It Tasted Like Sunlight A Flower Communion Reflection
James Ishmael Ford
17 June 2007

Text
Moon of the First Communion

For the girl, it was a growing up
to disillusion.
“Don’t we get to do anything more?” she asked.
The moment had passed
and the wafer tasted like dry bread
that was gone too soon,
the wine tasted like wine.

Her eyes were troubled,
she took off her veil.
Later, she smiled
and graciously allowed her parents
their celebration,
picking out the fanciest ice cream cake
in the store, calling
her best friend Sarah
to come over; and it was enough.

As for me,
the body of Christ, whatever it was,
was carried by the children
through the church
along with roses and potted plants
and self-portraits on newsprint
that they taped to the altar,
and the priest offered it
to anyone moved by God.

For the girl, more than anything,
I wanted to be part of it.
A woman handed me a wafer
that looked like the full moon,
another held a chalice of wine.
It tasted like sunlight
and warmed my throat a long time.
Kathleen Norris

Today is the concluding Sunday of our official church year. Please think quotes around “concluding” and “official.” We certainly continue, there are never Sundays that we don’t offer a possibility of gathering together, reflecting on some aspect of our lives and to share our sorrows and our joys. But there are subtle shifts in the pattern of our regular gathering. We move from the sanctuary to the parish hall. We move from gathering at ten fifteen to nine thirty. And the preacher is mostly not me, but rather voices of reflection from within our community. Next Sunday Dennis Thread will be the first of our nine thirty preachers and Noreen Kimball will preach the following Sunday. So, while in some ways this is one more Sunday of our continuing cycle of shared life, in other ways it is a marker of change.

This is a very full Sunday, as you’ve seen, marking many transitions beyond our shift into a summer schedule. Roberta and Joe are conducting their last service as music director and organist. We said a formal goodbye to our outgoing Board chair, Linda. Matched to these departures we’ve also marked young Marie’s initiation into our community through a ceremony of dedication. Later, we’ll mark our move into summertime with our all church barbecue. It’s going to be fun, I hope you can stay. And now, on this last official Sunday we continue our tradition of Flower Communion.

I’ve spoken of this before. The flower communion that has become so ubiquitous in our Unitarian Universalist congregations often as the last service of the church year is a very simple ritual. But, as with flowers, it contains layers of richness. 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 Norbert Capek. He was 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 service, what he called a “Flower Celebration,” was observed on the 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 members of the congregation each takes a different flower home, “without making any distinction where it came from” is 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.”

That simple act was itself given additional nuances when Capek was arrested by the Gestapo, and for the crimes of being Czech, a religious liberal 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, I hope, will remember that. I also hope we think about the spring, about Roberta and Joe and Linda, about Marie, about those who are here with us, about those who are absent in all the possible ways they can be absent, about life and death, and most of all I hope we will think about hope itself. In this way we bring ourselves into an act of communion with the whole of what is.

Communion, from the Latin communio, which literally means something along the lines of “mutual participation” and is generally understood as an intimate act of sharing. Actually Dr Capek resisted calling his service a flower communion because of that word’s association with the Eucharist, the central celebration of the Christian church. You can still find a few UU congregations that attempt to honor his original intent and call the service a flower celebration; but only a few. Almost all UU congregations as they celebrate this service call it a communion, call it the Flower Communion

As a small aside, as many here know I earned my undergraduate degree in my late thirties at Sonoma State University, a commuter college in Northern California. As I really was just trying to fulfill requirements to enter graduate school, and was working fulltime, I was very focused, and not particularly concerned with the issues of liberal education. My one concession to that traditional point of formal education was following the advice of friends to find a single teacher who appeared “wise” in one sense or another and simply take whatever classes that teacher offered. Upon recommendation of people who both knew me and the faculty, I took one and then a number of classes with Professor Gordon Tappan. While not the primary purpose I found myself immersed within archetypal psychology, a subset of Jungian studies.

