Many of you know that Jeff and I visited our daughter Kate while she was living in Brno, Czech Republic, this past spring. We spent a week there, mostly in Vienna and Prague, so now, of course, I am an expert on all things Czech.
You may already know that all of Czech is divided into three parts: Bohemia on the west, Moravia, then a little sliver called Silesia along the Polish border. Slovakia, since 1993, has been a separate nation. Division and subdivision and reunion is not unusual in that part of the world, where German- and Czech-speaking regions have long been washed over by one sovereignty or another with the tides of battle and power plays.
Bohemia is the part of Czech that has Prague in it, the westernmost chunk, famous for crystal and marionettes and beer. Prague is a great international city, never bombed in World War II, its ancient buildings still stand. It is the gay capital of the world, a friend told me, filled with adventurous youth and a sense of tottering on the edge of something, an underlying turbulence. For me, Prague was the souring highlight of our trip. We went downtown to the center of this great city, to Wenceslaus Square, the stage of some key historic moments for the nation, a national mass heralding the Revolutions of 1848; in 1918, the celebration of the downfall of the Hapsburgs was there. Wenceslaus Square is the place where in 1969, a student named Jan Palach set fire to himself to draw world attention to the 20-year plight of the Czechs under Communism. In 1989, it was the site of the riot which led to the Velvet Revolution. Remember how astonished we were when Communism was overturned without a single death? Memorials to martyrs of the communistic era pepper the gardens leading up to the statue of King/Saint Wenceslaus, their flickering votives and flowers gathered by hand still keeping their memories alive.
Then vehicle traffic is cut off, and we brush along on foot through several blocks of modern upscale store windows attached to buildings so old that the statues lining their facades were black with pollution. We walk through the monumental Powder Gate, marking the beginning of the route taken by Czech Kings to be crowned in St. Vitus' Cathedral in what is now called Old Town, Stare Mesto. On the square, a statue of Jan Hus oversees a giant plastic chessboard, about 20-feet square, with teams sitting alongside it pondering their next move. Beyond is the Astronomical Clock, a feat of engineering and artistry so magnificent in its day that, according the legend, the town council burned out the eyes of the builder so that he would not be able to make a finer clock for any other city. Tourists still gather on the hour to watch the windows open and carved and painted Jesus and all the saints appear one at a time to look out upon them. We walked down past the apartment where Franz Kafka had what must have been the most unlikely childhood ever, then across the Vltava River on the Charles bridge--that's named for the Bohemian Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The bridge is lined on both sides with artists, photographers, and woodcarvers interspersed with performers: Dixieland bands, opera singers, and marionettists with an occasional ordinary beggar thrown in case you don't want any art or music. Behind the vendors and performers are statues of kings and saints and heroes, shiny and black from age and air pollution, and beyond the great river, into which martyrs and traitors had been flung from windows, a uniquely Bohemian form of execution called "defenestration."
This is the city where Dr. Faustus sold his soul to the devil. Where Rudolph II Hapsburg immersed himself in alchemy and the occult to such an extent that he was deposed as insane. Milan Kundera called it the most beautiful city in the world, but it is also haunting, disturbing, mysterious, sinister. And it is in this city that we Unitarians find an ancient, or at least medieval, connection to our own story. Let's remain in this citiy, but go back about 600 years, to the early 1400s.
Jan Hus, the man watching the chess game, was a priest and a scholar at Charles University, Europe's first university! His name, in his own language, means "John Goose," if that makes it easy to remember. He was well-read in theology and popular ideas. He had read John Wycliffe, the English theologian, and the philosophies of the Czech "Free-Spiriters," a heretical group, but he agreed with much of what they had to say about the church's responsibility to the poor orphans and widows, the most powerless people of the day. Or the Least Power-Ful. To keep their departed head of household from having to languish in purgatory, widows and orphans had to pay huge sums which they could not afford in order to buy indulgences for his safe passage to heaven.
Hus thought that was wrong. He preached in his church, Bethlehem chapel, about that, and he preached not in Latin, but in Czech, so that the people who were right there could understand him.
He did not understand the practice of separating religion and religious practice from the people, including the practice of offering communion wine only to the clergy and giving the people only a scrap of bread. Hus believed literally in the gospel mandate which said "Take this cup, all of you, and drink from it." He also propounded his ideas about greater equality of all people in the secular world-if there was any difference between the two at that time.
This was the time of the Great Schism, and Wenceslaus ordered his prelates to observe strict neutrality to both popes, but at Charles University, only Hus remained neutral, so the foreign influences-mostly German-were kicked out, and Hus was made rector of the University.
