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TRAVELING LESSON: Who are our Partners in the Czech Republic?
Goal: To learn more about the history, customs, beliefs and practices of Czech Unitarians.
Materials: * These are normally stored in the Partnership suitcase.
- The Partnership Suitcase filled with materials for the lesson.
- *Game boards and card sets: one for every 4-6 children you expect to attend the lesson.
- *Playing pieces from commercial game boards: one for each player and 1 die for each game board.
- Map of the world. Pushpins and string or yarn.
- *Homemade passports for each participant (made in Lesson #1)
- *Page of stickers to put in passports. Date stamp (optional)
- *Copies of the founder story and the guided meditation to read aloud.
- Snack from the Czech Republic—If convenient, may be put in the suitcase as well.
- *Copies of “Under One Sky” .
Introduction: (15 minutes)
"This morning we are going to take a trip to visit Unitarians in the Czech Republic. We’ll learn more about this later but for now, let’s find the Czech Republic on our world map.
[Tie one end of a piece of string or yarn to the pushpin marking Czech Republic and the other end to one marking your town.]
“Now that we know where we are going, we will all need passports.” [Take the passports out of the Partnership Suitcase, and show them the Czech Republic “sticker” that they will receive when they return from their trip. Ask: “What should be done with the passports?” Ans: Keep in a clean pocket or give to you --their trip leader--until they're ready to return.]
“We decided to visit a Sunday school class in Prague this morning. The kids are learning about the Norbert Capek, who brought Unitarianism to the Czech Republic. After we hear a story about Capek, we’ll play a board game that tells us more and helps us think about how Czech Unitarians and US Unitarian Universalists are alike and how we are different.”
“A favorite snack of children in Prague is buchty, or buns stuffed with sweet cheese and jam. We’ll eat our snack while we hear the story.”
Founder Story: Take out of the suitcase and read aloud. (5 minutes)
Game: (take out of suitcase) Partners! in the Czech Republic (20-30 minutes)
Set up:
- Place the game boards on tables or the floor. Divide the participants into groups of 4-6 players. If you have a wide age range of participants, be sure to play the game with mixed ages so the older ones can help the younger.
- Note: the Customs cards and Beliefs and Practices cards are numbered and should be stacked in order in their own pile, face-down with the #1 card on top.
Object of the Game: To move along the path from Start to Finish.
Rules:
- Establish who will start by a roll of the die—high number goes first. Moving in clockwise direction, each player rolls the die and moves ahead the number of spaces shown.
- Players lift the flap of the square they land on and read the words under it. Follow directions, ie: Move ahead, move back, pick a Customs Card, or pick a Beliefs and Practices Card. Read or answer the question on the card.
- The next player goes after all cards are read and questions answered.
Stop the game 15 minutes before the end of the session.
Meditation (10 minutes)
We’re going to leave the Czech Republic after hearing a story about how freedom came to the Czech Republic.
Make yourself comfortable on the floor. Spread out so you can lie down. Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Feel your body relax into the floor. [Read Guided Imagery Story.]
Conclusion (5 minutes)
Hand out passports and pass out stickers. “This is the symbol of Czech Unitarians. [Pass around a small role of scotch tape or a glue stick so participants can paste the sticker on to the Czech Republic page.]
Sing “Under One Sky.” Then excuse the students one by one by stamping (or writing and initialing) today's date into their passports on the Czech Republic page. Tell them next Sunday there will be a trip to ______and show them that page in their passports. Welcome them back to ______[their home country] and put all their passports back in the suitcase. Hand out fact sheet for each child to take home.
Founder’s Story
Norbert Capek
Adapted from a sermon by Joan Van Becelaere
Norbert Capek [Chah’ pek] was a remarkable man—a minister, a missionary, a writer, a composer of hymns. He was also a heretic (who knows what that means?), a rebel, and lived a politically dangerous life.
