INTO THE GARDEN A Flower Communion Sermon
James Ishmael Ford
20 June 2004

Text
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside
but to us interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen:
Reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always.
For every gardener knows that after the digging,
after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth,
the harvest comes.
Marge Piercy

Well, here we are, at the end of the formal church year. Here we are once again contemplating the summer and all that it holds. I’d like, if you’ll indulge me, to reflect just a little before we all take off, on the secrets of gardens and gardening as a metaphor for our spiritual lives, for what it is we do here in this place, as well as what we do with our lives writ large. Just a pause, if you will, before we go forth into that glorious summer which is awaiting.

Already auntie has been drawn out of her room full of books and is tending to her various patches, the tomatoes which will be too many to eat, the various herbs and squashes, and as those who drive down Lexington Street regularly know, her pride and most important project, her gigantic wildly out of place jumble patch of petunias.

Jan is outside many an evening already, dragging the sprinklers from one end of the yard to the other. Weekends she gives time to pulling weeds. Even I find myself drawing away from my computer and various writing projects to examine the new lawn which replaced the old mud patch, to make at least a desultory attempt at holding off some of those weeds from too quickly re-claiming the lawn and garden.

In our Unitarian Universalist communities throughout most of the continent, one knows the church year is drawing to a close as ice and snow become ever more abstract concepts, as the rains bring rushing green and so many of us begin to turn our attention to those gardens, great or small. These gardens can be astonishingly large affairs. And I know folk for whom the garden is a few pots. Actually I kind of like that last idea best. But it sure seems the larger majority of us are drawn somehow in this season to our gardens.

For me something I most like about the end of the church year, and deeply connected to gardens and gardening, is how we observe our flower communion. I think they’re connected. Few of us garden because we must, or rather that must is found elsewhere than in growing food. And I think profoundly connected to that must, that compelling experience drawing so many of us to gardens and gardening, I know how I particularly like flowers simply because they have no purpose. They just are, little shocks of beauty bursting forth from nowhere. In the presence of simple useless beauty, I experience surges of joy and hope. Perhaps you have similar feelings around flowers, if not gardens.

Today in our last formal service of the church year, I’d like to stop just for a moment and reflect on flowers and gardens and contained in all that, I really believe, our ultimate purposes. Because I suggest that bit of attention to small things, particularly, I suggest flowers and gardens, both reminds and reveals. It reminds us life is really found in the small things. It reveals to us what is most valuable is often found in small bits of gratuitous beauty, in things no more important than flowers. Indeed I suggest our call to social justice is informed and fed through our attention to these small and mysterious things like flowers and gardens.

The flower communion that has become so ubiquitous in Unitarian Universalist congregations most commonly as the last service of the church year is simple enough a ritual. But, like flowers themselves, it holds a deeper story. The ritual is based in asking people to bring flowers to church. Its innovator Norbert Capek saw it as a spring festival. The flowers come into the community, are blessed, and then disbursed among the congregation, as Dr Capek saw it, each person carrying home a flower they did not themselves bring.

The deeper story turns on the life of Dr Capek, a Czech national who converted to Unitarianism early in the twentieth century, and who founded and led several Unitarian congregations in his native land. The original version of the flower communion was celebrated on the first anniversary of the founding of the Czech Unitarian movement, as Dr Capek described it, “a new experiment in symbolizing our liberty and brotherhood.” He said that as the congregation each takes a different flower home, “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 a human and wants to be good.”

That simple act was itself given additional nuances when Capek was arrested by the Gestapo, and for the crimes of being Czech and a Unitarian minister he was sent to Dachau where he walked into the gas chamber on the 12th of October, 1942. When we give each other those flowers we also remember that. I hope today we think about the spring, about life and death, about hope, and maybe particularly, I hope we think a bit about gardens, and meaningless joy blossoming out from the heart of all that is.

Certainly flowers and gardens flow together in human imagination particularly in the spring. Even an irredeemable urbanist like myself, never so happy as on the fortieth floor looking down on city lights; in this season feels the urge to get a little dirt under my fingernails. There is something atavistic, something ancient about this enterprise.

In our western culture the first great myth is about a garden. And I notice just about everyone claims it. The number of places people put the original Garden of Eden is about as many places as there are. I can think of a small illustration. There’s that old cold war joke, you may recall, about the Brit, the Frenchman and the Russian, standing together viewing a painting of Adam and Eve in the garden. “Look at how calm and reserved they are,” mused the Brit. “Obviously they’re English.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” replies the Frenchman. “They’re naked and they’re beautiful. There can be no doubt, they’re French.” The Russian, actually this works well enough for today, as well, says, “No clothes, no shelter, they have only an apple to eat & they’re being told this is paradise. Definitely, they’re Russian.” The Garden really does belong to us all.

