Flower Celebration

Looking at Flowers

Moment for all ages: “Looking at Flowers”

The children and youth may come forward now if you wish, and if you brought a flower today, bring it along.

If you brought a flower to share, you can put it in one of the vases on the table. (And if you didn’t bring a flower, here are some extras so you can have one to put in a vase.) The adults are going to do this, too. You people get to go first because you’ll want your hands free so I can give you another flower. You’ll see why you want a different flower in just a moment.

[Hand out flowers that can be dissected]

Often we look at a flower and say, Wow, isn’t that pretty. The color or the shape of the flower catches our eyes, or maybe we admire the scent. Well, I’m going to try to convince you that a flower is a whole lot more than that.

Look closely at the flower I handed you. Now look at the diagram I gave you, and see if you can find the different parts of the flower.

Let’s start with the petals and sepals. See those?

Now let’s look at the tiny parts of the flower. Use a magnifying glass if you want. The pistil is in the middle, and it’s made up of the style and the stigma. The stamens are around the center, and they’re made up of anthers, which are held up by filaments. That structure down at the bottom is the ovary. If you want to, you can take off some of the petals so you can see the inside better (this is why I gave you these flowers, so you can pull them apart).

The stamens produce pollen. The pistil takes the pollen that the stamens produce, and send it down to the ovary. The ovary is the part that turns into a seed.

So how does the pollen get from the pistil to the stamen? Depending on the flower, the pollen can be transferred by an insect such as a bee; or a bird or a bat or another animal; or sometimes by wind or water.

When an insect like a honey bee or a bumble bee comes to a flower, they are not looking for pollen. They are looking for nectar. Usually the flower stores the nectar deep inside the flower, at the base of the ovary. That way, the insect has to crawl all the way into the flower to get the nectar reward, which makes it more likely to get pollen on it. So the bee gets the nectar reward, and in return the bee helps the flower get pollinated. Look at your flower and imagine how a bee would spread the pollen around while getting its nectar reward.

If you get a chance, try sitting outside and watching a flower to see what insects come visit it. (If you stand a couple of feet away from the flower, and don’t make any sudden moves, the bees won’t sting you; they’re too busy getting nectar.) There are dozens of different kinds of bees: from bumble bees, which are pretty big, to tiny little sweat bees that are bright green in color. When you look closely, each flower is like a miniature world.

But what’s really fascinating is that bees need flowers so they can make honey from the nectar. And flowers need bees to move the pollen from stamen to pistil. This is yet another example of the interconnected web of all existence.

If you want to keep looking at your flower you can take it with you. But please leave the magnifiers here. And now you return to sit with your families again.

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

Story — The Flower Celebration

86 years ago, Norbert and Maja Capek were the ministers of a Unitarian congregation in Europe, in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Most members of their congregation had left other religions to become Unitarians, and many of these people did not want to be reminded of the religions they had left behind. So Norbert and Maja Capek decided to create a new ritual for their congregation — a Flower Celebration.

One Sunday in June, they asked everyone in the congregation to bring a flower to the worship service. There were more than two thousand people in the church, so the church rented a big concert hall for their worship services. When people arrived on Sunday morning, all the flowers were gathered together in vases — hundreds of colorful flowers all over the front of the church. Norbert Capek told the congregation that the flowers were symbols of what it means to be a human being: every flower was different, every flower was beautiful in its own way. And at the end of the worship service, everyone went up and took a flower, a different flower from the one that they had brought, took that flower home with them as a symbol of their connection to everyone else in the congregation.

Iva Fiserova grew up in the Prague Unitarian church, and she shared some of her memories of the Flower Celebration:

“Sunny morning… a granny walking holds a grandchild’s hand… carrying the most beautiful flowers from the garden, entire families enter a big house… there are floods of flowers on the stage of one of the biggest concert halls in the city… a vivid community sharing the mutual happiness of the gathering… thousands of people giving each other friendly greetings… a warm and festive atmosphere… the personal joy of belonging to this community… These are tiny fragments of childhood memories that influenced my life deeply and that have been treasured since those days.”