Norbert Capek was born on June 3, 1870 in Bohemia, which was at that time a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His family was too poor to give him an education so they sent Norbert to live with his Uncle Victor, who was a successful tailor in Vienna. Norbert was expected to work his way through the university as an apprentice.
Like everyone else, Capek was raised as a Roman Catholic, the state-supported religion. But, at the age of 18, he rebelled and became a Baptist. His uncle promptly booted him out of the house. The Baptists took the young man in and put him through seminary. Capek served Baptist congregations in Saxony and Moravia and was very successful in his ministry.
Capek first became interested in Unitarianism in 1910. He wrote to the American Unitarian Association and asked them to support his efforts to promote liberal religion in Eastern Europe. But at that time the Unitarian Association didn’t see much value in international ties and wouldn’t listen to his petition. They turned him away cold.
Capek was a writer and in his writings he supported independence for Czechoslovakia from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which the government did not like. Even his religious writings were considered subversive (plotting against the government) and the police raided his home more than once. Capek was warned that he was in danger of immediate arrest by Austrian authorities as an enemy of the state.
In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, Capek moved to the United States, where, for the next three years he was pastor of the First Slovak Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey. Throughout World War I and his time in the United States, Capek was an active force in the movement for Czechoslovak independence.
At the end of World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart and Czechoslovakia became independent. Capek and his wife Maja, like other war refugees, were eager to return to their home country and play a part in the new country. Capek again asked for help from the American Unitarian Association to build a Unitarian fellowship in Czechoslovakia and this time they gave it to him. He bid farewell to his refuge in the United States and he and Maja set out for Europe.
By February 1922, the Chapels, working as a team, had organized the Prague Congregation of Liberal Religious Fellowship. Almost immediately, the services were drawing standing-room-only crowds. The Sunday sermon, the highlight of the service, was repeated and debated in a popular Tuesday evening program. With financial help from the AUA and the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, they bought and renovated a medieval palace to hold the growing congregation and its offices. In 1926, Maja was also ordained as a Unitarian minister.
On June 24, 1923, the first Flower Festival was celebrated. This ritual, which is now celebrated annually by UU congregations the world over, started in the Prague Congregation. The Chapels developed the flower festival to add an interactive ritual to the services which, by the choice of the members, were simple and had no ritual: there was no singing, no prayers, no collection plate—members actually paid as they entered each Sunday. The congregation found a lot of meaning in the flower festival service and it became a tradition for them.
(If your church doesn’t have a flower festival, here is a brief description: Each member of the congregation is asked to bring a single blossoming flower to the service. At the start of the service, the flowers are placed in a large vase in the middle of the hall. The flowers are said to symbolize the members, each unique and free, joining together in fellowship and accepting each other regardless of their differences. At the end of the service, each member takes one flower home.)
In 1939 Maja Capek left for the United States for what was supposed to be a brief lecture tour. She brought the Flower Festival Service with her and it was celebrated for the first time in the United States at the First Unitarian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tragically, the Nazis took over Czechoslovakia while Maja was still on tour, which prevented her from returning to Prague. She stayed in Massachusetts during the war, working at the church in New Bedford.
As soon as the Nazi army took control, Capek became a marked man. He was interrogated by the Gestapo, whose spies listened to every word he preached. For a time he hid his message of freedom in Biblical stories and religious symbolism, and for a while it worked.
Then, on March 28, 1941, Capek and his youngest daughter Zora were arrested by the Gestapo. They were convicted of listening to foreign radio broadcasts, a treasonous offence. Remarkably, Capek was only sentenced to a year in prison and his daughter to 18 months. But a Gestapo officer overrode the court’s sentence and ordered that Norbert Capek be sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Capek’s papers were marked “return unwanted.” While at Dachau, it is said that he kept up the spirits of the other prisoners with his humor and cheerful spirit. But on October 12, 1942 he was sent on an “invalid transport,” and evidently killed that day either with poison gas or a lethal injection.
