ON COMMUNION

James Ishmael Ford
15 June 2003

I understand when Dr Norbert Capek first introduced the flower communion service at the Prague Unitarian congregation on the 4th of June, 1923 he called it a "Flower Festival Service." Both Capek and the congregation he served were in fact strongly in the humanist camp of our liberal religious tradition, and were generally uncomfortable with western spiritual language. I’ve even been told by one friend who likes to know about such matters that Capek actively disliked the term "communion" being used for the flower service.

Of course today some eighty years later what has become one of the signal and certainly uniquely Unitarian Universalist religious rituals is always called the flower communion. I want to reflect on that word communion. Today I want to reflect a little on the idea of communion, on why that word has insinuated itself into a central celebration of our spiritual tradition, apparently as easily and naturally as a bud opening and flowering.

In fact communion stands for many things. The word includes a range of meanings from a Christian denomination, such as the Anglican Communion, to intimate relationships such as "the communion of saints," to an ancient ritualized sacred meal, the "holy communion." But I think it is worth noting how in Webster’s dictionary the first definition, preceding all those various religious uses defines communion as "the act of sharing; community; participation." Here we see how communion is one of those big words, nuanced and sometimes contradictory.

So, perhaps of course, communion doesn’t fit comfortably into definitional boxes. It’s just too big a term to allow its use to be narrowly prescribed by anyone. So, poor Dr Capek found he had possibly unconsciously reincorporated a form of an ancient rite, some kind of communion ceremony into our modern and so up to date spiritual community.

But, actually western spiritual traditionalists haven’t able to contain communion any better than we’ve been able to exclude it. As recently as this past April the pope issued an encyclical, and not the first of its sort, denouncing the habit among many Catholics of sharing communion with non-Catholics, as well as often using other symbolic elements than bread and wine for these "illicit" communion celebrations.

It is my thesis that communion is a natural human activity. That it is a symbolic celebration of something deeply true about who we are. Rites of communion in all their many different guises all share a power and a blessedness that reveals the truth of who we are. And that’s what we’re about today, noticing within a small ritual act something at the very core of our being, of what we are and what we can be.

A rather tall order, perhaps, for the last formal service of our congregational church year. But, we are the spiritual community that prides itself as the old joke goes of being the only denomination God trusts out of sight for an entire season. The majority of us probably won’t be back in this building again until September. So I think it appropriate we spend just a little time considering a central tenant of the human condition: the mysterious reality of who we are and how we relate to one another.

Let’s think a little about what it is that we might carry away into the Summer and which might sustain us, and which I hope, will draw us back again as the temperature begins to turn once again and the first hints of winter begin to birth in the backs of our minds.

I suggest the story of Norbert Capek, and really of his wife Maja, often the forgotten co-creator of the flower communion, informs the celebration we observe in some very telling ways. Richard Gilbert, our recently retired minister in Rochester, New York, conveys some of the central themes of this story in his telling of it, and I’m using his historical sermon as the bases for my telling.

"Maja Veronica Oktavec was born in Bohemia in 1888 and attended Catholic schools there. Her intellectual curiosity quickly led her to question the theology she was taught. In 1908 her family moved to New York where she studied at Columbia. Later she became head librarian in the Czech section of the (New York) Public Library." There she met Norbert Capek who was studying at City College.

Norbert had been born in 1870 in Czechoslovakia. After being forced out of the Baptist ministry for his extreme liberal views he had become a journalist. His writings about government corruption led to some close brushes with the established authority and he only narrowly avoided imprisonment by fleeing to America.

While Norbert was familiar with Unitarianism as an abstract theological position, and in fact it was one of the reasons he’d been forced from the Baptist ministry, it was Maja who introduced him to our living North American Unitarianism. Not much later he was received into our denomination as a minister. The couple married and in 1921 they returned to Prague, where with the backing of the American Unitarian Association they founded an independent liberal religious congregation. Thanks to their hard work, there soon were congregations in four other Czech cities, as well.

As I’ve mentioned already, that first Flower Festival Service was held in 1923. Maja was always a partner in this work and in 1926 was herself formally ordained a Unitarian minister. In 1940 she came to the US to lecture and raise money for the fledgling Czech Unitarian network. And it was in the spring of that year she introduced our first North American celebration of the flower communion, in fact just down the road from us at the First Unitarian Universalist parish in Cambridge.

The war broke out and Maja was unable to return home. During that time she held ministerial positions at several parishes here in New England. With the Nazi invasion a curtain of silence settled over her homeland, and she wouldn’t know what happened there until the war’s end.

