By the Rev. Melanie
Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist
Church of New Orleans
Sunday, May 12, 2013
In the Victorian era of the 19th century in Europe
and America, there was an elaborate language of flowers. Using published flower directories
called “floriographies,” a person could carefully put together an assortment of
flowers to convey a particular message.
For instance, a bunch of pansies meant “thinking of you” while a spray
of ambrosia signaled that the other person’s feelings of love were
reciprocated. Meanings of
carnations depended on color, with yellow ones sending the message “you have
disappointed me” and striped or variegated carnations meant either a
straight-out “no” or a somewhat less negative “sorry I can’t be with you.”
While today we don’t expect our flower bouquets to do that
much communication for us, it is still true that flowers can convey
messages. I remember when my son
was about 12 and he got me to drive from our house to a flower shop and then
all the way across the town we lived in and up a mountain to deliver a dozen discount roses for
Valentines Day. In the present, my
spouse Eric stops regularly at Harkins the Florist in our neighborhood for
spontaneous no-reason bouquets. I
guess those messages are obvious.
But Eric says he’s been in Harkins at times when another man
has come in and asked for an apology bouquet, and gotten the question, “Exactly how bad
were you?” I guess professional
florists have different levels of bouquets for different degrees of apology.
There are the flowers presented at proms and flowers thrown
at famous opera singers and ballet dancers and flowers given to moms and
grandmothers on Mothers Day and flowers sent to loved ones in hospitals and
flowers delivered when someone has died.
A parishioner came to see me this week bringing a beautiful bouquet of
flowers from her garden. Flowers
say, I like you, I love you, I’m sorry, Congratulations, Thanks for everything,
I hope you get better, I miss you, I honor and celebrate the life you
lived. They even say something
like, “I don’t know what to say.” So
even though we in the 21st century don’t have books to tell us what
each kind of flower explicitly means, flowers still communicate.
In our religious movement, flowers are prominent in three notable
ceremonies. There is the rose with
thorns removed that is given to parents at the close of a Baby Dedication &
Naming ritual, to symbolize how parents wish to protect their babies from all
that would harm them. And there is
the corresponding rose with thorns given to young people at their Coming-of-Age ceremony to show that
the adults are ready to accept the young people into the adult community on
their own terms, without trying to shelter them.
The 3rd important religious ritual in Unitarian
Universalism is the Flower Communion, which has several layers of meaning. We remember and honor Norbert and Majia
Capek, the courageous founders of Czech Unitarianism and heroes of the Nazi
era. We follow their intention for
the flower ceremony by lifting up the value of diversity in religious
community, and the reminder that human life is both beautiful and fragile, like
flowers. As they did, we make the
children of our community a central part of the ceremony, to recognize their
role as the future of the church.
But in every UU congregation that holds a Flower Communion,
there are also the more particular meanings. For a congregation in a time of transition, the flowers are
appropriate because flowers are themselves a transition in the life of a
plant. No matter how showy,
flowers are not the end product of a plant; they are a way station to fruit and
new seed. So flowers are a good
reminder that a period of change, however uncomfortable, is temporary, and then
comes the time of fruit and harvest.
In the same way that spouses and partners can apologize
through the medium of flowers, a Flower Communion can be a small step in a
journey of reconciliation and healing for a congregation experiencing some kind
of conflict. We have each brought
a flower to represent ourselves, and we take home a flower that was brought by
someone else, that stands for them.
In this way, we symbolically offer a bit of ourselves to each other in
the congregation, and accept a part of another person in return.
For a congregation needing an infusion of positive feelings
about the future, flowers are messengers of hope, saying, in effect, “There are
good things to come.” For congregations
in the throes of emotion, flowers can say, “I hope we all feel better soon” and
“See? There’s still lots of beauty and joy in the world.”
There is very little an outgoing minister can do to help with
congregational healing in a time of transition – although unfortunately there
is a LOT a minister could do that would be disruptive and cause further hurt
and confusion. I have been
striving mightily to stay out of y’all’s way at this time and to make sure
there is a clear space for your next minister to step into.
The healing and reconciliation that is needed in First Church
can be helped by your next minister, but in point of fact, the real work must
be done by all of you with each other.
You must remember that each of you is unique and fragile, beautiful and
various. You must decide that what
you want in a liberal religious community is diversity, diversity of
background, diversity of talents, diversity of opinions – and then you must
devise your own ways of living comfortably with all that difference, finding
ways to honor and incorporate the differences wherever you can. You must come to grips with the fact
that no one in the church is perfect and that like all humans everywhere, each
of us makes mistakes. You must take your courage in both hands and speak up when you think something might be amiss, and not let your questions and concerns go underground. It is not
mistakes that kill a community – it is the inability to process mistakes and
learn from them and resolve not to make the same mistakes in the future.
Fragile, strong, supple, tender, beautiful, various, hopeful,
joyful – so are the flowers of our Flower Communion and so are all of us. Remember that, and treat each other
accordingly.
May the blessing of the flowers be upon you.
May their beauty beckon to you each morning
And their loveliness lure you each day,
And their tenderness caress you each
night.
May their delicate petals make you
gentle,
And their eyes make you aware.
May their stems make you sturdy,
And their reaching make you care.
(from "Flowers have the Gift of Language" by Reginald Zottoli)
