History
The Flower Communion was initiated by Norbert Čapek, who was also the founder of the Unitarian Church in Czechoslovakia. He saw the need to unite the diverse congregants of his church, from varying Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish backgrounds, without alienating those who had left these traditions. For this reason he honored the universal beauty of nature by having a communion of flowers instead of the Eucharist. The first Flower Communion was held in Prague on June 4, 1923. Čapek's term is more accurately translated as "Flower Celebration," a term which continues to be preferred by Czech Unitarians today.
The Flower Communion was reportedly introduced in the United States in 1940 by Maja Čapek, Norbert's wife, and was widely adopted by the American Unitarian churches, and their successor Unitarian Universalist congregations. Earlier Unitarian "Flower Services," documented in Midwestern U.S. Unitarian congregations beginning circa 1880, were somewhat different in form from Čapek's service.
Read more about this topic: Flower Communion
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If usually the present age is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (18551916)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“And now this is the way in which the history of your former life has reached my ears! As he said this he held out in his hand the fatal letter.”
—Anthony Trollope (18151882)