THE FLOWER COMMUNION: A Story of Our
Faith
June 3, 2012
SUNFLOWER SUTRA (excerpted)
I walked on the banks of the tincan
banana dock and
sat down under the huge shade of a Southern
Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a
busted rusty iron
pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,
surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored
the red sky, sun
sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves
rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there
was a dead gray
shadow against the sky, big as a
man, sitting
dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust—
….Poor dead flower? when did you
forget you were a
flower? when did you look at your skin and
decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
--We're not our skin of grime, we're
not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening
sitdown vision.
Alan Ginsburg.
This day, June 3, in 1870, Norbet
Capek was born in Bohemia. Capek is known to Unitarians world-wide as the one
who introduced the flower communion to us and the composer of over 90 hymns, as
well as the founder of the Unitarian movement in Czechoslovakia, a movement the
numbered over 8,000 members in his day!
How did he do it? Through LOVE &
TRUTH.
After all
these years of leading one of our own Unitarian rituals, the Flower Communion,
I discovered I’ve been doing it wrong.
We’ve been doing it wrong, and I’m guessing 99.9 % of UU congregations
have been too.
Actually, it
was in about 2000 that a letter, written by Norbert Capek’s widow, was
circulated among UU clergy, a letter that stressed the importance of making the
Flower Communion replace Easter traditions.
"Delighted
to hear that there are intentions of releasing a pamphlet on the Flower
Communion. While I do not care what and how the individual churches perform
this service, as I told before, I was a bit dismayed recently over the fact
that some churches (the San Francisco one included) use it as a substitute for
Easter or any other myth. Norbert never meant it to be this nor was it ever and
is not to this day held at Easter. Čapek's only motivation was to stress and
bring about BROTHERHOOD. As a symbol he used flowers because in the name of a
floweror flowers no wars were waged as was the case with the Cross or the
Chalice. The flowers are used as symbols of the gifts which each person can
make to the church and through the church to other persons. Because of the
large variety each person is able to express his individuality. The exchange of
flowers means that I shall walk, without reservation, with anyone - regardless
of his social status, or his former religious affiliation, as long as he is
ready and willing to go along in search of truth and service to man."
When I heard
about this letter, I encouraged this church to move our Flower Communion to the
early weeks of summer ~~ even though our church does not disband for the
summer, we do take a breath from the relentless pace of church year activity~~
and the church agreed!
But I didn’t
read far enough. Capek, who introduced the Flower Communion in 1923, in his
congregation in Prague, was the founder and promulgator of the Unitarian Church
in what was called Bohemia when he was born, then Czechoslovakia, now Czech
Republic. He wanted the ex-Catholics and former Jews in his congregation to
have a ritual which would give them everything ritual does: symbolism, hope, a
larger purpose, but would not remind them too closely of those former rituals,
like bread and wine, with which they had grown uncomfortable.
But Capek
also encouraged the members of the congregation to choose any flower as they
left, "just as it comes without making any distinction where it came from
and whom it represents, to confess that we accept each other as brothers and
sisters without regard to class, race, or other distinction, acknowledging
everybody as our friend who is human and wants
to be good."
This is a
Humanist ritual.
Today I
suggest we shift our ritual a bit to incorporate that part, perhaps the most
important part of all. What I see too often is that we do the first part well:
celebrating the bouquet of diversity, but we are way too picky and
discriminating about which “flowers” we take home, eschewing those who aren’t
like us: poor people, working class people, uneducated (but not necessarily
unintelligent) people, Hillbilles, rednecks, the gypsies among us, Republicans.
It is the
great challenge of this faith to practice, over and over, the flower communion
in our hearts and minds. To challenge ourselves to accept and walk beside all
of our fellow humans, with one small exception.
·
We don’t
have to accept without question Nazis, KKK members, God Hates Fags sign
holders, or any stripe of people who abuse, or perpetrate injustice upon the
weak and innocent, especially children. As
Capek even said,
"...as
long as he is ready and willing to go along in search of truth and service to
man
·
who
is human and wants to be good..."