In fact in Prague things went from bad to worst. As you might imagine the Nazis did not think highly of our Unitarian principles, and eventually the Gestapo arrested Norbert as well as one of their daughters. Charged with treason he was sent to Dachau and a year later Norbert Capek was executed for the crimes of speaking on behalf of human dignity and against human oppression.

Richard Gilbert writes how "before his death, Dr Capek’s courage in the face of torture and starvation was a source of inspiration to his fellow prisoners. While in the camp he led (his companions) in worship, using the Flower Communion ceremony as the ritual. Each prisoner brought what flowers they could find in the camp to a service. At the end they took with them a different flower than the one they brought, to symbolize their sense of community… After the war, survivors testified that the Unitarian minister could not have been sent to a place where he was more needed."

The first time I read that line, where Richard Gilbert, another servant of our spiritual way, someone who has himself stood for justice in our nation and as a witness before power, stopped me cold. I think about myself, I think about so many of us here, and how in small and great ways we find ourselves in the strangest places. And how in some mysterious way each of us might find ourselves in that situation, where we "could not have been sent to a place where (one of us) was more needed."

It happens. It happens all the time. Many of us in this room are parents. Most of us in this room have spouses or lovers. All of us in this room find ourselves meeting with and dealing with and living with people in all sorts of circumstances. What values are we bringing to those encounters? What is it about what we do and say in this gathering that makes us the right person to be in those circumstances?

I suggest as valuable as it is, it isn’t our penchant for good argument. It isn’t our inclination to be better educated than most. I suggest it, that chance of our being in the right place at the right time, of being able to deal with human need small or great, conveying love and attention to a child or speaking out against injustice, has to do with something else. It has to do, I believe, with our witnessing with our bodies as much as our words "the act of sharing; community; participation" as our core spiritual values.

I think we, you and I in this room, all of our companions on the great spiritual way of reason and tolerance and freedom are about communion, in its truest and most powerful sense. Through our disciplines of reason and tolerance and freedom, through our free and responsible search for truth, we’ve found ourselves discovering something at the core of our human condition.

I speak of it regularly. It has to do with those twin truths, which like communion itself, might seem internally contradictory, but in reality are nuanced and lively, and dynamic. We are unique, each of us like a flower that appears, never to be repeated. And, we are one, completely created out of each other, flesh of our flesh, heart of our heart. And this is something so powerful and strange and mysterious that we might be shocked, we might not even be able to quite wrap our minds around it and what it means. But, we return constantly, to think, to reflect, to consider what it does mean.

So, as some here know, I belong to a sermon writing support group. And yes, I’m aware, it doesn’t seem to be doing me all that much good. But, I try. As do we all. Anyway there I was just a week ago with my friends, UU ministers all. And we were discussing some spiritual poetry and its use in sermons. I read one of my favorites, by the UU minister Lynn Ungar, from her small volume Blessing the Bread. I’ve read it here before. I think it worth, as I did for the colleagues, reading here.

"Sunday morning at the marina/Barely enough wind to keep the kites aloft/and so we drifted to the ground/to nibble bagels, chocolate,/giant loose-skinned oranges,/random poetry, blades of grass/Sacraments and indulgences/for the first of Spring.

"And in the moment before sleep/my breast against your arm/sang Gloria/ and the soles of my feet/cried Sanctus to the sun/Placing the last chocolate/in your mouth I whispered/"This is my body, take and eat"/and we melted, very slowly,/on the earth’s tongue."

My, my friends said. A beautiful poem, they said. Perhaps a little too erotic for a sermon poem, they said. But, that’s the wonder and the mystery and difficulty and the promise of communion. It’s messy. It’s wonderful and it’s difficult. And certainly it is erotic.

Communion is a walk down to the marina. It is lovers sharing chocolate. It is parents putting their children to bed. It is friends arguing the latest political action of our government. It is you and I, you and I together, noticing, caring and living. It is noticing we are unique. It is noticing we are one. It is noticing we are intimate.

So, we bring flowers into this room, itself sanctified by generations of our friends and companions, of those who have gone before us, and those who will come in the years after us. We put those flowers in pots, we mix them up with flowers already there for those who have forgotten or missed the announcement, because that’s as it should be too, there is always room for one more among us; and we get a new flower and take it home. So simple. Maybe, considering what it signifies, even too simple.

But that’s the way it is, simple and complicated. We are all mixed up together. Our thoughts and our actions affect each other. And what we do here together affects the world itself. So, we call ourselves to the mystery of communion. We reflect on how it works, what it does, and how knowing in our bones we are separate and one and in a dance of relationship, gives voice to the deep knowing and direction to our lives.

We are living our communion.

Amen.