Flower Communion Sunday
Rev. Diane Rollert
Unitarian Church of Montreal, June 6, 2021
Normally, this is one of the most joyous days of our year. We arrive at church with flowers in our hands, ready to celebrate our annual flower communion. We tell the story of the first flower communion, of Rev. Norbert Čapek (pronounced CHA-peck), founder of the Unitarian movement in Prague, and his wife Maja (pronounced MY-ah), who created and celebrated the first flower communion on June 4, 1922.
The Čapeks created a ceremony that would be welcoming to the diverse members of their congregation, who came from Protestant, Catholic and Jewish backgrounds. Each congregant would bring a flower to exchange with someone else. The beauty and uniqueness of each blossom was a way to honour the beauty and uniqueness of each person. That’s all it was. That’s all it’s been for all these years that we’ve observed this tradition.
This year, once again, we can’t physically exchange flowers. My heart still aches to be with you in our building on de Maisonneuve, to revel in the garden (where I usually pick a few extra blossoms, just in case), and to watch as everyone delights in taking a new flower home.
This ceremony is always bittersweet, because it’s also a time when we must remember the tragic ending of Norbert Čapek’s life and that of his daughter. who both died in concentration camps during World War II.
When the Nazis took control of Prague in 1940, they found Dr. Čapek’s gospel of the inherent worth and beauty of every human person to be “too dangerous to the Reich.” He was condemned to death.
Biographer Richard Henry writes that Čapek had “a sun-drenched, pre-Holocaust faith…that sustained thousands of his compatriots during the darkness of Nazi occupation.” Concentration camp survivors who knew Čapek at Dachau said that his faith enabled him to endure his own martyrdom with equanimity and heroism.
Norbert Čapek died at Dachau in October of 1942, holding onto to a faith that had enabled him to create harmony amidst theological diversity in a terribly polarized time.
Last year, on this very Sunday, I wondered what Norbert Čapek would have thought of the Black Lives Matter movement and the tragic death of so many Black, Indigenous and People of Colour at the hands of police in North America. And today, I find myself wondering how he would have responded to the discovery of the bodies of 215 Indigenous children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Colombia.
The sun-drenched faith we share is challenged by the atrocity that a school — a school — would have a graveyard at all, let alone a graveyard filled with the bodies of so many children who
remain unaccounted for. Last week, many of you expressed the shame, the anger, the sadness you are feeling because of this tragic discovery.
So, today, I want to invite into a ritual of commemoration and a call for restoration.
Will you join me in the spirit of prayer, quiet respect and remembrance.
I light two tall candles to represent the number two hundred, and another fifteen smaller candles, for the 215 children whose bodies have been discovered, whose cause of death and life stories have yet to be revealed.
Spirit of Life,
Ground of our Being,
Creator Spirit,
we mourn for all the families
who lost their children
to the Canadian residential school system.
We mourn for all the children
whose lives were cruelly disrupted.
We mourn for the children
who went on to live
for the rest of their lives
with the physical and mental scars
of their experiences.
We mourn for the children who did not survive,
who never went home,
and were lost forever.
May we never accept silence
from ourselves, our communities
or our leaders
in the face of such inhumanity.
May we work for restoration and reparations
we owe to the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island,
for the suffering of generations
still recovering from these injustices.
May all the children who have been divided
from those who love them
be brought home once again,
to be cherished,
and to find rest.
Amen.
Please join me in a time of silence for 215 seconds.
[Silence]
So may we be called to action
in the name of these children.