church, that refers back to Jan Hus, who lived at the end of the 1300s, beginning of the 1400s. He began as a Catholic priest, but he realized there was a lot wrong with the way things were being done, and he criticized many aspects of the Catholic church and the clergy. For example, the practice of receiving money in order to save people's souls, which was a common practice in the Catholic church in the Middle Ages, also corruption, priests having children and all sorts of things. They told him to shut up. He was eventually burned at the stake, but he had so many followers. There was such a reaction to the overbearing and, in part, corrupt Catholic church at the time, that there were entire communities who fought, went into battle for their independence, and you can see how religion and the political aspirations were joined together. So that was Jan Hus burnt in the early 1400s. Now, interesting parallel, but Norbert Chapek had an ancestor who was one of Huss's supporters, leaving reincarnation. I don't know. Anyway, the Hussite church adopted various, at that time, radical reforms in the early 20s. For example, using the Czech language in church, instead of Latin. That was a big new thing. Voluntary, instead of compulsory, celibacy, for priests, I could tell you this big difference. And allowing the ordination of women, again. How could they do that? This is just a delicious story, but in 1999, this Hussite church, in many other respects, I like the Catholics, seven sacraments, similar sort of servers had bishops and patriarchs and all the rest of it. In 1999, they were set to elect their first woman bishop. And the Roman Catholic Archbishop said, "Oh, wow, this is just going a step too far. You are going to really damage ecumenical relations if you do this." But they did it anyway. That was rather spirited of them. But it's getting back to Chapek with the help of locals and American and British funds. They were able to buy a palace in the middle of Prague. One thing of a palace, really a big stone structure, a big stone building with many, many different rooms and parts. If you've been to Prague, there are many palaces. Anyway, they were able to get one right in the middle of the old town, and that's been the Prague headquarters of the Uniterians ever since. So I visited there. It's quite impressive. In 1930, they were recognised formally as a religion in Czechoslovakia, and they've gone out of a sense. They had some really hard times after 1948 with the communist regime. They had commissars coming to their meetings to make sure nothing improper was said. So it was a very difficult time. It became more and more difficult to get ministers, more and more difficult to get funds. But there was something of a revival in the 1990s as people came out of that post-communist era. And some years ago, they set up an academy. So actually for training ministers in Prague, they offer courses in English as well as Czech. And so I went along to a retreat to engage in some spiritual education. So what I'm going to do now to demonstrate, I'm going to hand around this plate of washed strawberry pieces. And I invite you to take one and hold it and contemplate the sight and the feel of it. Probably not the sound of it. But let us do that and hold them and then we should have done that. Early in life, we often don't pay attention going on. And it is an essential building block foundation for the spiritual life to really see what's happening, to really experience other people who enter. So just as in life, we may have dollar pieces. Some of us may have the sweet. But let us all eat together and savour this strawberry. So who cut off a one word, Salah was one? No, he deserved that, Australia. Yum, yum over there. Any other words? Fresh. Fresh. Juicy. Juicy. Paramedic. Paramedic. Wow, this was a good batch of strawberries. And we could hear the strawberries. And we could hear them. Being macerated. So the big thing about this, we did a similar exercise in this retreat I was on. And here's the profound challenge that comes from this demonstration. It would be so wonderful if every week, the minister or through the music or ritual, we could convey to you an experience that is somewhat transformative. I'm very conscious that so much of the time, it's information transfer. Now, information can be useful. It can lead to insight. But it's not the same thing as the experience. I could have given you a five minute lecture about the taste of strawberries. It wouldn't be the same, would it? Time, nothing. And spiritual experiences like that. Yeah. But we hope that through a passage of time, with exposure to ideas and experiences, whether it be through this Unitarian practice or somewhere else, we trust that you will come to greater spiltment. And that will be demonstrated through your attention to others, through your care and your generosity to others. As I was researching today and some of these thoughts about religion, I did come across an interesting whip by a philosopher, writer, Michael Séras. And he said, "Religion is the opposite of negligence." I thought that was so beautiful, maybe because I'm a lawyer. But religion is the opposite of negligence. Negligence, of course, meaning that we don't care. Oh, whatever happens, happens. Ehh, reckless. But when we are the opposite to that, we are caring about everyone with whom we are coming to contact. The other thought I had about this was the etymology of religion, coming from the Old Latin Relegare, to bind. And the idea, then, was to bind people to God through the ritual, through the church, and so on. Or, of course, in primitive religions, through shamanic ritual, whatever it might be. But I really think Unitarianism is something different, because we are not here to bind people. We don't proselytise, we don't block people in a room. We are free. And we want to encourage that freedom. People are free to let go of old ideas, free to let go of unhealthy relationships. We encourage that freedom. And really, that freedom I am talking about is freedom to use our reason without prejudice, which distorts reason or limits its function. We are talking about freedom to be in awe of this beauty, this beautiful universe of the blue fairy-ren, of the dolphins at the sea, of the bush out here. And it's when we have our own internal machinations, problems, regrets, anxiety, that it prevents us from really paying attention and being in awe of this beautiful world. And, of course, we want to be free in relationships, to be able to love without inhibition, without guilt, without anxiety. And we can be in awe also of the generosity and kindness of people, because among the meanness and materialism of the world, there is so much generosity and kindness. We can be very grateful for that. So, by bringing into play a final piece of music, and I'll say one more thing about freedom. Freedom to be open to the spirit. Now, I can say as a matter of conviction that there is something more than just our human difficulty of reason, whether you call it intuition or the spirit of life or God, there is something available to us to help guide us to our next step, to our end. Sometimes we have to let go of preconceptions in order to be free, to be open to that. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] We hope you've enjoyed this Expanding Horizons podcast. These podcasts are the intellectual property of the presenter. They can be used only with the express permission and appropriate acknowledgement of the presenter. This permission can be obtained by emailing admin@unitariansa.org.au. Please feel free to leave a comment or visit us on Facebook or Twitter by searching SA Unitarians or by visiting our website at unitariansa.org.au [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] (gentle music)