That’s how Isa Fiserova remembers the Flowers Celebration from when she was a little girl.

Our church has a special connection to the Flower Celebration. Maja Capek, one of the ministers of the Prague Unitarian Church, came to New Bedford during the Second World War, and was the minister of the North Unitarian Church. A few of our church members still remember Maja Capek from when they were children. While she was here in New Bedford, she conducted the Flower Celebration each spring. And so we still have a Flower Celebration each year, partly to keep alive the memory of Maja Capek.

Readings

The first reading was a prayer by Norbert Capek, written while he was imprisoned by the Nazis:

It is worthwhile to live and fight courageously for sacred ideals.
Oh blow ye 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 would worthless seem,
I have lived amidst eternity.
Be grateful, my soul,
My life was worth living.
He who was pressed from all sides but remained victorious in spirit is welcomed into the choir of heroes.
He who overcame the fetters giving wing to the mind is entering into the golden age of the victorious.

[Second reading not included.]

Homily

Each year, we hold a Flower Celebration in the second week of June. I would like to speak to you this morning about the religious symbolism of the Flower Celebration. This is the last time I will preach to you as your settled minister, and the religious symbolism of the Flower Celebration offers me a perfect chance to sum up the main theological notions about which I have been preaching for the past four years.

The Flower Celebration as we know it today had its origins in a post-Christian religious ritual developed in the 1920s by Norbert and Maja Capek for the Unitarian church in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Most North American Unitarian Universalists call this religious ritual a “Flower Communion,” but I consider that name to be misleading; the Capeks wanted a ritual that was not based on old Christian rituals, and I feel calling this ritual “communion” when it has nothing to do with the Christian ritual of the eucharist is incorrect.

The Flower Celebration begins before the worship service, and outside the church building. Individuals and families find flowers to bring to church. Those who have gardens might pick flowers from their gardens; others might buy flowers from a florist; and others might find flowers growing by the side of the road or growing in a field. Then everyone brings their flowers to the church, each individual carrying a flower that looks like no other flower in the world. At the beginning of the Flower Celebration, everyone in the congregation brings their flowers to the front of the church, and places them in one of the vases there. The vases of flowers remain at the front of the church until the end of the worship service, the massed flowers serving as bright spots of color that enliven the worship space. Then at the end of the worship service, each person takes a flower home; not the flower they brought, but a flower that someone else brought.

First Unitarian Church has a special connection to the Flower Celebration. In 1939, as the Second World War was heating up, Maja Capek came to the United States to promote relief efforts in central Europe. She was unable to return to Nazi-controlled Czechoslovakia, and spent the remainder of the war in this country. From 1940 to 1943, she served as the minister of one of our antecedent congregations, North Unitarian Church. So it was Maja Capek herself who introduced this ritual to us Unitarians here in New Bedford.

The Flower Celebration is a simple ritual. It is also a powerful ritual with several layers of meaning.

Most obviously, the Flower Celebration is a ritual that celebrates the connections between the individuals who make up the congregation. You come in to the Flower Celebration with one flower, and you leave carrying a flower that someone else brought. You may not know who that other person was, yet when you leave the worship service your life has been touched by him or her. Perhaps the person who brought your flower is one of the people who has been one of your spiritual guides or mentors in the church. For all you know, that other person is one of the people in the church whom you happen to dislike; yet your dislike of that person means nothing in the face of the transcendent meaning and beauty of the flower you carry. Equally likely, your flower was brought by someone whom you don’t know. Every person in a congregation is connected by the transcendent meaning and beauty of the religious community, which is made up of individuals who are each physical manifestations of transcendent human beauty. We may not always see the transcendent beauty that is in each individual, but the Flower Celebration reminds us that it is there, in each and every one of us. The Flower Celebration also reminds us that we are connected each to all through that transcendence.

