How Does Your Garden Grow?
Reflection for Flower Communion Sunday given at
The Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
May 15, 2016
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
In our most recent Food For Faith session our topic of discussion was aging. (Food For Faith, for those of you who may not know, is the the adult religious education program I facilitate here) Participants were invited to name what they considered the greatest blessing of aging. Several named what could be summarized as a sense of perspective as the greatest blessing that has come with age. The ability to pause, discern and act…or not…from that place of discernment is hallmark of maturity. Now everyone ages, but not everyone matures. Aging requires little more than the passage of time. Maturity requires something more.
One of the things I like to do in my leisure time is visit historical houses and gardens. I especially like to see old photographs of a house or garden when it was first constructed. In these early photographs the landscape is often bare and the foliage and flora small or sparse. Comparing these early photos to the current state of a landscape often reveals whether or not the property has merely aged or if it has matured.
Mature landscapes reflect a certain level of thoughtfulness, planning, direction and care…and this is true whether it presents as a formal space (like those designed for a grand estate…the gardens at at the Villa Borghese in Rome, for example) or more freestyle (like the Berkshire botanical gardens in Stockbridge, MA.) They are places and sources of joy, awe and wonder, inspiration and beauty.
Aged landscapes tend to appear random, overgrown or underdeveloped. They may be uncomfortable places that engender feelings of anxiety, loneliness, or isolation. Often they are weighed down by an air of melancholy and sense of missed opportunity. (The grounds surrounding strip malls in the US or Soviet era apartment blocks in central and eastern Europe come to mind as such landscapes.)
Our spiritual lives, are in some ways, a sort of landscape or garden. Though initially quite bare, it will not stay that way for long. Feelings, thoughts and ideas will take root and be given wings through our actions. Our garden will age until our last breath, but without some effort it will never mature.
Like the gardens I enjoy visiting, our spiritual lives, in order to mature, require more than the passage of time; they require practice within time, the practice of growth. So, how does your garden grow?
Part of the answer to that question can be found in the ritual and story of Flower Communion. Norbert Capek, the Czech Unitarian minister who created what we today call Flower Communion described it as “A new experiment in symbolizing our liberty and unity (originally brotherhood)...in which participants confess that we accept each other as brothers and sisters without regard to class, race, or other distinction, acknowledging everybody as our friend who...wants to be good.”
In this brief statement, Capek alludes to three essential practices of growth:
1. Ritual. Capek created a ritual, that is he specifically set aside time to focus on the nature of our humanity and our relationship to others. Ritual can be as elaborate as a formal ceremony with a set liturgy and music or it can be simple, like time put aside each day to sit in silence or walk in the woods. The point is to regularly set aside time to step out of one’s routine and shift one’s attention or focus. Here growth is practiced through intentionality.
2. Boundaries. Capek speaks of “our liberty and unity.” Here Capek alludes to our need to establish both a healthy sense of self and connect with others in community. People with a good sense of self learn to respond to life from an understanding of their own feelings and values rather than in reaction to the feelings and values of others.
Community provides opportunities to refine our self-understanding, learn from and share with others. Here growth is practiced by discerning one’s place in the world.
3. Humility. Capek notes participants in the flower ceremony “confess and accept each other…without regard to class, race, or other distinction, acknowledging everybody as our friend..who wants to be good.” This is perhaps Capek’s most daring statement because it goes against the message we receive from our culture from the minute we’re born which basically tells us our gain requires another’s loss and vice versa. Capek challenges us to renounce this message and instead confess and accept not just a radical equality, but a radical valuing and affirmation of others rooted in an acknowledgement of our interconnectedness. Here growth is practiced through transcendence of the ego toward an embodiment of a life lived for a greater good.
Lest we think Capek’s words and ideas quaint musings for people with time on their hands, they, in fact, cost Capek his life only 74 years ago in a Nazi gas chamber. Indeed, his ideas were deemed dangerous. For they were recognized as powerful. Powerful enough to subvert and bring down the ruling party. Powerful enough to unite people in celebration, rather than fear, of human diversity…a threat without equal to any system or ideology of oppression.
We are here today, protected rather than persecuted by our government, in our pursuit and exercise of religious and spiritual practice. I is probably hard for most of us to imagine life without this freedom. An unintended consequence of this freedom, is the diminishment of the value and urgency of developing a mature spiritual life, a life, when joined with others over time, capable of liberating humankind from the very conditions which cause us despair.
