"The Spirituality of Gardening"
by the Rev. Krista Taves
June 3, 2007
Flower Communion
(this Flower Communion has been developed by drawing on several Flower Communions published in "The Communion Book" by Carl Seaburg)
In the years immediately following the First World War, Norbert Capek, who had once been head of all the Baptist Churches of Bohemia, discovered that he had begun to embrace theological and religious convictions which were simply too liberal for that religious community. In response, he founded the Unitarian movement in Czechoslovakia. Many of its members, like Capek, had grown up in other religious communities and found that their religious needs could not be met by the ceremonies and hymns which were part of the churches of their childhood. Dr. Capek responded by writing hymns of his own and devising new ceremonies.
One of the challenges he found in his church, and some of us may relate to this, is that some people wanted more ceremony, some less. Because many came to his church in rejection of other churches, they had difficulty agreeing on symbols and rituals. Everyone had different and competing meanings for them. And yet, there was a strong need to feel connected, to feel centered, to feel at one with one another, and the need to symbolize their connections to each other in ritual.
The Flower Communion was Norbert Capek's response to that deep need. He looked to nature as the place where we are all connected. Human symbols could so easily be used to divide, but in the world of nature, we are truly connected, truly one with the other. People were asked to bring a flower of their choice. When they arrived at church a large vase stood waiting for them, attended by two young members of the Church School. Each person was asked to place their flower in the vase. This signified that it was by their own free will that they joined with the others. The vase that contained all the flowers was the symbol of their united church fellowship. Later, all were welcomed to take a flower from the vase, a flower different than the one they brought. The significance of the flower communion is that as no two flowers are alike, so no two people are alike, yet each has a contribution to make. Together the different flowers form a beautiful bouquet. Our common bouquet would not be the same without the unique addition of each individual flower, and thus it is with our community, it would not be the same without each and every one of you. Thus this communion is a statement of our community.
Norbert Capek's communion spread throughout Unitarian churches, arriving in North America just about the time that Capek was arrested by the Nazis and executed at Dachau. His message of connection and communion was no mere nicety. When we truly feel our connections to one another, when we connect through our differences and refuse to be divided from one another, those who benefit by fear and division will be threatened. Over the years, the Flower Communion has become a yearly tradition in many Unitarian Universalist congregations in North America, Britain and around the world. By exchanging flowers, we show our willingness to walk together in our search for truth, disregarding all that might divide us. This communion of sharing is essential to a free people of a free faith.
You are all welcome to participate in this communion, whether you are here for the first time or the hundredth, whether you brought your flower or received one as you walked in the door. Simply by being here, simply by being who you, you belong here in this place in this time. Each of us has something to offer, each of us has the need to receive the generosity of the other. In this giving and receiving, we are one with all humanity.
Let us begin our communion with the responsive reading printed in your order of service:
Minister: Flowers speak to us of joy.
Congregation: My joy be with you.
Minister: Flowers give us hope when life begins anew each spring.
Congregation: May hope begin anew each spring in your heart.
Minister: Flowers stand for sharing.
Congregation: May we share together the beauty of the flowers.
Minister: Flowers send a message of sympathy.
Congregation: May you feel sympathy for others.
Minister: Flowers tells of friendship.
Congregation: May your friendships be everlasting.
Minister: Flowers speak of love.
Congregation: May you love one another.
Minister: As we have given of ourselves to those we love and to the world around, so let us place these flowers in the basket of our common humanity.
Please join me in blessing these flowers, using the words of consecration written by Norbert Capek for that first Flower Communion:
Consecration of the Flowers (Norbert Capek, 1870-1942)
Infinite Spirit of Life, we ask thy blessing on these thy messengers of fellowship and love. May they remind us that, amid diversities of knowledge and of gifts, to be one in desire and affection, and devotion to good and beauty. May they also remind us of the value of comradeship, of doing and sharing with one another. may we cherish friendship as a most precious gift. 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. May we be strengthened by the knowledge that one spirit, the spirit of love, unites us, and may we endeavor together for a more joyful life for all. Amen.
And now, let us prepare to receive the flowers that have been so generously brought into to the altar of humanity. Take, treasure, be strengthened and renewed.