Maja Capek did not learn of Norbert’s death until after the war. Leadership of the Prague church passed to the Capek’s’ daughter and son-in-law, both ordained Unitarian ministers. Maja decided to work to help the victims of the war and joined the staff of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency. She died in 1966.
Here is a prayer that Norbert Capek wrote just before his death:
“It is worthwhile to live and fight courageously for sacred ideals. Oh, blow, you evil winds, into my body’s fire. My soul, you’ll never unravel. Even though disappointed a thousand times or fallen in the fight, and everything worthless seem, I have lived amidst eternity. Be grateful, my soul. My life was worth living. The one who was pressed from all sides but remained victorious in spirit is welcomed into the choir of heroes.”
Guided Meditation
Imagine that the year is 1989—not too long ago—and you live in the city of Prague. The streets are very narrow and some of the buildings—former castles—are hundreds of years old. Your grandparents had been farmers in the rolling hills and valleys of Bohemia, but they were forced to move to the city after World War II because under communism people could no longer make a good living farming. Your parents work in a factory that makes steel. At first the factories were good places to work. But because the government controlled everything (from how much money people could make to where they sold their products and at what price), there was no reason to make factories better or more productive. So many of the factories are now out-dated and run down.
One night you overhear a conversation between your parents and some of their friends. They are talking about overthrowing the communists. You remember learning in school that a group of Czechs had tried to change the government back in the late 1960s, to make it less controlling. But that had backfired: The Soviet Union had cracked down on the Czech people and made life even harder after that. So some people are afraid to speak out for change. Others think the times are different now because the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbacev, actually wants reforms that would bring greater freedom and competition to communist countries. They say the Czechs don’t have to be afraid of the Soviet Union anymore and that now is the time to demand change.
Well, it turns out they were right. The very next day demonstrations began, and it took only 6 weeks, from November 17 to December 10, to peacefully overthrow the communists and form a new democratic government. People in other countries called it the “Velvet Revolution” because it was a complete turnover of power with no violence, so it was soft, like velvet. What it did have was lots and lots of demonstrations—people of all ages, including you and your family, marched in the streets and refused to go to work. One demonstration in Prague had over 750,000 people! The communist leaders were totally unprepared to deal with this popular unrest and they resigned their power on November 29, 1989. Within a year the first elections in 40 years were held. More than 96 percent of the population went to the polls to vote for the new Parliament.
The future is much brighter now. Things that were banned by the communists, like religion and rock music, are coming back. Churches have thrown open their doors and are renovating their buildings—including the church your family attends, called Unitaria. The building at 8 Karlova Street was once a medieval palace and has been the home of Czech Unitarians since 1924. People are once again making music in the streets and celebrating the old holidays. Who knows what this new freedom will bring?
Snack Recipes
Buchty (Yeast Buns)
Czech yeast buns and tarts (buchty a kolace) are another characteristic phenomenon of the Czech cuisine which appears even in a number of national fairytales. Yeast buns and tarts are small pieces or raised dough stuffed with sweet cottage cheese, ground poppy seed, plum-jam, or another special regional filling, and baked in the oven. Yeast buns are usually sprinkled with powdered sugar. Served after a sustaining soup, they once formed the main course.
Ingredients:
100 grams unsalted margarine
100 grams sugar
2 egg yolks
500 grams fine ground flour
1/4 liter milk
30 grams yeast.
Filling:
sweet cottage cheese, ground poppy seed, plum-jam
Directions:
Combine margarine, sugar and eggs with an electric mixer. Add flour, lukewarm milk, and the yeast mixture (yeast and a drop of milk). Knead the dough thoroughly and leave it to proof. Once the dough has risen, dust a flat surface with flour and roll out the dough to 1/2 inch thickness. Cut into squares, place filling of choice into center of the squares, and fold corners up to form parcels. Bake on a tray lined with baking paper, in an electric oven at 200 C, for approximately 20 minutes. While baking, keep moistening the top with a brush dipped in oil.
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