It appears the word “eden” derives from ancient Sumerian and means “delight.” And certainly from the beginnings of our western culture the idea of a garden, an enclosure dedicated to cultivation has been an image for paradise itself. I suggest we can look at this image and discern some broad outlines for spiritual engagement, for how we can cultivate our interior lives. So, let’s think a little about gardens and particularly of the miracle of flowers, the adornment of the world as spiritual practice, at least as a metaphor for spiritual practice.

There are any number of places we can begin to describe a spiritual discipline, which I define here as a practice of presence. Our shared faith is in the possibility of what is, and so our spiritual disciplines should all draw us to presence, whether they be prayer or mediation or disciplined conversations. We could talk about cultivating the soil, picking the right plants, obtaining appropriate tools. But, we don’t have all that much time, so let me limit the parameters a little and simply discuss digging, planting, pruning, watching, noticing death, and then seeing that next step, recalling spring and the mystery of eternal renewal. That seems enough, doesn’t it?

Once this urge to garden arises, once we feel the willingness, then we need to decide what it is we’re trying to grow? Here I remind us of flowers. This is, after all, flower communion Sunday. I think of auntie’s petunias, silly flowers, riotous flowers, bunched up in our garden in such an auntie-like way. Each of us needs to ask what it is we’re about on our spiritual journeys. Are we seeking a little respite? I don’t find anything wrong with that. Are we hoping for some exercise? Sounds like a good motivation to me.

But maybe we’re looking for something even deeper. Here, again, I draw your attention back to flowers, to those things that can’t be eaten, that take more work than they’re worth. Bread and roses goes the old line. We need bread and we need roses, and petunias, and so many other flashes of beauty to grace this world. Here we find the strength to go on; here we can find the deeper purposes that inform our intuition of service. Here we find the nourishment we need to do the work that needs doing.

There is that wonderful passage in the scriptures, with versions in both Matthew and Luke. In Luke it goes, “Consider the lilies, how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” This is where we find ourselves going as we undertake the garden as a spiritual work.

What we plant, if we attend, grows. Then immediately, immediately, we find another hard part. We need to weed and to prune. Sometimes we need to cut back the growth from the previous season. Sometimes we need to make decisions and cut out directions things were going so that energy can be channeled in other directions. It might hurt, at least a little. But this intentionality, this focus is important.

And, of course, nonetheless, what will happen, happens. Turns out we’re not completely in control. Perhaps you’ve noticed. Even with all our best planning things end up taking their own direction. In the enterprise of gardening this is the time where the rules fall away and mysteries are revealed. My old friend and colleague Will Saunders observes “The garden is intentional. And so is the spiritual life.” However, he adds, and this is so important. “Like a garden, sustaining and nurturing our spiritual lives is dependent on forces beyond our control.” There is a certain necessary surrender on this way. The rhythms of nature reveal this, the rain comes when it will or not. Winds blow. Things happen. And one of those things is death. You can’t work in a garden and not deal with death. You can’t observe the flower communion and not think at least a little about death, and loss, and grief.

But the story doesn’t end there. And here is the mystery of our spiritual lives. Here is the mystery that informs our work as families as citizens, as people of faith. Here what that faith is, is revealed, The garden and its gift the flower reveals another step. Like our teacher Marge Piercy reminds us.

For every gardener knows that after the digging,
after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth,
the harvest comes.

Auntie has been drawn out of her room full of books and is tending to her various patches, the tomatoes which will be too many to eat, the various herbs and squashes, and as those who drive down Lexington Street regularly know, her pride and most important project, her gigantic wildly out of place jumble patch of petunias.

Into the garden. As we go forward into our lives, into the summer, I hope we recall the seasons of our delight, each revealing the harvest. I hope we recall the little paradise we cultivate here as well as in our homes. I hope every time we look at a flower we remember the need for roses as well as bread. I hope we recall our practice of presence to the small things.

I hope we find moments of renewal. And I hope we remain safe in each other’s hearts and minds. And I hope we’ll drop into this garden once in a while over the summer. And I hope we all return safely home and to this garden patch in the next couple of months, renewed, renewing, and as ever hopelessly beautiful. Travel in peace and joy, my friends. And remember, always, the flowers.

Amen.