WORSHIP SERVICE: "The Flower Communion"

Rev. Paul Beedle, with worship associate Betty Johnson

June 7, 2009

* listing of objects on the altar is at the bottom of this page

Lighting the Chalice:

Children of the earth and sky, we are nurtured, sustained, given warmth and light from above and below. Supported by earth's strong, firm crust, we build our homes, till the fields, plant our gardens and orchards. When we turn from self and seek to be aware, we will find holy light in human faces, in blossom, birdsong, and sky. Then earth is truly our home, and we are one with all earth's creatures, parents of earth's children yet to be. (Alice Berry)

Unison Affirmation:

Hymn #78 "Color and Fragrance"

1 Color and fragrance, magical rhythm, sweet changing music will change us with them: life within life, inner light gently glowing, surely you seem to be God's vision growing.

2 O starry heavens, worlds of all splendor, suns without number, new life engender: wheel in a wheel with the light brightly glowing, moving in harmony, God's vision growing.

3 Hand full of pebbles, high mountain passes, depths of the ocean, dew on the grasses: great theings and small, with the light gently glowing, word of the wordless song, God's vision growing.

4 Delicate beings, lacewing and sparrow in field and forest, clover and yarrow: life greeting life with the light brightly glowing, none are too small to be God's vision growing.

5 In human eyes burns the soul of living, illumines altars of loving giving: greeting, we meet, seeing light brightly glowing, share in a greater life, God's vision growing.

6 Shaper of all things, to us you've given our chance to keep here on earth a heaven. Moving in harmony, light gently glowing, may we be, gratefully, God's vision growing.

Conversation with Children & Youth: The Meaning of the Flower Communion (extemporaneous)

Meditation

Sung meditation: "Come and Fill Our Hearts"

Silence

Spoken meditation: (words of Norbert Capek)

In the depths of my soul – there where lies the source of strength – where the divine and the human meet – there, quiet your mind, quiet, quiet. Outside let lightning reign, horrible darkness frighten the world. But from the depths of your own soul, from that silence will rise again God's flower. Return to your self, rest in your self, live in the depths of your soul where the divine and the human meet. Tune your heart to the eternal and in the depths of your own soul, your panting quiets down. Where the divine and the human meet, there is your refuge.

Amen.

Anthem: "You'll Never Walk Alone" (Rogers & Hammerstein)

Reflection:

Norbert Capek was a religious liberal whose personal journey led him from a Catholic upbringing to an embrace of the Baptist faith at the age of 18, and a ministry as “a [Baptist] missionary pastor [who] traveled through Hungary for twenty years.” (1) This was before the First World War, and he was a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a Catholic regime that struggled toward religious tolerance during the 19^th century, and at times swung toward reaction and oppression. It took patience, perseverance and courage to go about that Empire planting Baptist churches!

Over the course of his career, he discovered the depth of his own religious liberalism. To him, faith was “inner harmony, [which is] the precondition of strong character, good health, joyful moods, and victorious, creative life.” He saw religious education as “an endeavor to awaken the inner forces of the child and teach him how to organize, harmonize and adapt them to the ever-changing influences which come to him from outside.” His religious education vision had five pillars: to develop the ability to have faith and confidence, the ability to hope, the feeling of worship, the practice of charity or selfless love, and a habit of conscientiousness. These, he thought, were the characteristics of a truly religious person. (2)

To him, free religion sought political freedom. As the First World War broke out in 1914, Capek accepted a call to serve a Baptist church in New York and came to the United States. Within six months he was tried for heresy there, exonerated, and then accepted a call to serve a Baptist congregation in New Jersey, (3) where he became President of the Czechoslovak Alliance of New Jersey. One example of his activity during the World War I is a letter to the editor of the New York Times, written in 1918. He was responding to an editorial that proposed dividing the Austro-Hungarian Empire and forming a Hungarian-Slavic Union from the non-German parts of it. He pointed out that Hungarians were in fact a minority in the Kingdom of Hungary, and that “this war was prepared and declared by the German-Hungarian ruling and armed minority against the expressed will of the suppressed and unarmed Slavic majority... The Hungarians,” he wrote, “do not believe in the equality of all men; they believe in superior or ruling races, and races that are inferior or subject ones. ... And because they are weaker than the Czechoslovaks they unite with the Germans, and because they are inferior they suppress Slovak schools in order to keep people who by nature are superior, artificially inferior. ... As soon as the [Hungarians] renounce their will to oppress other people, ... then can [they] be eligible to a union which will be formed with or without them between free and democratic nations.” (4) Not that he had any strong feelings!

He wrote this letter just five years before the first Flower Communion at the Unitarian Church in Prague, held to celebrate the first anniversary of the founding of that church, and conceived in the spirit of possibility and creativity that is so vivid in a new church. His passionate involvement in the Czechoslovak freedom movement is counterpoint to the message of harmony and sharing that his flower communion was meant to express. Political freedom in Europe was caught in the push-pull between many awakenings of national feeling and the principle of self-determination of peoples. A “people” was not necessarily the same thing as a “nation” in the rhetoric of that time, nor was either of these the same thing as a “state.” There were contradictions in the thinking of freedom activists, and Capek was no exception. He cites Hungarian mistreatment of the Slovaks in his letter to the Times, and at the same time he writes of "the Czechoslovaks." That's because some in the freedom movement to which he belonged were influenced by an ideology that came to be called Czechoslovakism, which promoted the idea that the Czechs and Slovaks were one people. But that was not so. And this false idea of one Czechoslovak people got mixed up with the goal of a political union – a single state – of Czechs and Slovaks. Czechoslovakism was a Czech mindset that took little account of Slovak needs, interests or aspirations. This mindset defined the Czechoslovak state that was created after the war. In the years he was building his church in Prague, Slovaks in Czechoslovakia discovered they had exchanged their Hungarian oppressors for Czech ones. One could see that this business of harmony and sharing required actually getting to know others at a deeper level – to know their sense of themselves, their needs, interests and aspirations.