This leads us to another meaning of the Flower Celebration. During the Flower Celebration, each flower is of value; there is no flower that will be discarded, or ignored, or rejected. Each flower is unique, each flower is different, yet all the flowers are welcome. This is an obvious metaphor for how we hope to treat each other as human beings. We aim to see the value in each human being. We try to live our lives so that no human being is discarded, or ignored, or discriminated against, or rejected. We also know perfectly well that it seems impossible to live our lives in that way. As an extreme example, while in a theoretical way we might be able to see the human value of a convicted child molester who is at great risk of being a repeat offender, in actual practice we don’t particularly want that person to be a member of our church. In real life, our highest values are sometimes brought down by unpleasant realities. Yet we want to hold on to those highest values, even if sometimes we can only hold on to them theoretically. So each year we have a Flower Celebration to remind us that one of our highest values is that each individual human being has all the beauty and value of a perfect flower.

Here in the United States, the Flower Celebration takes on a special meaning due to the history of our country. In the United States, we are still living with the moral problem of discrimination based on skin color. Racial discrimination, left over from the days of legal slavery, remains one of our most nettlesome moral problems. In the Flower Celebration, flowers of every color are valued equally, and here in the United States we almost can’t help but make the leap from flower color to skin color. The Flower Celebration reminds us, in this not-so-subtle way, that each individual human being has value and beauty regardless of skin color.

Another nettlesome moral problem that we face in today’s world is the problem of ecological sustainability, and here again the Flower Celebration reminds us of this vast moral problem. The flowers that we bring to a Flower Celebration are so fragile; they are easily crushed, they will wilt if we don’t care for them by keeping them in water. The very presence of flowers in the church reminds us of the fragility of the ecosystem. We also become aware that many different species of flowers are present during the Flower Celebration, and of course we value each different species equally. This serves to remind us that the ecosystem consists of many different species of plants and animals, each of which is equally valuable. Thus the Flower Celebration helps us to remember the importance of working towards an ecologically sustainable world.

And for me, the Flower Celebration illustrates one final theological point. Flowers come into bloom, fade, go to seed, and the seeds may germinate next spring while the flower itself with wither and rot and turn into compost that will nurture next year’s plants. The world is an endless cycle of change and transformation. This reminds me of the tenets of process theology: that nothing stays the same, and that we must be constantly ready to allow growth and change within ourselves, and constantly ready to transform ourselves in response to an always changing world. Stasis means death. Change means life, and growth, and hope. At the same time, change is never easy; to transform ourselves can require great courage. When I look at the flowers gathered for the Flower Celebration, I cannot help but think that they will all be faded and gone within a week or two; we cannot freeze these flowers so that they bloom forever. So these flowers will fade, but I also know that during next year’s Flower Celebration, people will bring flowers of equal beauty. Thus, change isn’t something to be avoided, it’s something to be embraced because change is the way of life; and for us human beings, change inevitably leads to growth and transformation.

So the Flower Celebration becomes a ritual which brings to a deeper awareness of our theology and of our moral values. The transience of flowers reminds us that change and transformation are the only things that will lead us to growth. The fragility of the flowers reminds us of the fragility of the ecosystem, and our moral responsibility to create an ecologically sustainable world. The uniqueness of each flower and the diversity of all the flowers reminds us of the uniqueness and diversity of human beings, and of our moral responsibility to end all forms of discrimination and racism. The exchange of flowers reminds us that each individual in this religious community is connected to every other individual, reminds us that we are not alone and that we cannot exist without community.

And assuming the Flower Celebration does bring us to a deeper awareness of our theology and of our moral values, may we then in turn continue to live out our theologies and our moral values in our day-to-day lives. We come to church each week to restore our connection to each other, to ourselves, and to something which is large than our selves; and having been restored, we go back out into the world, nurturing growth, embracing change, ever moving toward a world that will be transformed into a heaven on earth.

