Introduction to the Flower Communion Service:
The Unitarian Universalist Flower Communion service we celebrate this morning was introduced in 1923 by Dr. Norbert Capek (Chah-peck), founder of the modern Unitarian movement in Czechoslovakia. On the last Sunday before the summer recess of the Unitarian church in Prague, all the children and adults participated in this colorful ritual, which gives concrete expression to the humanity-affirming principles of our liberal faith. When the Nazis took control of Prague in 1940, they found Dr. Capek’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. Capek was sent to Dachau, where he was killed the following year. This gentle man suffered a cruel death, but his message of human hope and decency lives on through his Flower Communion, which is widely celebrated among Unitarian Universalists. It is a noble ritual we are about to recreate. This service will include some of the original prayers of Dr. Capek to help us remember the principles and dreams for which he died.
Following is the sermon by Rev Susan Moran on June 4, 2017
Oh Beauty!
One of the great joys of this communion ceremony is the time it gives us to sit and stare at all of these flowers, each one a singular beauty. I spent a fair amount of my sabbatical being wowed by beauty, and when I say wowed, I mean that sudden intake of breath because you are so surprised and taken up by what you are seeing. After a few breath-taking moments like this, I began to wonder why the beauty of this world is so rarely discussed by the popular religious traditions. In my Concordance of the Hebrew bible and the New Testament, there are over 70 entries of various Hebrew and Greek forms of the word beauty. Most of them are describing people. For emphasis on natural beauty, there are the poets of course, but we should also remember that the transcendentalists urged individuals to experience nature directly. The Unitarian doxology I grew up singing urges us to let beauty, truth and good be sung. In fact, as a born and bred UU, I can attest to the value and significance that our religion places on natural beauty. As children, we planted seeds, and took walks in the woods, collecting the colorful fall leaves. From spring flowers to fall leaves, from flower communion to the dissecting of fish we found in the sand on the beach, I was taught that our earth was as worthy of adoration and worship as the people who lived in it.
With so much attention being paid to climate change, and what we can do about it, I think of something my friend, the Rev Mary Harrington used to say: If you want kids to care about ecology and environmental sustainability, bring them to beautiful places. You cannot save what you do not love.
Bring yourselves to beautiful places—for the inspiration and the peace, but also for the commitment. Our faith instills an early and abiding appreciation for the beauty of the natural world, and the wisdom to know that we are part of this natural world, interwoven in ways that cannot be unplaited. I don’t know about you, but I grew up in a home filled with stones and shells and coral, and plants and sea glass. My prized possession in college was the 6 foot long piece of driftwood that was the main attraction in our living room. We are people inspired by beauty.
There is beauty all over this world that catches us unawares and reminds us that life is worth living, even if only to see the fog rolling through the mountains and down to the lake. We must seek out beauty and love it, if for no other reason than to put in perspective what is happening in the world right now. We are living in fraught times, violent and cruel and pretty much as bad, and as good as it is ever was. But the pace of change is so rapid, we are having trouble keeping up. We will get into this as the weeks progress. The point is that 2017 is the kind of year that draws on all of our reserves, all of our resilience. When our needs are so great, beauty is an antidote and a correction to the harried pace of information being emitted every second. Beauty is life giving and soul satisfying.
Remember this exchange between Celie and Shug in Alice Walker’s, The Color Purple?
Shug says, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. What it do when it pissed off? [Celie asks] Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.” (The Color Purple, by Alice Walker)
It is our duty to notice these little surprises, whether or not you believe that God provides them. It is not only our responsibility to notice natural beauty, but to protect it, nurture it, care for it. We cannot save what we do not love.
My favorite line in Cheryl Strayed’s best selling memoir, Wild, is not one she wrote. It’s her mother’s suggestion to Cheryl, and to all of us: Put yourself in the way of beauty.
I spent a good part of the last few months putting myself in the way of beauty, and it was blissful, it was surprising, and it was healing.
When I rented the little car at the San Diego airport, I didn’t realize it was going to transport me to some of the most gorgeous places I have ever seen. I wasn’t prepared for the awe inducing sight of fields and fields of yellow mustard stretching as far as the horizon as I drove through the Los Padres Mountains northeast of Santa Barbara. I wasn’t prepared to be taken up by the sight of the bright green mountains rising on either side of the valley. The sounds and smells of the sea crashing along the jagged coast of Carmel were spectacular, as were the hulking rounded rock formations and cactus of the Joshua tree national park.
My friends and family took me to botanical gardens and lakes, long sandy beaches and hikes along riverbeds. I put myself in the way of beauty and my tired places were renewed and my broken places stitched back together.
Looking at some of the vistas, I started wondering about beauty being in the eyes of the beholder. I know it’s true when it comes to people. We all know and love people who by other folks’ standards wouldn’t be called beautiful yet we find them so. The road that leads to my community in Maine may not be pretty to you, but to me, it is nothing short of fabulous, gorgeous, spectacular. So I understand about beauty being subjective. I love a poppy and a peony but gladiolas, not so much. But are there any views or vistas that would be considered beautiful on a universal basis? When it comes to beauty, are there absolutes? Studies have been done with people and babies looking at faces and it seems that some faces have proven to be universally admired. It has something to do with the symmetry of the face—how far apart the eyes are from each other and where the nose is located in relation to the mouth.
If beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, the views that made me utter Oh!, that literally took my breath away–may have left you cold. But I find this hard to believe. Just as symmetry is appealing to the eye, there must be some views on our planet—that are breathtaking for everyone.
The one thing that may stop us from having the Ah HA moment—the kind of transcendence sought in meditation, in religious ritual, in quiet and intimate conversation with people we love, in deep silence—is familiarity.
The reason that my view out my window in Rockport doesn’t take my breath away is because I see it every day. I travelled far and wide during my sabbatical and saw sights I hadn’t seen before. Seeing beauty I wasn’t used to helped me to appreciate the beauty right here. Rockport is newly beautiful, having been away from it for a while. And your faces! There are fewer more beautiful sights. Let us put ourselves in the way of beauty. If we seek it in new places, our familiar places will once again come alive and offer us the sense of wholeness and belonging, peace and comfort that we seek and need.
June 4, 2017
Rev Susan Moran ©
CALL TO WORSHIP
The beauty of the whole
We gather to worship, our hearts alive with hope that here we will be truly seen, that here we will be welcomed into the garden of this community, where the simple and the elegant, the fluted and frilled, the shy and the dramatic complement one another and are treasured. May we know that here, each contributes in their way to the beauty of the whole. Come, let us worship together, all genders, sexualities, politics, clappers and non-clappers, progressives, pagans Christians and Jews, humanist, theist, and atheist, may we root ourselves in the values of this faith: compassion and courage, justice, beauty, and connection.