So how did this missionary Baptist pastor become founder of the Unitarian Church in Prague? When he was living in New Jersey, two of his eleven children went with some friends to church school at the Unitarian congregation in Orange, New Jersey. One Sunday Capek and his wife went to visit that church, and realized they had found a religious home that expressed their liberal faith. Capek was then 49 years old. His minister introduced him to denominational leaders, and with the assistance of the American Unitarian Association he returned to Europe, to the new republic of Czechoslovakia, to build a Unitarian movement there. He succeeded in fostering Unitarian congregations throughout the country. The Prague Church became the largest Unitarian congregation in the world, with a membership of over 3000.

Capek was arrested during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia – his crime was listening to a radio broadcast from London. While he was in jail, the Nazi official who ruled Prague was assassinated, and there followed a violent crackdown on all activity the Nazis saw as suspect or subversive. Because of this, Capek ended up in the Dachau concentration camp and died in the gas chamber. His wife had returned to the United States, and traveled to Unitarian congregations seeking support for the Czech Unitarians and introducing the flower communion to America.

His biographer, Richard Henry, described Capek's faith as “a sun-drenched, pre-Holocaust faith ... that sustained thousands ... during the darkness of Nazi occupation [and] enabled him to endure [it] with an equanimity and heroism confirmed by survivors of ... Dachau who knew him there.”(5) When we celebrate the flower communion, we affirm not only the surface beauty of diversity and harmony, but the deep roots of courage, faith and confidence, the ability to hope, the feeling of worship, the practice of charity or selfless love, and habit of conscientiousness that characterize liberal faith.

NOTES:

(1) Norbert Capek, letter to the editor of the New York Times: “Magyar and Czech Can Never Unite” (August 25, 1918).

(2) Richard Henry, “Norbert Capek,” in the online Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography. (http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/)

(3) Richard Henry, Norbert Fabian Capek: A Spiritual Journey (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1999).

(4) Norbert Capek, letter to the editor of the New York Times: “Magyar and Czech Can Never Unite” (August 25, 1918).

(5) Richard Henry, “Norbert Capek,” in the online Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography. (http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/)

The Flower Communion

And so let us now celebrate the flower communion. After consecrating the flowers, I'll invite you to come forward by the left-hand aisle, take a flower you did not bring, and return by the right-hand aisle, so that we move in a single, circular flow and aren't bumping into one another. And if walking is difficult for you, feel free to remain where you are and ask your neighbor to bring you back a flower. Let us celebrate the flower communion together, beginning with Norbert Capek's words of consecration:

Infinite Spirit of Life, we ask your blessing on these flowers, your messengers of friendship and love.

May they remind us, amid diversities of knowledge and gifts, to be one in desire and affection and devotion to good and to beauty.

May they also remind us of comradeship, of doing and sharing alike.

May we cherish friendship as a most precious gift.

May we realize that whatever we 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.

EXCHANGE OF FLOWERS

CLOSING OF RITUAL: Responsive Reading #534 (Gloria! by Barbara Pescan)

Gloria / The tenacity of Earth and its creatures.

Kyrie eleison / These children who will go on to save what we cannot.

Baruch ata Adonai / The ordinary tenacity of plans and of people.

Om / The center of the universe which is everywhere, not the least place in the human heart.

Alleluia / Love that survives anger, and winter, and despair, and sorrow, and even death.

Shalom / Love that persists.

Nam myo-ho renge kyo / Calm that is the seed in the dark.

Amen / For endings that are beginnings, for beginnings that are endings.

Alleluia / For the circle, the spiral, the web, the egg, the orbit, the center, the seed, the flower, the fruit, the opening, the death, the release, the seed.

Amen / We are going on.

Amen / It is going on.

Amen / Blessed be.

Stewardship & Outreach Offerings (words of Norbert Capek)

Let us renew our resolution—sincerely to be real brothers and sisters

regardless of any kind of bar which estranges [one from another].

In this holy resolution may we be strengthened,

knowing that we are [all one] family,

that one spirit, the spirit of love,

unites us, and [may we] endeavor for a more perfect and more joyful life.

Hymn “The Flame of Faith” (words & music by Paul Beedle)

1 The flame of faith burns in my soul, my being hungers to be whole, and all the hungers of the world break in upon my soul's restlessness. (CHORUS)

2 The flame of faith burns in my mind, its giuding voice hints and reminds, and all the voices of the world break in upon my mind's openness. (CHORUS)

3 The flame of faith burns in my heart, ,though passions spin my soul apart, and all the passions of the world break in upon my heart's hopefulness. (CHORUS)

4 The flame of faith burns in my life, recalling truth and blessing strife, and all the callings of the world break in upon my life's worthiness. (CHORUS)

CHORUS: O let the warmth of love give comfort, and let the light of vision shine! May the oil of courage heal us, and may we be the cup divine!

Extinguishing the Chalice

By exchanging flowers, we show our willingness to walk together in our search for truth, disregarding all that might divide us. Each person takes home a flower brought by someone else – thus symbolizing our shared celebration in community. This communion of sharing is essential to a free people of a free religion. (Reginald Zottoli)

* The altar for Flower Communion: Celebrating the diversity of Thoreau's ministries