Flower Celebration

This worship service was conducted by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the homily below is a reading text. The actual homily as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Homily copyright (c) 2007 Daniel Harper.

Child dedication

This worship service included a child dedication ceremony for two children of the church.

Minister’s introduction to the child dedication

In just a moment, we’re going to celebrate the christening of two children. But before we do that, let me tell you a little bit about what a christening is, and how it differs from a child dedication.

You probably know that our church has Universalist roots — First Universalist merged with First Unitarian in 1930. The Universalists have long done child dedications instead of baptisms. By 1793, the celebrated Universalist minister John Murray was performing child-dedications rather than baptisms [Life of Murray, 1854 ed., pp. 243-244], since as a Universalist Murray did not believe in the necessity of washing away some mythical original sin through baptism.

Unitarians evolved somewhat differently. By the time I was christened in a Unitarian church, just before merger with the Universalists, a Unitarian christening welcomed the child into a church that recognized, as I was taught as a child, the spiritual leadership of Jesus. But in both ceremonies, the children were formally welcomed into the church family.

These days, during a child dedication we dedicate a child to the highest ideals of morality and ethics; while a Unitarian Universalist christening more specifically acknowledges our spiritual roots in the teachings of that great spiritual master, Jesus of Nazareth.

Gathering the flowers

83 years ago, Norbert and Maja Capek were ministers of a Unitarian congregation far away from here in Europe, in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Most members of their congregation had left other religions to become Unitarians, and many of these people did not want to be reminded of the religions they had left behind. So Norbert and Maja Capek decided to create a new ritual for their congregation — a Flower Celebration.

One Sunday in June, they asked everyone in the congregation to bring a flower to the worship service. When people arrived on Sunday morning, all the flowers were gathered together in vases, and Norbert Capek said a short blessing over the flowers. Thus the flowers became symbols of what it means to be a human being: every flower was different, every flower was beautiful in its own way. And at the end of the worship service, everyone went up and took a flower, a different flower from the one that they had brought, took that flower home with them as a symbol of their connection to everyone else in the congregation.

We are going to have our own Flower Celebration, or Flower Communion, right here in our own congregation. In just a moment, we will all have a chance to come forward and place a flower in the vases on the table here. If you forgot to bring a flower with you this morning, or if you didn’t know that you were supposed to bring a flower, you will find extra flowers on the table over there, and you can come up, pick a flower you like, and place it in one of the vases here.

Because we value our children highly — for our children represent new beginnings and new possibilities — I am going to let the children be the first ones to bring their flowers forward. I invite the children to come forward now, and you may bring an adult along if you wish….

[Children come forward]

And now I invite everyone to come forward and place a flower in the vase here.

[All come forward]

This short blessing was written by Norbert Capek:

“Infinite Spirit of Life, we ask your blessing on these [flowers], your messengers of fellowship and love. May they remind us, amid diversities of knowledge and of gifts, to be one in desire and affection, and in devotion to your will. May they also remind us of the value of comradeship, of doing and sharing alike. May we cherish friendship as one of your most precious gifts. May we not let awareness of another’s talents discourage us, or sully our relationship, but may we realize that, whatever we can do, great or small, the efforts of all of us are needed to do your work in this world.”

Readings

Not long before he was put to death by the Nazis, Dr. Capek wrote this prayer:

The second reading comes from the book Norbert Fabian Capek: A Spiritual Journey, by Richard Henry. Henry quotes Maja Capek, Norbert’s husband, as saying:

“During all his years in America Capek never had an interest in finding out more about the Unitarian church. Why should he be interested in a church that had no missionary spirit, was not willing to give a hand to a groping soul?”