Sermon
When Lena and Rudy sold their farm and retired to town, Lena announced to her children and her grandchildren that she was finished with gardening. And not one of them believed her. In the 40 years since Lena and Rudy had purchased that farm, she had transformed a dilapidated rundown yard into an expansive network of gardens, explosive in color, fragrance, variety, and usefulness. She had made this happen even as she rose every morning at 5 a.m. with her husband to milk and feed the cows, work in the fields, do extra hours at the factory when winter slowed things down, not to mention raise four children. Every year she said the same thing. "My gardens are getting too large for me to handle." And yet every spring she watched the moon, even though her literalist religion told her that it was dangerous superstition, and when its fullness was just right, she would plant her seeds.
When the children grew up and away, and the dairy was sold, and her eldest son worked their land, her gardens continued to expand and mature. Her peach, plum, pear, apple, apricot and cherry trees now produced enough to fill the freezers and pantries of her children, grandchildren, siblings, and her aging parents, not to mention provide a few bottles of wine for Rudy. And of course…. She had more flowers. People would slow down when driving past Lena and Rudy's home. Not only was the effect stunning, sometimes you could even smell the fragrance from the road.
But when they sold the farm, something in her changed. "I have worked all my life," she said. "It is time for a break." When they bought an uninspiring ranch home in town, it was deep winter and the yard was devoid of any signs of life except some dead vines on the side fence. When they moved in, it was spring, and wouldn't you know, a few meager perennials began to emerge. And it turned out those dead vines produced grapes. Rudy was happy, and Lena declared she could be content. "This is good," she said. "I will be happy with this, but no more!" And she prepared for a quiet retirement with her husband.
But that was not to be. Rudy, not unlike many farmers, was unable to adjust to retirement. He adjusted even more poorly to town life. He grew bored, then listless, then depressed, and then ill and it was good she did not have a large garden for his care took all her time. When Rudy died, less than a year after they'd moved into town, she was left alone in her ranch home and uninspiring yard.
Lena was heartbroken. For the first year after his death, she had little energy to do much besides water what already grew. She even spoke at times of moving to an apartment saying the house and yard was too empty for her. But then, bit by bit, things began to change. She had been unable to let go of her large flower pots. She found them in the garage and set them on the front porch which soon disappeared under the foliage of her signature petunias. Then other pots began to materialize from the basement and lined the sidewalk to the back door. And then she'd say, "You know….. maybe this year I'll just dig out another five or six inches for the back garden." Imagine what an additional five or six inches a year over ten years looks like - that's how long she has now been a widow - and you have a sense of what has happened. Rose bushes, strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries, grapes, and even an apricot tree that she nurtured from seed. And every spring, as she has done her whole life, she watches the moon, and when it tells her it's time, there she is in her garden, turning the soil and planting her annuals.
When Norbert Capek introduced the Flower Communion to his congregation, he had no idea that this would become a signature ritual for Unitarian Universalists around the world. He had no idea that simple flowers could evoke such a powerful sense of connection and oneness within such overwhelming diversity. He also had no idea that his vision of community and communion would be so powerful that it would threaten his life.
When the Nazis took over Czechoslovakia during World War II, Capek refused to keep silent. He spoke out against the injustices he saw, he called his parishioners to an overwhelming sense of unity and connection with everyone and everything in their world, and he called them to act on it. For his audaciousness, he was arrested several times, finally imprisoned in a concentration camp, and executed. Perhaps that is one reason why the Flower Communion is such a powerful ritual for us. Knowing that the one who created it died for what he believed gives it a unique sense of power and resonance. The Flower Communion's message is no empty poetry. It involves very real flesh and blood issues of life and death.
When we reenact that ritual, when we reach back into history and make it real in the here and now, we are doing something very powerful. We are saying no to the forces that killed him. We are saying no to those who continue to seek to divide us from each other. We are calling ourselves to respond to hate with love. We are calling ourselves to respond to violence with peace. We are calling ourselves to respond to the big and small differences between us with compassion, patience, love, and a hunger to understand. And when we do this, we call ourselves to the ongoing cycle of creation where death is transformed into life. And just as Lena gradually built her gardens after Rudy died, when we bring back to life the Flower Communion, it is as if we stand before a garden saying, "You know ... maybe five or six inches more…."