I loved this experience so much I followed the same pattern when I went off to the Pacific School of Religion, a school of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. People who knew me and the faculty said a wise guide for me would be Louis Weil. I looked him up. He was an Anglican priest, did his ministerial preparation at the General Theological Seminary in New York and his doctorate at the Institut Catholique de Paris, one of the more prestigious “pontifical institutions” of the Roman Catholic Church. I noticed he also was officially a “professor of liturgics” at the GTU’s Episcopal seminary, the Church Divinity School of the Pacific. I thought Episcopal? I thought liturgics? I also thought about how at Sonoma State the only classes I actually remembered were those taught by Gordon Tappan. So, I swallowed hard, and took my first class with Louis. I went on to take a bunch of classes with him and he was one of the readers for my M.A. thesis which followed my M.Div.

I never regretted it. He was, and is a saintly mentor. I consider him one of my most important teachers, and not just in the school sense of that word, although he was very much that, as well. Along the way I also picked up way more about liturgy than is probably healthy for a Unitarian Universalist with a rationalist/Buddhist temperament.

So, perhaps my wanting to reflect on this comes naturally. What might communion be for us in this small ritual of sharing flowers? My old friend Tom Schade, a UU minister and a leader in the UU Christian community has observed about the more traditional Christian communion and what it can mean for religious liberals, how “the risen spirit of Christ present at the pentecost remains incarnate in many bodies of people, including many that never call his name, but wherever people gather in love, mutual respect and affection and self-sacrifice --- that just as he did when he lived, Jesus would recognize himself in many more bodies than would be expected.”

Tom seems to draw upon the “hidden Christian” theme that suggests if our hearts are open and that we gather in love, mutual respect, affection and, interestingly self-sacrifice, we are acting in the spirit of communion to which Jesus called his followers. While I can see how one might find some form of Christian triumphalism in what he’s saying, I think Tom is calling us to something much bigger, much bigger. I hope you catch the Universalist impulse in Tom’s comments, which I think is very important for us here, today. With that, bottom line, I think he’s right. At such a moment of our radical openness to each other in the movement of a sacred act, we can discover a hidden wholeness, which I believe is the answer to our heart’s longing. The name we put on that wholeness is less important, I believe, than that we actually open our hearts and find it.

Still, what is that wholeness? The Western tradition gives many different analogies. In Genesis 1:27, we learn how we are created “in the image of God.” I’d like us to consider what this image of God might point to for us as religious liberals. I suggest this can easily be seen as a pointing to a common identity we share with each other. I’m also mindful of the Christian scriptures, and how John 15:5 has Jesus say “I am the vine; you are the branches thereof.” If that isn’t a personification of our own compelling image of the interdependent web, I’m really not sure what would be.

But, here I’d like to conclude my remarks by drawing your attention to a flower. Any flower. Rose, carnation, nasturtium, daisy, peonie; each is unique, absolutely never to be replicated in time or space. Each is just as it is. And, every one is a flower. If we reflect on that flowerness which is found only in the specific of each flower, we may begin to open our hearts to a healing experience, to the wholeness of which we are a part, from which we take our being, and to which in the fullness of time, we return.

So, how do we approach such a thing? As my old teacher Louis Weil observed “(W)e need symbols that are so manifest that children (as well as adults) can engage them... Our task is to offer the symbols and invite children and adults into the ritual and then let them have their own experience. The experience will be different for different people and different levels of engagement which is fine; specific experience is the Spirit's work in the liturgy not the clergy's. If we keep our understanding of symbol really rooted, we can simply invite (every person’s) experience of engaging the symbol in its weightiness.” In its fullness. In its wholeness.

Enough about. Now I ask any children present to come forward, and to stand with the flowers. As soon as we pronounce our version of Dr Capek’s blessing adapted from his prayers, I hope you will distribute the flowers to everyone present.

***

Dr Capek’s blessing: Infinite spirit of life, we ask your blessing on these messengers of fellowship and love. May they remind us, among our many differences, to find our unity within love. May they remind us why we come together. May we cherish our friendship with each other as a divine gift. In this holy resolve may we be strengthened in knowing we are all members of God’s family; and that one spirit, love, unites us; and endeavor within that knowledge to work for justice and joy. Amen

Children, will you please pass the flowers to everyone present.

Thank you, and amen.