Homily — “Giving a Hand to a Groping Soul”

In June, 1914, a Baptist minister named Norbert Capek came to the United States from Bohemia and Moravia — what we now call the Czech Republic. In 1913, Austria had taken away Bohemia’s autonomy, and by April, 1914, the outspoken Capek was on a police blacklist. Nor was he any more welcome within the Baptist church; a friend told him politely that he sounded like a Unitarian, while others less politely called him a heretic. So he left his homeland with his family and came to New York.

Once in America, he served as minister to Slovak Baptist churches, though with increasing discomfort on his part. His new wife, Maja — his wife Marie had died not long after arriving in America — Maja encouraged his doubts, encouraged him to rethink his spiritual position. After the Baptists tried him for heresy twice, he finally resigned his ministry in 1919.

So there he was, without a church, without a denomination. And at the same time, he and Maja watched avidly as the new country, Czechoslovakia, was born. They wanted to go back and be part of their homeland’s liberation. Specifically, they wanted to be a part of their homeland’s spiritual liberation. What we now know as the Czech Republic had been a Protestant country until 1620 when the Hapsburg monarchy began oppressing Protestants, eventually forcing all Protestants to convert to Catholicism. After World War One, when the Hapsburg monarchy ended, Czechs began leaving the Catholic church by the thousands. Maja and Norbert Capek wanted to be in Czechoslovakia to found a liberal church for those thousands of people. But where could they get support for such a liberal church?

Ten years earlier, Norbert had approached the American Unitarian Association, asking them if they would support an earlier effort to found a liberal church in Czechoslovakia. But the American Unitarian Association had simply ignored Capek. It was as if someone came to our church, told us how they agreed with our religious values, felt in harmony with us — and in response we just ignored them and walked away. I feel ashamed at the way those Unitarians back in 1910 treated Norbert Capek. And so it was that Maja Capek later remembered, as we heard in the second reading: “During all his years in America Capek never had an interest in finding out more about the Unitarian church. Why should he be interested in a church that had no missionary spirit, was not willing to give a hand to a groping soul?”

However… by 1920 the Capek children wanted to go to Sunday school. The Capek family was living in East Orange, New Jersey then. One Sunday, the children went off to Sunday school at one church. When they came back, their father and mother quizzed them about what they had learned; but that church was teaching their children the old repressive dogmas, and Norbert said that he wished the children would go to a different Sunday school the next week.

Well, this went on for a few weeks. The children would go off to Sunday school, and their parents would quiz them when they got home. When Norbert and Maja heard the same old orthodox Christian doctrines, they asked their children if they would please try a new church the next week.

Until one Sunday, when things were different. Years later, Maja Capek recalled:

“One Sunday they came home and Capek was very much pleased with the lessons they had learned. He encouraged them to keep going there. And the, being curious about what this church had for adults, Capek and I went one Sunday. It was a small church, and we wanted to slip out unnoticed. But we could not get by the minister who stood at the entrance shaking hands and talking with everyone present. When our turn came, he said to us, ‘I believe you are new here. I have never seen you before.’ We said we were and then we confessed that we were the parents of three children in his Sunday school. And we told him how much we liked what the children were learning there.”

Do I need to tell you that it was the Unitarian church in East Orange that Maja and Norbert Capek liked so much? Even though the American Unitarian Association had ignored Norbert ten years earlier, the local Unitarian church held out a hand to him and to Maja. The minister of that church, Walter Reid Hunt, arranged to introduce the Capeks to the president of the American Unitarian Association, Samuel A. Eliot. And once Eliot actually met Norbert, he realized that this was an experienced, capable minister who deserved the full financial and moral support of the American Unitarian Association.

With that moral and financial backing, Norbert and Maja went back to Czechoslovakia. Before he left, on June 5, 1921, Norbert gave a farewell talk to his friends in the Unitarian church in East Orange New Jersey. He told them how they had restored his faith in Unitarians, after having been snubbed earlier. He told them what he liked about that Unitarian church:

“…I found not only clear heads but warm hearts, too. I liked the deep and inspiring sermons of Mr. Hunt, I enjoyed the sweet music of Mr. Decker, I loved to join in the bouyant, light-winged singing of the congregation, and especially I was enthusiastic about my [children], what they told me about their Sunday school and their teachers. It is certainly the best Sunday school I ever saw.