It is
written that Capek’s faith was a “sun-drenched, pre-Holocaust faith…” There is
evidence that even when he was arrested after preaching one Sunday in Prague in
spite of Nazis standing in the back of his congregation, then tried and sent to
Dachau as an invalid age 72, he led church services among his fellow victims,
sand and composed hymns, and kept alive some vestige of faith and hope even in
that most evil and despicable of environments.
What he said
that Sunday in 1942 was this:
We all know that this is the worst
winter in our history and the ground is terribly frozen. We also know that the
Spring must come, and the seeds now buried will sprout and bloom again.
The Nazis
saw through the symbolism … it was not winter, after all, but early Spring….
And the next morning at 6AM he was arrested at his home. His death was a
horrible one in the gas chambers and he was, furthermore, a victim of the
dreadful medical experiments performed at Dachau.
It is said
by liberal Christians that you cannot have the resurrection without the
crucifixion. What that means is that a faith not tempered and earned by
devotion in spite of hardships is no true faith. It is no more significant than
a belief in fairies or a Pollyanna –ish optimism that denies the very real
presence of evil and violence and despair. You can’t have LOVE without TRUTH.
A shallow
faith is Mac Donald’s compared with the slow food meal of organic produced
cultivated locally. It is a bouquet of plastic flowers or roses grown on
mega-farms in Columbia by workers paid $39 a month, compared with locally grown
seasonal wildflowers. It has no roots and it will not make any difference in
the world or in your own soul.
Our movement
(NOT our faith) has two major weaknesses. It is, like much liberal thought, too
complacent and somewhat too optimistic. It does not call evil when it sees it. It
practices a sham of love, a love without discernment or truth.
At the same
time, liberal movements are too insular. We can be self-congratulatory and and
elitist, and in our isolation, fail to see our true interconnectedness. That’s
truth without love.
symbol of the Prague church
Subscribing
to no theological system, Norbert Capek celebrated the "hidden cry for
harmony with the Infinite" in every soul. "Every person," he
wrote, "is an embodiment of God and in every one of us God struggles for
higher expression." "Religion," he said, "can never die
because human beings. . . cannot but be religious regardless of the form of [their]
religion." Religion should, before all else, provide that "inner
harmony which is the precondition of strong character, good health, joyful
moods and victorious, creative life."
"It is
my ideal," he wrote, "that unitarian religion in our country should
mean a higher culture. . . new attitudes toward life and practically a new
race. . . . In short, unitarian religion should mean the next advanced cultural
level of a certain people." The church's task, he felt,"must be to
place truth above any tradition, spirit above any scripture, freedom above
authority, and progress above all reaction."
Capek
himself points to both of these challenges we face, as a congregation, as a
movement, as liberal people in an increasingly fear-driven world.
The first: to continue to celebrate all that IS good in humanity and the world.
That’s LOVE.
The second: to face and speak the truth, fearlessly, freely, and sometimes
forcibly. That’s TRUTH.
The flower that symbolized the
Unitarian Church in Prague was the sunflower. Of course, Capek did not survive
to read Ginsburg’s poem, The Sunflower
Sutra, written in 1955. But especially given what we must call a post-Holocaust, post-September 11th,
faith, I think he might have approved. For Ginsburg names in his poem,
literally and symbolically, all of the things that dirty the sunflower: greed,
exploitation, inhumanity, waste and destruction. Still he sees with delight
that the sunflower stood its ground through all of these. A kind of victory.
The motto of the church was Veritas Vincit. Truth is victorious. It
was changed to Latin from Czech to fool the Nazis, but it has been the deep
core of our religion since Servetus was burned at the stake, and even today
when we stand for immigrants, against bullying, when this church hosts a WomanPriest
ordination or the first Gay Pride prom, and whenever we act with clarity and
love TEMPERED with TRUTH.
This is our challenge.. may we meet
it, individually and collectively, with joy and hope.