If we really embody this calling into our lives, this world would change. If we embodied compassion, patience, love and understanding into everything we did, this world would have no choice but to change. And just as the poetry of the Flower Communion, this is no meaningless platitude. When I say that the world would change if we embodied love, compassion, patience and peace, I'm not talking about a mythical diamond studded and tie dyed paradise where everyone is happy and blissful. That would be a shallow promise. The purpose of life is not happiness. This may sound strange, given that we live in a country where the pursuit of happiness stands in the preamble to the constitution. This may sound doubly strange in a society that tells us unceasingly that we must do everything we can to get it, even if it means maxing out credit cards and walking over our values and those we love. The pursuit of happiness, if that is all we pursue, leads us astray. It's a pretty small way to live. The true purpose of life is meaningfulness. And while we are bound to experience happiness in the midst of a meaningful life, happiness in and of itself is not the point. Making a difference is.
Even ten years after Rudy's death, Lena still grieves him. Her house still feels empty. She still bakes a cake on his birthday and invites the family for a celebration. She struggles with depression and fierce loneliness and some days she is difficult to be with. And yet when she gardens, there is a purpose. She is involved in that meaningful act of creation, where what was empty becomes filled. And what that gives her is not necessarily happiness, but it is a sense of contentedness and meaning, even if momentary. And in that moment, she is healed.
Capek's Flower Communion calls us to the same act of creation. If we really embody the calling to respond to violence with peace, we are creating life. If we truly respond to the differences between us with compassion, patience, understanding and love, we become part of a larger universal cycle of creation where death is transformed into life. Those pieces of us that have died can come to life. Those parts of our lives that have become stained with death and decay will come to life, maybe not always the way we want them to, and they may not be restored to exactly the way they were before they died. This calling is not to some utopia where everyone has a happily ever after, but it is a call to a much richer, meaningful and bittersweet life. If we respond to hate with love, those parts of our lives that are stained with death and decay will have the opportunity to heal and find new life imbued with meaning and purpose. When we are healed, we are reborn and we become agents of rebirth in a world stained with its own death and decay. To use more traditional language, when we are filled with the spirit of love, we become reconciled with God and are ready to do the meaningful work of building the kingdom of heaven on earth, in our hearts, in our families, and with the larger world. We will be able to take that spade in hand and take back the garden and tend it anew.
This is what Norbert Capek sought to do. In a country that was painfully divided by differences, that lived in fear of its neighbors and was wrought with internal political, cultural, ethnic and social tension, where it had become more and more difficult for people to hear each other, he searched in vain for some way to bring before his congregation another way – to show the truth of how deeply interconnected they were and how very much they needed one another and how very special their differences were. Everything he tried had failed. Every symbol he used pleased some and angered others. And then, in absolute frustration, he saw the flowers in the field and thought to himself, who could possibly argue with a flower. The next Sunday, person after person brought their flower and took another one home, and even if the peace lasted only in that moment, they were changed. They had taken back some of the garden.
That is the kind of power we have. When we will ourselves to heal, and when we will ourselves to love, when we will ourselves to reconcile with that deep substrata of the sacred that flows in each of us, we become agents of change and healing, and that is why I feel so passionately about the power of this faith to change the world and to heal the many who are in search of whatever it is that they so keenly feel the lack of in this precious life. This is why so many of us have become increasingly hungry to spread our message of love and compassion and freedom. For just as in Capek's day, we know we are in times when darkness beckons and we are tempted over and over again into the seductive grasp of division and distrust. I want us to do more than resist that division and distrust. Let us open ourselves to that deeper healing, that truer transformation, that garden that beckons to each of us.
Last winter, Lena put her name on a waiting list for an apartment in a seniors' residence. She is 84 years old and getting tired. But this spring, she watched the moon once again, and when it was time, she asked her daughter to take her to the nursery where she bought six cedars to plant along the only remaining ungardened side of her backyard.
When you take your flower home today, treasure it, for it will soon die, but hold tight in your heart what that flower calls you to. And may you too, when the moon is right, find yourself in that garden tilling the soil for another season.
Amen and blessed be.
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Send Questions or Comments to Rev. Taves: Minister@EmersonUUChapel.org
Updated: 06/25/07