“But above all I liked what is so difficult to describe, what is more than a friendly smile, more than a kind word of greeting — it is that personal touch of a soul that has vision, it is the heart of religion in the heart of this congregation.”

My friends, Norbert Capek could have been describing this very congregation, First Unitarian in New Bedford. I cannot claim to preach deep and inspiring sermons, but at least they’re religiously liberal. But Randy’s sweet music, the good singing of this congregation (when you like the hymns you are asked to sing, that is), the non-dogmatic teaching of our Sunday school, the friendly smiles, the kind words of greeting — we here have that personal touch of a soul that has vision. That is the heart of religion, which is the heart of this congregation.

Not that we make a big deal out of ourselves. We are not like the hypocrites who have those television shows, the ones praying and wailing and asking for money, and putting on a grand show. That’s all you get from them, a grand show, but there’s no real religion at the heart of all that preaching and praying and weeping and wailing. We are quieter, and not so showy. But when you head out to social hour and start talking with the members and friends of this church, you realize that these are souls with vision.

For many of us, our souls have visions of an earth made fair with all her people free; that is to say, we will not rest until we have instituted heaven here on earth. For others of us, our souls have intellectual and spiritual and artistic visions that extend beyond mere transient dogmas to that which is permanent in religion. Our souls have visions of personal integrity, where we try to treat each person as having that of the divine within. Our souls have visions of a universe in which love is the most powerful force. Go out into social hour, and in those ordinary-looking people I see souls of vision. Go out into social hour, and underneath the ordinary conversations, I hear souls with depth and intensity sounding forth.

Each member and friend of this church is on his or her own spiritual journey, and most of us — maybe even all of us — take this pretty seriously. And I see individuals in this church reaching out to each other, and reaching out to visitors and newcomers, extending a hand to a groping soul. So it is that the strength of this church lies in the individual characters of each of us, its members and friends.

Let me get back to Norbert and Maja Capek before I end. By 1922, they had begun a new liberal congregation in Prague. Soon, they realized the need for new religious ceremonies, and so on June 24, 1923, Norbert Capek organized the first flower celebration. He described that first flower celebration to Samuel Eliot:

“…in my sermon I put emphasis on the individual character of each ‘member-flower,’ on our liberty as a foundation of our fellowship. Then I emphasized our common cause, our belonging together as one spiritual community…. And when we go home, each takes one flower just as it comes without making any distinction where it came from and who it represents, to confess that we accept each other as brothers and sisters without regard to race, class, or other distinction, acknowledging everybody is our friend who is a human and who wants to be good.”

So it is that in just a moment, we will come forward and take a flower from the communal vase, take a flower without regard to race, class, or any other distinction. So it is that we recognize that we are all connected to one another, all humanity is connected, and in that connection lies whatever salvation we shall find. How could it be otherwise? –for whenever we extend our hand to a groping soul, to another human being — whenever we take a hand that has been extended to us — there is hope; there is true salvation; there is the power of love.

The exchange of flowers

The poet William Blake wrote:

    To see a World in a grain of Sand
    And a heaven in a Wild Flower,
    Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
    And Eternity in an hour.

Please come forward now, and take one flower, a flower different from the one you put into the vase, without regard to where it came from, without regard to the race, class, sexual orientation, age, gender, or national origin of the person who put it there.

[All come forward to take flower.]

We have each taken a flower, a blossom unique and like no other. So we affirm that we are all brothers and sisters. This flower in your hand may fade, but every spring flowers bloom; nor will they ever stop. Everett Hoagland sent me a poem by the poet Bassho that tells us why:

    the temple bell stops
    but the sound keeps coming
    out of the flowers

— trans. Robert Bly