Celebrate!
April brings us the biggest holidays of the year for two of the world’s biggest religions: Easter for the Christians, and Passover for the Jews. But April also is a time for other kinds of celebrations, particularly those centered on the earth and spring.
Click on a holiday below to view links to information, activities and more related to these celebrations:
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We Honor… |
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Norbert Capek, creator of the flower ceremony, or flower communion, as it is often called today. Norbert Capek was a Unitarian minister from Czechoslovakia, in Eastern Europe. Capek 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, which grew to be the biggest Unitarian church in the world, with some 3,200 members. Capek decided that this special church needed a special symbol, a ceremony of their own, not based on any other religion. 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 things that we share the whole world around. The Festival of Flowers 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 Unitarian 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.
Capek died for talking about how good it is for people to come together in our differences, but his wife Maja survived, and brought the idea of the flower ceremony to the United States, where UU churches across the country still celebrate the flower communion in the spring or summer.
You can find out more about Capek’s life here. |
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Act!
Earth Day is a special holiday to remember our responsibility to the “interdependent web of all existence.” But, of course, it would be even better to make every day Earth Day. What can you do to help care for Planet Earth? The thing that usually first pops into people’s minds is picking up trash, which is a fine thing to do. But there are other things you can do to help control garbage that are at least as important. For instance, did you know that those little stickers they put on fruit can contaminate our oceans and waterways? The plastic neither sinks nor floats, and so it can get through water treatment plants and into the ocean. So take off those stickers and throw them away properly.
Of course, one of the best ways to handle garbage is to make less of it. Bring cloth bags to the store, and both save the resources that go into make paper or plastic bags and keep the used bags from taking up space as garbage. Even grownups with the best of intentions sometimes forget, so make it your job to be the reusable bag reminder person. You can also reduce garbage by making sure that you take lunch to school in reusable containers rather than baggies—sandwiches can go in Tupperware-type boxes, milk can travel in a thermos—really, there’s a washable container for almost everything. Oh, and water bottles? The water inside is probably no different than what comes out of your tap. Use a glass or refill a bottle rather than wasting all that plastic by buying water in bottles. |
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Nurturing Your Spirit
Easter is the Christian celebration of the rebirth of Jesus Christ. But the celebration of rebirth goes back way before the time of Jesus, as people around the world celebrated the rebirth of the natural world that happens in spring. Is something being reborn near you or inside you? If the weather allows it, find a place outside where you can sit comfortably for a while. Look around. What signs do you see of life being reborn around you? Are there new buds or leaves on the trees? Flowers blooming? Green plants (including weeds) coming up from the ground? Now look inside you for a bit. Is there anything in your life that feels new and exciting? Things that used to make you sad or scared that don’t make you feel so bad any more? Honor the growing places in the world around you and inside yourself. Take in a deep breath, and as you let it out, send your good wishes to the new life you see inside and around you.
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Principles in Practice
Earth Day and Arbor Day are certain good times to celebrate our seventh UU principle, “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.” What does it mean to feel yourself to be a part of an interconnected web of life? How does knowing you are a part of a connected web of life affect your choices? Here’s a poem by the German author Herman Hesse that seems to get at that question:
Sometimes, when a bird cries out,
Or the wind sweeps through a tree,
Or a dog howls in a far-off farm,
I hold still and listen a long time.
My world turns and goes back to the place
Where, a thousand forgotten years ago,
The bird and the blowing wind
Were like me, and were my brothers.
My soul turns into a tree,
And an animal, and a cloud bank.
Then changed and odd it comes home
And asks me questions. What should I reply? |
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