Hus's heresy, drawn entirely from Wycliffe's heresy, rattled too many cages at last. In 1413, he was excommunicated. A general Council was called at Constance, and Hus was asked to recant. Though he agreed to recant to the teachings of which he was falsely accused-the teachings he did not actually teach-he could not agree to recant the teachings which he did teach and believe in.
On July 6, 1415, at the Council of Constance, Hus was burned at the stake, his ashes were thrown into the river so that no one could gather relics and make a saint of him. Nevertheless, he is recognized as a saint in the Anglican Catholic church, his saints day, July 6. And certainly the Czech people continued to adore him as a saint and Martyr.
He is said to have pronounced from the conflagration: "Today you burn a goose, but out of my ashes shall be born a swan whom you will not burn."
Now, the central symbol of these populist views was the chalice, the cup of Christ's own blood, which Christ himself directed all to share. Hus's secular followers were known as Hussites and his religious followers were known as the Bohemian Brethren, and they took that symbol and wore it like a lapel pin, one UU minister has said. Just as it symbolizes community to you, commonality, equality, truth...so it did to them. It became something of a religious symbol and a nationalist symbol. Now I looked through lots of old art, and did not find one Hussite or Bohemian Brother wearing it like a lapel pin or even a coat of arms, I'll accept that it may have had its ups and downs, or maybe no artist was around around when Hussites were posing for their portraits in full dress. Nevertheless, for the Czechs, the Hussite motto is associated with the chalice, "Pravda vitezi," "Truth prevails." And the flame is reminder of Hus's fiery execution-"lest we forget." We place that flame in the chalice to hear its call to the recurring possibility of letting truth prevail, letting truth prevail which will engender a path to social justice, fairness for widows and orphans, equality for all the people. So we've got Hussites, Bohemian Brethren, and truth prevailing. Which of those is "the swan that will not be burned" I cannot say. I just don't know how arrogant Hus was-or how full of faith. Some Lutherans and some Germans, think the "swan" was a prophetic reference to Martin Luther. Now THAT's arrogant!
For Bohemian people, Hus is a nationalist reformer, not a religious one. The symbol survived and was seen on a Czech ambulance during World War II by a staff member of the Unitarian Service Committee. Though he did not know the story of the emblem, he borrowed the attractive design for what is now the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, which many of us know mainly as the Guest-At-Our-Table folks. It has just been over the last few decades that artistic interpretations of flaming chalices, wallhangings, sculptures, jewelry, have appeared and that the use of the flaming chalice, the ceremony of lighting a chalice before worship, has spread into our congregations.
We say it is a light of truth, the warmth of community, a nifty image, but it is also a historic symbol that transcends mere denominationalism or geography. It is a symbol of history and hope. It protests "the way things are" on behalf of the people who are left out of their own conventions, disenfranchised from the systems and governments which restrain them, the biblical widows and orphans, and the disempowered of our own world and of the second and third worlds. It is a compelling image, the grail our grand history sets before us, the ancient communion chalice utterly reinterpreted.
Like Hus, like the Hussites and the Bohemian Brethren, I wear that symbol, though I don't think any artists have caught me posing with it on yet, either. Well, maybe a few photographers. I want to protest, too; protest that religion is not elitist, cultural, ethnic, racial, nor even an intellectual game. It is a recurring possibility of a living engagement with truth as embodied in real human lives. I cannot help but believe that, as often as I struggle to come to deeper truth, just so often does something good become more possible in the world, something that protests on behalf of all who live, something "more swan than goose," beyond the power of a single individual to create, but within the power of all of us to create, which will make the world a just place in which we all can live.
I had heard this story of Jan Hus many years ago from a UU minister named Judith Walker-Riggs, and it was in my heart and in the back of my mind. I've researched it imperfectly and tried to put it back together as best I could. I hope I have been able to do justice to the story, and I'd like to open the floor to any comments or thoughts or questions you might have for me or for each other.
Let me close with the words of Rev. Mark Belletini:
Yesterday the heretics spoke and acted, Yesterday the dissenters broke with their own world and imagined a world yet to be born, a world for which they offered their lives as midwives. Tomorrow will their hopes be delivered and cry out?
Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but today, O Faithful Spirit, let liberty and love, freedom and daring, converge in this place and in this moment, among these people; quicken in this hymn, and qucken in our lives.
Let us join in the music of the Bohemian Brethren to sing the Unitarian Universalist words to Hymn # 287, "Faith of the Larger Liberty."
Note: For the Jan Hus story and related insights, I thank Rev. Judith Walker-Riggs and Rev. Mark Belletini.