Flower Ceremony and Homily

“The earth laughs in flowers.”

—from “Hamatreya” by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), white American Transcendentalist and Unitarian Minister

Welcome—Charlotte Ferworn

Today is a day I always look forward to here at UCM – today is our Flower Ceremony service. The Flower Ceremony, as Rita so wonderfully put it in the Shining Chalice this week, gives material expression to the humanity-affirming principles of our liberal faith.

I love a good ceremony.

I really do. I love weddings, baby showers, graduations. I love solstice celebrations, coming of age rituals, birthday parties. I love welcoming in the new year. I even love funerals and celebrations of life.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been pondering that love. Initially it didn’t feel like a very Unitarian Universalist love. Where did these ceremonies come from anyways? Some of the ceremonies that I loved seemed kind of like leftovers from other religions or other places. Sure, I celebrate Christmas, but not Christmas-Christmas.

But I do love ceremonies – deeply. They’re meaningful to me. So thinking about them as leftovers felt too cheap to capture what I was experiencing. I started breaking down specifically what I loved about ceremonies and noticed something else: I don’t do very many ceremonies alone. The ceremonies I love the most always include an element of gathering.

Last Summer, in my quest to understand my own need for ceremony, I read a book called The Art of the Gathering by Priya Parker and it was my number one go to book recommendation for weeks after I read it.

In the first few pages, she contemplates why we gather at all, and she concludes “We gather to solve problems that we can’t solve on our own, we gather to celebrate, to morn, and to mark transitions. We gather to make decisions, we gather because we need one another. We gather to show strength. We gather to honor and acknowledge. We gather to build companies, and schools, and neighborhoods. We gather to welcome and we gather to say goodbye.”

We have gathered here this Sunday, as we gather here every Sunday – okay most Sundays – okay some Sundays. Today — at least — we have gathered here to give material expression to the humanity-affirming principles of our liberal faith, we have gathered here to join each other in community, to deepen our connection, and later today, we will gather to make decisions.

Beyond mission statements and branding, as a congregation we have united in our broad and inclusive outlook, and in our values, as expressed in our eight Principles. We are united in shared experience: our open worship services, spiritual education, and rites of passage; our work for social justice; our quest to include the marginalized; our expressions of love and our covenant of Right Relations.

As I have said on many Sundays, our congregation thrives thanks to the generous volunteer time given in committees and in the kitchen and the gardens and halls, and in all the other contributions made by members and friends. Let the Flower Ceremony remind us of what we bring with us to give and what receive each Sunday within this community of worship.

Embodied Meditation & Flower Blessing Adapted from a “Flower Communion Blessing” by Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern—Caitlyn Seale Charlotte Ferworn

Caitlyn: Begin by loosening your body, loosening your shoulders, loosening your mind and your heart. Let’s breathe together.

Sit or stand as you feel most comfortable. Move your eyes to a window, inviting the outdoors to be part of what we are doing together indoors, the world of nature all connected.

Feel your feet on the ground. Let your feet be the roots centering you in this space. Take a breath in as you sit up straight and rest your elbows on the arms of your chair. Or against your sides Exhale as you hold your flower in front of your chest.

Let us whisper our blessings to the flowers for the beauty and imperfection that is uniquely their own.

Charlotte: May your life bloom with learning.

Caitlyn: Work your way up the stem within your hands. Is the stem smooth or rough? Does your plant have thorns or branching leaves? Are there unopened buds or small holes hidden amongst the leaves? Maybe even some small bugs.

Let us whisper our blessings to the flowers for the beauty and imperfection that is uniquely their own.

Charlotte: May your life bloom with happiness.

Caitlyn: Hold the flower petals to your nose and take a deep inhale. Maybe it smells like dirt or the store from where you bought it. And exhale if you haven’t already. Maybe it smells like your front or back garden as you enjoy the sun. What does the flower smell like to you?

Let us whisper our blessings to the flowers for the beauty and imperfection that is uniquely their own.

Charlotte: May your life bloom with fulfilled needs.

Caitlyn: And let us bloom like a garden. Let us raise the flowers in our hands from our heart center. Inhaling as we grow together as a community and open ourselves to mystery and wonder. Exhaling as we share our seeds of wisdom, experience, happiness and love.

Bring your hands to the heart center again. Let us bloom one more time, aware of our feet on the ground. Inhaling as we offer the simplicity of ourselves, giving out of what we are, and knowing it is enough. Exhaling our whispered blessings to the flowers for the beauty and imperfection that is uniquely their own.

Charlotte: May your life bloom.

Caitlyn: Now, with these blessed flowers, please come forward and place them into the vases on the table and then return to your seats. We are here to help if you need.

Prayer & Ritual—Rita, Caitlyn, & Charlotte

Dr. Norbert Čapek, founder of the modern Unitarian movement in the former Czechoslovakia, created the flower ceremony in 1923 for his church in Prague. On the last Sunday before the summer recess of the Unitarian church, all the children and adults participated in this colorful ritual, which gives material expression to the humanity-affirming principles of our liberal faith. Today, all over this country and all over the world, Unitarians and Unitarian Universalist are celebrating the Flower Ceremony, or will in the weeks to come. This is our faith, this is our religion, binding us to each other and to something greater than ourselves.

