This is the text of the reflection I offered at the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia on Sunday, April 22nd 2018. It being Earth Day, this was the perfect Sunday to celebrate Flower Communion. Especially in light of the discontent and disquiet current being felt in the congregation, it was the right time to remember the beauty of our community and how each of us contributes to it.
I want to tell you the story of the Flower Communion we’re celebrating today, and which many, many Unitarian Universalist congregations celebrate each year. It’s one of the few uniquely Unitarian Universalist rituals our movement has. For some, it’s right up there with the In-Gathering Water Ceremony.
Norbert Čapek was born in 1870. His family was Catholic, and as a young boy he wanted to grow up to be a priest. As he got older, Catholicism lost its luster for him, yet the urge toward ordained ministry continued. At the age of 18 he joined the Baptists, and was ordained a Baptist minister.
So the Flower Communion was created by an ex-Catholic turned Baptist? Hold on. His search for truth and meaning isn’t done yet.
Čapek became an itinerant preacher, and evangelist who travelled widely, spreading the Good News. Along the way he came into contact with the free Christian movement in Moravia. The Moravian Church has its own fascinating history. Jan Hus disagreed with some of the ways of the dominant Catholic Church. Among other things: he wanted the liturgy to be celebrated in Czech, rather than Latin, and wanted lay people to be able to receive both the bread and the wine during the Eucharist (at the time only priests were permitted to drink the wine). As to priests, he thought they ought to be allowed to get married. And he thought the practice of granting indulgences – which supposedly reduced the punishment for a person’s sins – and the concept of purgatory were wrong. Naturally, he was charged with heresy – this was the 1400s after all. Hus was declared guilty, and burned at the stake.
During his travels Čapek – remember Čapek? This is a story about Norbert Čapek – became increasingly liberal in his views and anti-clerical. He wrote and edited a number of religious journals, writing articles about everything from psychology to politics. He, too, drew the negative attention of The Powers That Be, and he and his wife fled to the United States, along with their eight children. This was 1914.
While he and his family were in the United States, the Baptists in his homeland brought up on charges in two heresy trials (Hus only got one!). You might say that Čapek agreed with the charges, although didn’t see them as heresy, and he resigned as a Baptist clergy person. That same year he discovered the teachings of Unitarianism, and he and his wife joined the First Unitarian Church of Essex County in Orange, New Jersey. They were so moved by the teachings of what would become our own Unitarian Universalist faith, that they decided they had to go back to their homeland, and returned to Prague that same year.
Čapek formed the Liberal Religious Fellowship – an awfully good name, don’t you think? – and this fledgling Unitarian church grew, soon able to buy their own building, which they called “Unitaria.” (Eventually they were able to purchase a medieval palace, which they renovated into their church building. In 1926, the Czech government formally recognized the Unitarian Church of Czechoslovakia as a legitimate religion.
In those early years, not everyone who attended a service would have immediately recognized them as a religion. The minister didn’t wear robes, there were no elaborate rituals, they didn’t sing hymns, and there were no formal prayers. The services consisted largely of lectures. And while all of that was appealing, some members of the congregation felt that there was a lack of a spiritual dimension, so Čapek begin to write hymns, and other liturgical elements.
Wanting to have a ritual that would embody the community as a community, yet not wanting to try to replicate the Eucharist, Čapek invited the members to bring with them one morning a flower. It could be something from their own gardens, or something they found growing along the way. When they entered the church, there was a large vase in the vestibule, with two children in charge. People were asked to place their flower in the vase. Having placed it there themselves was a reminder that it was their own free choice to enter into this community, and together that vase of flowers represented the beauty of their church.
During the service, the vase was brought up to the front of the church, and Čapek said a prayer and then consecrated the flowers. The children then took the bouquet back to the vestibule, and people were asked to take a flower on their way out at the end of the service. They were asked to take a flower other than the one they’d brought, as a way of symbolizing that the members of the community carried one another even when not at church together.
When WWII broke out, the Čapeks were invited to return to the United States, but Norbert wanted to stay in Europe, continuing to serve the faith that had given him so much. His wife did go back to the US to raise funds for relief efforts in Czechoslovakia. She also served as minister in the North Unitarian Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts during this time. Back in their homeland, Norbert and his daughter were arrested by the Gestapo. They were charged with the capital offense of “listening to foreign broadcasts.” They were eventually taken to Dachau, where he was tortured and, eventually, murdered.
His wife Maja had shared their Flower Ceremony with the church in New Bedford, and its practice spread – in part, because of its beauty, and also as a way of honoring this Unitarian martyr.
And we celebrate it this morning. We have created a bouquet of flowers, each contributing its own beauty, just as we create a bouquet of people, each adding their own unique gifts and spirit to the whole. Each Sunday I say that if any one of us were not here, it would be a different Sunday, just as if any one of those flowers was not there, it would be a different sight.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (whom some call “Saint Ralph” – okay, only I call him that) famously wrote (and it’s famous because it’s in the back of our hymnal):
These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.
But I’ll admit that I’m not so interested in roses – with apologies to those of you who may have brought one this morning. Roses are so … quintessentially “flower.” One of my favorite flowers is the dandelion. Oh, I know that folks spend a lot of time trying to rid their lawns of them. I can’t calculate the number of hours I spent on my knees, under the watchful eye of my mother, doing my best to remove each and every one, digging down with one of those garden tools with the “v” shaped top, trying to get them out by the roots so that they wouldn’t come back. (She’s she’s not here to hear it, I’ll confess that I didn’t always make the full effort and would just pull off the obvious bit above ground.)
And maybe it’s because of what I’d call my “misspent youth” that I love dandelions so much, but I can tell you that a field of those compact little balls of sunshine is as beautiful to me as any of those enormous tulip fields Holland has to offer.
And maybe I love them because dandelions are often classified by people as a weed – as opposed to those stately roses. On those few occasions when I watch televised sporting events, I rarely root for the team everyone else does. I always root for the underdog, even if that means changing my allegiance during a game. And with apologies to Ruth Douglas and others who know a lot more than I do about the perils of invasive species, I root for the weeds. And after all, as a leader of a homestead camp I attended in my youth like to say, “Even a rose is a weed if it’s in a tomato patch.”
My mother once bought a product called Meadow in a Can. In that can were the seeds of nearly 150 varieties of flower, and it was meant to be spread over an area of about 500 square feet. My mother apparently didn’t read the fine print, because she poured out that can in one of her 5 x 8 beds, a total of only 40 feet. That summer she really had a patch of wild flowers. And my mother, being my mother, and I, being my mother’s son, loved that little area of beauty run wild more than any of her well-ordered, traditionally planted beds. Up close it was … well … it was a mess. But step back a bit, or look at it from above, and it was a chaos of color. A profusion of joy. Beauty run wild.
My friends, for all the tumult and turmoil roiling in our congregation at this time, I look out at you and see here – and among those not here this morning – just such a wild patch of beauty. Roses and dandelions. Spring ephemerals like bluebells, Dutchman’s breeches, and bloodroot (which blooms for only a few days), as well as long-blooming plants such as lavender, coneflower, and Russian sage. We are that Meadow in a Can, we are those 150 varieties blooming together, we are a field of wildflowers. And while it is human nature when times are hard to identify some as “flowers” and others as “weeds,” the soil and the sun make no such distinction.
It is my hope, it is my prayer, that we can remember this truth about ourselves. That we can take that view from above and see our abiding loveliness. Let us look on one another in love. Let us be mindful, always, of our beauty.
Pax tecum,
RevWik
