A look back at the church year just completed. Specific thanks is appropriate for the experiences of growth and learning and all the people who contributed to our success. General thanks is appropriate, as always, for all that is our lives.
We have had quite a year together. Thank you for everything.
Some experiences were joyful, full of celebration and pride. Other experiences were sorrowful, or disappointing, or uncomfortable. That is the life of any community. And I want to say thank you for everything.
I say thank you for everything because every experience, all kinds of experience, are what makes a community and what makes belonging to a community meaningful
Without the rough edges there would be no work to do, and no learning and growth could take place. If we were already perfect, then no transformation would be necessary, and transformation is the work of the church.
Of course, we prefer the happy, easy, smooth moments. But there is life, too, in the difficult times. Passing through the good times, makes it easy to stay in community. Staying on through the hard times, deepens our understanding and intimacy, and makes our friendships even more valuable.
Looking back at our year together as a collection of individual moments, is like looking at the bouquet we make together of our separate flowers.
Each moment is unique
Each moment is special in its own way.
Each flower has its own character
All together they make a thing of beauty.
The flower communion ritual was invented by the Unitarian minister Norbert Capek. He was born in 1870 in what today is the Czech Republic.
He was raised Catholic and was ordained a Baptist minister at the age of 18, but as he matured his thoughts continued to move toward more liberal religious ideas.
In 1914, at the age of 44, his political and anti-clerical views landed him in trouble with the German government and Catholic church and he fled to the United States.
He became the minister of a Baptist church in Manhattan, and then in Newark, New Jersey. But his liberal religious views were a poor fit with the Baptist church and he left the church and the Baptist faith. He and his wife became Unitarians. They joined the First Unitarian Church of Essex County, in New Jersey, in 1921.
Having spent the war years in the United States, Capek and his wife and one of their daughters and her husband now decided to return to their newly independent homeland of Czechoslovakia, and to take their Unitarian faith with them.
In Prague, in 1921, the Capek family founded a community called the Liberal Religious Fellowship and purchased a building for their church.
Unitarianism had not been present in Czechoslovakia prior to 1921. The community Capek and his wife gathered were mostly ex-Catholics, agnostics, and atheists, who had fallen away from their religion, unconnected to the supernaturalism of traditional Christianity, and discouraged in humanity by the evidence of the war they had recently suffered through.
Still, though, they were looking for something to give them hope, and something to draw them together as a community.
A traditional communion service, focused on connecting with a divine spirit, wouldn’t do. Capek wanted a ritual that would have the spiritual power of communion, but that would connect his community with each other, and without any supernaturalism. The story goes that in the post-war privations of the society, Capek was walking along a road and saw a wildflower and realized that beauty appears always, and sometimes in the simplest thing.
For the worship service on June 4, 1923, the day after his 53rd birthday, Capek asked every member of his congregation to bring a single flower with them to church.
As people arrived at church they each added their flower to a single vase and created an enormous bouquet. Capek blessed the flowers. Each flower, in its individual beauty, represents the beauty of each individual members of the congregation. The bouquet, all together, represents the beauty of the congregation.
At the close of the worship service, Capek invited each person to take home a single flower from the bouquet, a different flower than the one they brought, but without regard as to whose flower they were choosing, showing that in the community of the church we are all connected as equals.
In a moment I’ll ask you to come forward and participate in that part of the ritual.
Norbert Capek served as the minister of the Prague Unitarian church for twenty years. His wife, Maja Capek was also ordained a Unitarian minister in 1926. By 1941 the Prague church had become the largest Unitarian congregation in the world, with three thousand two hundred members.
Norbert Capek was invited to come to the United States as the Nazi’s began to assume control, but he declined. Maja Capek did come to the U.S. working to raise money for relief efforts. She served as the minister of the Unitarian Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts from 1940 to 1943.
Norbert, along with his daughter, was arrested by the gestapo in March, 1941. He was taken to the Dachau Concentration Camp and eventually from there to Hartheim Castle near Linz, Austria, where he died of poison gas on October 12, 1942.
“We sing of the freedoms which martyrs and heroes
have won by their labor, their sorrow, their pain;
the oppressed befriending, our ampler hopes defending,
their death becomes a triumph, they died not in vain.”
On this, the 100th Anniversary of the founding of the Flower Communion Ritual, we honor and celebrate the life of Norbert Capek.
We honor his commitment to free religious thought.
We honor his love of community.
We honor his creativity in the worship arts
We honor his skill in building institutions.
We honor his courage in staying true to his principles.
We honor his spiritual vision that saw the precious worth of every individual in all our glorious diversity, and how each one’s gift of every kind are required to build and maintain community.
And that how, community, once created, presents its own kind of beauty and precious worth, more even, than the sum of the individuals which are its members.
And how, having once joined ourselves in community, that community power and presence then finds its place within us, so that even when we step away from our community, we take a piece of its strength with us.
I invite you now to come forward and select a flower and then holding your flower return to your seat.