The Flower Celebration is an annual ritual that celebrates beauty, human uniqueness, diversity, and community.

Originally created in 1923 by Unitarian minister Rev. Norbert Fabian Čapek (pronounced "CHOP-eck”) of Prague, the ceremony was introduced to the United States by Rev. Mája Čapek, Norbert's widow. That ritual has endured and is treasured by Unitarian Universalists around the world who are now eager to celebrate its centennial.

In this ceremony, everyone in the congregation brings a flower and places it in a shared vase. The congregation and minister bless the flowers, and they're redistributed so that each person brings home a different flower than the one they brought. All are invited to participate; we will have a few extra flowers for anyone who arrives without one.

excerpted from “The Story of Norbert Čapek's Flower Ceremony” by Teresa and David Schwartz:

His mother was a devout Catholic, his father agnostic. He became an acolyte at age 10, in 1890 at St. Martin’s Catholic Church. In the years that followed, he became disillusioned: his priest was a cynic.

Slowly, his faith became more and more liberal.

He left Bohemia under government threat and … joined a Unitarian church in New Jersey in 1921—for the same reason a whole lot of you did: their children liked the religious education program. That’s the power of our Sunday School teachers. Kids, that’s your power, too!

World War I ended. His home country now independent, he and [his family] returned home to Czechoslovakia.

His Unitarian church was the Prague Liberal Religious Fellowship. In just 20 years, his church had 3,200 members.

The traditional Christian communion service of bread and wine wouldn’t meet the needs of his congregation, because his church—like ours—had people who believed different things.

Čapek turned to the beauty of the countryside; to the beauty of flowers. In 1923, he developed the flower ceremony. He asked his congregants to bring a flower to church—from their gardens, the field, or the roadside. He invited each person to place their flower in a vase. Following the service, each person could take a flower from the vase—a different one than they had brought.

Čapek was a visionary minister with a church ahead of its time, a BOLD church, a church thinking beyond its doors, beyond what it thought possible.

It was a church that was willing to take risks; to make tough decisions; to bear disappointment; and to build a new way…first by building a church, and that church could build up the world.

That is our church. That was Čapek’s church.

For this, the Gestapo arrested him in 1942.

The Nazis killed Norbert Čapek. But his spirit, courage, and commitment live on, today. Those qualities have passed, now, to us, to make them real.

His wife Mája brought the flower ceremony to the Unitarian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1940.

What we are about to do is not a historical reenactment of something over and done, but an affirmation of our continuity with the generations of struggle for ever-widening liberty.

This flower ceremony, lovely though it is, isn’t a diversion from ugly reality, but a gentle fierceness which proclaims that in the midst of sinister days there is always the light of beauty.

We are here not to recall something that happened, but to remember something that is happening: to re-member—to put it back together again—and in that remembering, may we put ourselves back together again, each as a part of the body of this community: out of many, one.

Today, we celebrate this ritual of solemnity and joy.

As Čapek asked his people to bring a flower and celebrate beauty, so shall we.