Dr. Čapek had witnessed the devastations of World War I, the beginning of a loss of faith especially among Europeans. He was witnessing the emergence of the nationalistic party that eventually became the Nazis. He could see that the people needed more communion with each other, more community, to sustain them in good times and bad, to hold them together when social forces would seek to drive them apart and against each other. For some time, he had felt the need for a symbolic ritual that would bind people more closely together. His times were not so different from our times.

The ritual was introduced in 1940 to American Unitarians in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Dr. Čapek’s wife, Maja V. Čapek, also a minister. Due to the outbreak of World War II, Maja was unable to return to Prague. It was not until the war was over that Norbert Čapek’s death in a Nazi concentration camp was revealed.

When the Nazis took control of Prague in 1940, they found Dr. Čapek’s gospel of the inherent worth and beauty of every human person to be—as Nazi court records show—“. . . too dangerous to the Reich [for him] to be allowed to live.” Dr. Čapek was sent to Dachau, where he was killed the next year during a Nazi “medical
experiment.” This gentle man suffered a cruel death, but his message of human hope and decency lives on through his legacy of beauty and unity.

Thus, the Flower Ceremony holds both beauty and hideous death, both joy and sorrow in its enactment. Relationship is hard, but profoundly necessary. Our differences can push us apart, but they are also the source of learning, curiosity, and compassion creating a web to hold us, to bind us, one to another and each to all. It is altogether fitting that we reaffirm bonds of community through our Flower Celebration today.

Hear now these words by the Rev. Sarah Movius Schurr:

“These flowers we see before us, they come in many shades and colors.
They come in many sizes and shapes. They carry different scents. Some have no scent at all.
Yet all are created by the same miracle.
The miracle, that these blossoms grow each year out of the divine mixing of water, soil, and sunshine.

Our lives are miracles as well.
Despite our trials and disappointments, people come every year to celebrate the Flower Communion.
To be reminded that all of us have value and all have a place in the beauty of the world.
To be reminded that where you come from is not as important as the fact that you are here now.
To be reminded that all are welcome, and all may receive communion from the table of this [Fellowship].

We come to be a part of something greater than ourselves.”

Please come forward now and take a flower, one that you did not bring. Come now forward and take a flower blessed by one of these beloved companions, who breathed love and wishes into their gift, that it might be a gift to another. In receiving the gift of a flower from another, we build our garden, our connections, our web, invisible though it may be. But you can trust it, you can hold it in faith, just as you hold this flower with care.

Homily—Rita

Much as I love our Ingathering Water Ceremony, which we share at the beginning of the program year, I love the Flower Ceremony more. When we gather in September, we mix and mingle our waters, emphasizing our blending together, our sameness of source, our watery reality and being. Flower Ceremony, though equally symbolic, challenges us to acknowledge our differentiation and our willingness to be together as different. We are not all the same, and powerful efforts to suppress our differences—to erase us, to make us illegal, to kill us if necessary—these efforts seem to grow stronger every day, encouraging us to hate each other, to silence each other, to see each other as a threat that needs to be suppressed or eradicated. Flower Ceremony reminds us that we can be, we must thrive as glorious individuals and as part of a larger whole made beautiful by our presence, all needed in the making of such beauty.

Čapek faced horrors beyond what any of us can imagine—emerging from World War I and running headlong into the murderous Nazis and their co-creators of devastation and evil. And Čapek somehow remained forever hopeful. From Unitarianism—a belief in one God, one source of the holy—Čapek created a ritual emphasizing our human need to live in harmony. Together, we make life worthwhile by fighting for ideals, by moving against mayhem in our societies, with faith that community makes for a calm spirit, an ability to persist in fighting and resisting forces of division and hatred. We in this Congregation, in our own context, can be like this, too. Such is the promise of the Flower Ceremony.

If I were a flower, I would be a stargazer lily, proclaiming proudly my place in the sun. What about you? Each of our unique beingness, rich and fragrant with history, identity, and experience, all of that matters. It always matters. Our differences are good, both a sign of our earthiness and a source of rich possibility and new creativity and delight.

Even when the things we love—even when the people we love, fade and depart—we carry forward the deep connections in our memories, growing new actions and new ways of being and belonging, always changing. But the truly important, the truly meaningful, the heart of things is never lost, as long as we are here. Here, we are part of something greater than ourselves. We can bring a song of gratitude, hope still shining regardless of evil and strife. Here, you are home.

Flower Ceremony is a potent and constant reminder that love, that the power of love, grounds our faith and sustains it, even as love sustains us, its radical nature sturdy and bountiful in a time when fear is deliberately fomented as a means of control. May we live in these our fraught times with the patience of a gardener, with the patience to grow our spirits, persistent and resilient for the work of fighting injustice and staying in relationship. “Some of us feel like weeds, sometimes. Some of us carry seeds, sometimes. Some of us are prickly, sometimes. Some of us smell. And all of us are beautiful. What a bouquet of people we are! Here we are, better together, as life calls us on.

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