Every year, on the last Sunday before things get very informal for the summer, we celebrate "Flower Communion". This is a day when children and adults are all in church together. Everyone is invited to bring some flowers from their garden, if they have one, and we place them in vases at the front of the church.  People are like flowers, each uniquely beautiful and yet all similar in some ways. We admire them all together during worship, then towards the end of the service, we invite everyone to come forward and take one, a gift to them from someone.  Each flower is itself precious and unique, like the person who gave it, carrying within it something of the Holy.  We take the flowers home, so children have a chance to appreciate and care for them. 

This uniquely Unitarian Universalist ceremony is a gift to our religious movement from an early twentieth century leader of the Unitarian Church in what was then Czechoslovakia, Dr. Norbert Capek.  After attending a Unitarian church in New Jersey while he was a Baptist minister among the Czech and Slovak immigrants there, Dr. Capek realized that what he needed to do was go back to his homeland and start a church more like a Unitarian church.  He envisioned a church that taught freedom of thought and a spirituality that is based on inner truth more than outer dogma.  So he did that.  With support from the American Unitarian Association, his congregation in Prague became large, and other congregations grew throughout the country.  

But then the Nazi forces came to rule the country.  When they found out about Capek's teachings, they knew he had to be silenced.  Freedom?  not under Nazi rule.  He was sent to the labor camp at Dachau, and ultimately died in a gas chamber.  His church lives, however, and the flower communion we celebrate each year also celebrates his initiative, his courage, and his willingness to die for his faith.  Each person, like each flower, is unique and beautiful.  And each has within it something of the Holy.  Some are very precious, indeed.