Celebrate!
Welcome to summer (at least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere). June is certainly a time to celebrate—getting out school, for one thing! (Is there an official Vacation Day?) More than that, it seems that June is a time for being grateful: pagans celebrate gratitude for the generosity of the Earth at the Summer Solstice, and we all can celebrate gratitude for dads on Father's Day!
Find out more about these holidays and how you might celebrate them in your family:
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We Honor… |
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| Norbert Capek, the Unitarian who created the flower ceremony which many Unitarian and Unitarian Universalist congregations still celebrate every spring or summer. Norbert Capek was born on June 3rd, 1870, in Czechoslovakia, which is in Eastern Europe. Capek (pronounced CHA-peck) was a Unitarian minister. He didn't even find out about the Unitarians until he was almost forty years old and already a Baptist minister, but when he did, he knew that was where he belonged. You see, Norbert Capek had a great ideal of freedom for all people, and in the Unitarian church he finally found a group of people who shared his passion for freedom.
When Capek became a Unitarian minister he started a new church in Czechoslovakia, and he decided that this special church needed a special symbol. And so he came up with what he called the "Festival of Flowers," in which every person, children and adults alike, brought a flower to church. All those flowers were gathered together in big vases and blessed, and later in the service each person took a different flower than the one they came with. Capek said that we all are like flowers, with many different shapes and sizes and colors, but like the flowers we are all beautiful. And, he said, although the flowers are all different, in some ways they are all the same. All of them have stalks, and all of them have petals, and we as people also all have some things that are the same the whole world around. The Festival of Flowers, or Flower Communion, was for him a symbol of freedom, a symbol of how we come together with all our differences and our special gifts to make one beautiful whole. And, he said, the church is like the vase that holds the flowers. It is the place where we all fit in, the vase that holds us together in our freedom and our differences.
Unfortunately, this story has a tragic ending. Norbert Capek was preaching about freedom and appreciating differences at a time when Hitler and the Nazis were coming to power in Europe. The Nazis were people who were scared by differences and didn't believe in freedom. They thought that there was only one good kind of people, and that people should be as much the same as possible. Capek knew that it was very dangerous to go on preaching freedom and sharing in Flower Communion, but he also knew that what he had to say was so important that he couldn't stop. And so the Nazis came, and they took Capek to the Dachau concentration camp, and they killed him, for fear that people would listen to Capek's message of love instead of their demand for sameness.
Norbert Capek died, but Unitarian Universalist churches share in his memory and his bravery each year by celebrating Flower Communion as he did. In local churches, people all bring flowers, sharing in their different gifts, and each person takes home a different flower than the one they brought, just as we all learn and grow from the gifts of others.
Even if you don't have a big church group of people to bring and share flowers, you can have a family or small group flower ceremony by sending everybody outside to find a flower. (Make sure that you ask permission if you want to pick a flower from someone else's yard!) If you only have a small number of people, your bouquet will look prettiest if each person brings more than one flower—weeds are fine! You can have each person take a different flower than the one they brought, leave the bouquet out where everyone can enjoy all the flowers together, or think of someone beyond your family/group who you could give the bouquet to.
Find out more about Norbert Capek and his flower ceremony. |
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Act!
One of the great things about summer is that wonderful summer fruits and vegetables like peaches, apricots, cherries, nectarines, tomatoes, green beans and zucchini are ripe and available. Have you ever thought about the food you eat as a justice issue? Agriculture (growing fruits, vegetables and grains) often uses a lot of pesticides (bug killers) and herbicides (weed killers) which can harm a lot of things beyond what they're meant to kill. Also, produce often comes to our grocery stores from more than a thousand miles away, which uses a whole lot of fuel, contributing to pollution and global warming.
June is a great time to talk with your family about trying to eat local and/or organic produce. Is there a farmer's market near you? It's a lot of fun to go and support local farmers and get the freshest, most delicious fruits and vegetables. Some organic farmers even have programs where you pay a certain amount of money to get a box of fruits and/or vegetables every month during the summer. That can be a great way to try things you might never have tasted, as well as get produce that's healthy for people and nature both. And, of course, you might even be able to grow some of your own vegetables at home. If anything tastes better than a home-grown strawberry, I don't know what it is! (And there's no driving involved at all.) |
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Nurturing Your Spirit
Since June has so many holidays associated with gratitude, it seems like a good month to remind ourselves of the spiritual practice of gratitude. Feeling grateful for the good things of our lives not only reminds us to live more gently in the world by replacing greediness with gratitude, it also helps us to feel happier and more at peace. In bed, right before you drift off to sleep, is a perfect time to think about the things you are grateful for. You could remember parts of your day that went really well, or think of at least three things which you are grateful to have in your life or in the world in general (like friends, pets, chocolate, health, talents that you have, things you like to do, sunshine, trees, parents, cheetahs, comfortable pajamas, etc., etc.).
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Principles in Practice
Our third UU principle is "Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations." In other words, UUs strive to accept people the way they are, but also try to help people to better, kinder, more loving, and more responsible. That's a good principle to remember this month, since June brings us Gay Pride Day. Many people don't accept gay folks—they think it is wrong or disgusting for a man to fall in love with a man, or a woman to fall in love with a woman. Lots of people—teenagers especially—use the word "faggot" (an insulting term for a gay man) as a general insult. If, as UUs, we work to accept everyone the way they are, it makes sense that we would accept gays (men who fall in love with men) and lesbians (women who fall in love with women), and not think that they should have to pretend to be different than who they are. And while we can accept people's different views about gay men and lesbians, we can also encourage spiritual growth by letting people know when their words are thoughtless or intentionally cruel. For instance, when someone expresses prejudiced views or uses rude terms like "faggot," you can say "It makes me really uncomfortable to hear people insulted like that." You don't have to change their minds, but when you make it clear that you don't like any kind of prejudiced behavior then everyone in the situation will probably experience some "spiritual growth."
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