Still, though we are not subject, as Capek, to the tyranny of government, we are at the mercy of time. There is no question we will age and with us, the garden of our spiritual lives too. The question thus is, will we mature? Together, may it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
Reflection for Flower Communion Sunday given at
The Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
May 15, 2016
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
In our most recent Food For Faith session our topic of discussion was aging. (Food For Faith, for those of you who may not know, is the the adult religious education program I facilitate here) Participants were invited to name what they considered the greatest blessing of aging. Several named what could be summarized as a sense of perspective as the greatest blessing that has come with age. The ability to pause, discern and act…or not…from that place of discernment is hallmark of maturity. Now everyone ages, but not everyone matures. Aging requires little more than the passage of time. Maturity requires something more.
One of the things I like to do in my leisure time is visit historical houses and gardens. I especially like to see old photographs of a house or garden when it was first constructed. In these early photographs the landscape is often bare and the foliage and flora small or sparse. Comparing these early photos to the current state of a landscape often reveals whether or not the property has merely aged or if it has matured.
Mature landscapes reflect a certain level of thoughtfulness, planning, direction and care…and this is true whether it presents as a formal space (like those designed for a grand estate…the gardens at at the Villa Borghese in Rome, for example) or more freestyle (like the Berkshire botanical gardens in Stockbridge, MA.) They are places and sources of joy, awe and wonder, inspiration and beauty.
Aged landscapes tend to appear random, overgrown or underdeveloped. They may be uncomfortable places that engender feelings of anxiety, loneliness, or isolation. Often they are weighed down by an air of melancholy and sense of missed opportunity. (The grounds surrounding strip malls in the US or Soviet era apartment blocks in central and eastern Europe come to mind as such landscapes.)
Our spiritual lives, are in some ways, a sort of landscape or garden. Though initially quite bare, it will not stay that way for long. Feelings, thoughts and ideas will take root and be given wings through our actions. Our garden will age until our last breath, but without some effort it will never mature.
Like the gardens I enjoy visiting, our spiritual lives, in order to mature, require more than the passage of time; they require practice within time, the practice of growth. So, how does your garden grow?
Part of the answer to that question can be found in the ritual and story of Flower Communion. Norbert Capek, the Czech Unitarian minister who created what we today call Flower Communion described it as “A new experiment in symbolizing our liberty and unity (originally brotherhood)...in which participants confess that we accept each other as brothers and sisters without regard to class, race, or other distinction, acknowledging everybody as our friend who...wants to be good.”
In this brief statement, Capek alludes to three essential practices of growth:
1. Ritual. Capek created a ritual, that is he specifically set aside time to focus on the nature of our humanity and our relationship to others. Ritual can be as elaborate as a formal ceremony with a set liturgy and music or it can be simple, like time put aside each day to sit in silence or walk in the woods. The point is to regularly set aside time to step out of one’s routine and shift one’s attention or focus. Here growth is practiced through intentionality.
2. Boundaries. Capek speaks of “our liberty and unity.” Here Capek alludes to our need to establish both a healthy sense of self and connect with others in community. People with a good sense of self learn to respond to life from an understanding of their own feelings and values rather than in reaction to the feelings and values of others.
Community provides opportunities to refine our self-understanding, learn from and share with others. Here growth is practiced by discerning one’s place in the world.
3. Humility. Capek notes participants in the flower ceremony “confess and accept each other…without regard to class, race, or other distinction, acknowledging everybody as our friend..who wants to be good.” This is perhaps Capek’s most daring statement because it goes against the message we receive from our culture from the minute we’re born which basically tells us our gain requires another’s loss and vice versa. Capek challenges us to renounce this message and instead confess and accept not just a radical equality, but a radical valuing and affirmation of others rooted in an acknowledgement of our interconnectedness. Here growth is practiced through transcendence of the ego toward an embodiment of a life lived for a greater good.
Lest we think Capek’s words and ideas quaint musings for people with time on their hands, they, in fact, cost Capek his life only 74 years ago in a Nazi gas chamber. Indeed, his ideas were deemed dangerous. For they were recognized as powerful. Powerful enough to subvert and bring down the ruling party. Powerful enough to unite people in celebration, rather than fear, of human diversity…a threat without equal to any system or ideology of oppression.
We are here today, protected rather than persecuted by our government, in our pursuit and exercise of religious and spiritual practice. I is probably hard for most of us to imagine life without this freedom. An unintended consequence of this freedom, is the diminishment of the value and urgency of developing a mature spiritual life, a life, when joined with others over time, capable of liberating humankind from the very conditions which cause us despair.
Still, though we are not subject, as Capek, to the tyranny of government, we are at the mercy of time. There is no question we will age and with us, the garden of our spiritual lives too. The question thus is, will we mature? Together, may it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
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