| I lived the major part of my life in the communist
regime. Such a life was cut off by the oppression of the natural
spontaneity in socialising, but even worse was that people could not
practice their religion in public as a natural part of their life.
There was established an animosity against religion: a part of the
materialistic ideology and propaganda was to diminish the meaning of
religion and spirituality; and there were sanctions introduced
against those who were not loyal to the regime. The era of Stalin in
the early 1950s’, was even in the Czechoslovakia the time of the
most aggressive and oppressive regime. Nevertheless, at that time,
as a pre-school child, I had the most important spiritual and
religious experience in our church: the Flower Communion. The only
ritual of the Czech Unitarians originated by the founder of the
church, Norbert Čapek, in 1923.
Many other Unitarian groups adapted it as well as yours as I
understand. Since my childhood I have carried that experience with
me as a model of the congregation which loves, provides a safe
environment, cares, and enables its members to experience free
spirit. Religion was truly lived in that community. Naturally,
after the fall of the communist regime there were many, including
me, coming back to the church with a desire to experience the same
spirited community. Our earlier spiritual experience in our church
became our life-long foundation for the rest of our life in the
totalitarian regime. But at our comeback there was not a trusting,
loving and caring community any more. The web of relationships
within this community was partly rotted, because people did not
attend the church in the past four decades and partly destroyed by
animosity and mistrust embedded into society by the horrors we
experienced. Unfortunately, our hope to find that ideal church
failed. In addition at that time we experienced a minister’s
misconduct and were locked out of our own church. We kept up our
church life in a refuge of a friendly church for seven years until
we re-established our legal and material status and recovered our
church building.
Nevertheless, the experience of our freedom and exile opened the
way for bringing our personal stories and sharing them, gradually
building trust again and re-establishing our relationships with
Unitarians and Universalists abroad, too. We had had a tradition of
rich foreign relationships: the Czech Unitarian church was started
with the support of American and British Unitarians in the 1920s’;
the IARF Congress was held in Prague in 1927; at the beginning of
the II World War a mission of American and British Unitarians helped
those endangered by fascism to escape the country. After the war
there was supportive relief of the Unitarian Service Committee from
Canada, led by the Czech expatriate Lotta Hitschmanova. – Do you
know whether some members of your congregation were personally
involved? My beloved minister, Bohdana Hasplova, preached over here
in Canada in support of the relief work and my grandmother unwrapped
deliveries along with the Women’s Unitarian League in Prague: some
120 children’s homes in the country were supplied with clothes and
food. One of the homes, where orphans from German, Czech, Jewish and
other families were gathered, was fully equipped by the joint
Unitarian Service Committees’ efforts.
Living in the earlier Communist Bloc after we became free and
were allowed to travel again I recall my first visits to Western
Europe and North America: Crossing the borders I was moved to tears
by my new freedom and was happy to belong to our global family. Soon
after I found our Euro-American culture centred on our own
prosperity. There now is an orientation to a material wellbeing to
such an extent that people mistaken it for real satisfaction and
happiness. Living in freedom I am again experiencing a loss of one
of the essential life dimensions: spirituality.
In spite of that meeting people in different countries can enrich
my spiritual life. If I go beyond only meeting them and allow this
encounter to affect my thoughts, I can understand their culture,
which can become source of a wonderful inspiration for me. My
emotions affected in this way develop into compassion and I
experience a transformation as if my personality expanded. – Here is
my bag, which I carry wherever I go, the gift of a Unitarian in
Transylvania, Romania. Now my school bag at Meadville Lombard
Theological School reminds me of the dear friend in a remote place.
– My inner life becomes richer and from that I can act in a new way.
I am becoming aware of the freedom of my spirit, which cannot be
taken away from me. I want to see a re-birth of the values I
experienced as a small child in a loving and trusting church. I want
this for my children and grandchildren, and for our whole religious
community. I believe that by cultivating our spirit we can face the
social tendencies that undermine our relationships. As Vaclav Havel,
our former president, remarked [on his visit to the U.S. in 1995]:
"In today’s multicultural world, the truly reliable path…must start
at the root of all cultures, and in what lies infinitely deeper in
human hearts and minds than political opinion, convictions,
antipathies, or sympathies. It must be rooted in self-transcendence
…Transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in
harmony even with what we ourselves are not, what we do not
understand, what seems distant from us in time and space, but with
which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together with
us, all this constitutes a single world."
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