Flowers To Take Home a sermon preached by Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, on Mothers’ Day, May 5, 2005

When I was a child in the early grades of elementary school, my mother would sometimes keep me home from school and take me out to brunch with her friends. We would go to a brand-new two-story cafeteria in downtown Fort Worth – it was oh-so-trendy, very modern with stainless steel walls and lots of art and glass all around. My mother and her friends would talk about the strange things that adults talk about; I didn’t often understand, but I felt like I was being invited into a new world – a grown-up world of adults, sophistication, and opportunity. In today’s world, I suppose she would be raked over the coals by some school official for adding to my truancy, but back then, she kept me home a few times, and by doing so gave me a real gift. She showed me that I was important to her somehow, and she let me know it in ways that as I grew up would give me a place to go inside myself whenever I felt lost.

One afternoon after school, I was enticed by a young friend of mine to walk home with him. It wasn’t far, he said, less than a block. And though I wasn’t old enough to make that decision, I went. And when we got to his house, my friend waved goodbye, ran up his front walk and into his front door.

I stood there on the sidewalk alone. I looked around and realized - I didn’t know how to get home. I was lost! I didn’t know which way to turn or what to do. I can see it in my mind’s eye now that I was only about fifty feet from where I should have been, across a two-lane street from my usual path home. But I couldn’t have figured it out that day. When I was six and standing all alone in that lonely spot, it felt like I was a million miles from anything I knew.

While I stood there looking around and probably crying my eyes out, my friend’s mom came out of the house and asked if I would like her to call my mom. Sure, I said through the tears. And a few minutes later, when my mother walked up to get me, she showed me how to cross the street and she showed me how to get back on track and she showed me how to find my way home.

I was talking to a friend of mine about this recently and she said she hadn’t liked her mother very much. She couldn’t remember any stories like the one I told you about my mom. She didn’t think of her mother as at all nurturing. They’d had a hard time getting along most of their lives. My friend had always taken paths that her mother did not particularly appreciate or condone. For instance, when my friend had married a man who was already a minister, the mom had not seemed supportive. When my friend was ordained into the ministry herself, her mom didn’t understand that, either. And when my friend had been the first woman on the faculty of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, her mom thought she was meddling where she didn’t belong.

It’s Mothers’ Day today and the Hallmark Greeting Card Company tells us it’s supposed to be a happy day, a wonderful day of celebration for all of us. But not all motherhood is happy. There may be a lot of us who struggle with the vision of motherhood we have in our minds. Either we can’t quite get comfortable with the image of our own mothers – maybe we had mothers who were distant or abusive or simply not present for whatever reason. Or perhaps you’re a woman troubled by motherhood - your own or your lack of it. Maybe you’ve lost a child or maybe you’re troubled by feeling like you‘ve failed in some way – wanting to have kids and not being able to or wanting to have a better relationship with the ones you have. Mothers’ Day has always been problematic in churches for women who have lost children or women who would like to be better mothers, women who have tried everything they can to be mothers but to no avail.

For these people, for these women, for you, maybe, this can be a difficult day: the celebrations misguided, the greeting card sentiments saccharine sweet, the unacknowledged losses a knife somewhere deep.

And yet, we’ve chosen this day to have a Flower Communion. We do this, at least in part, in memory of the man who instituted it at a tumultuous moment in the Europe of the 1920’s. The Rev. Dr. Norbert Capek saw a need in his Prague Unitarian church for seeking out beauty amidst strife, for seeking out calm in the face of the gathering storm, for seeking out hope in a seemingly hopeless situation. Dr. Capek led his church for twenty years until his arrest by the Gestapo, his internment in Dachau, and his death at the hands of Nazi medical experimenters. Tradition has it that he continued to hone his Flower Festival even while imprisoned in the camps.

In a few minutes, we will share flowers the way his congregation did. We will say the same words of blessing he said, and we will say together the same unison words of dedication his congregation repeated each time they performed the ritual. We will thereby link ourselves to a tradition that has touched hearts and lifted people for many decades through good times and bad. It is important that we work to keep these touchstones from the past as we move out into an uncertain and unpredictable future.

But why flowers? They can be so difficult to grow, so hard to keep, so expensive to buy. They don’t last long, especially after they’re cut. Why not something that’s longer lasting? Something with a shelf life, something we could carry with us for a while?

Well. Flowers are inextricably linked in human culture with relationship.

Flowers seem like an essential element at funerals and memorial services, don’t they? If we have a relationship with someone who passes on, we may think first of sending flowers.

Weddings, too, speak of relationship. They cry out for flowers, as decorations for the space, on the lapels of the groomsmen, in the hands of the bride. Weddings wouldn’t be weddings without flowers of some kind.

We use flowers for all kinds of social reasons. Men in our culture are taught that bringing home a few flowers to a wife or partner will fix whatever they did or said the night before and get them back into a relationship they had sabotaged the night before. Flowers are often a centerpiece when people formally sit down to eat together, breaking bread together being one of our most basic relationships. Of course, mothers want flowers on Mothers’ Day – a rose says "I love you," - flowers speak to mothers of a deep and abiding relationship with children. And we have flowers here at church for most of our worship services; the people that prepare and donate the flowers are saying that they are a part of this place and that what we do matters to them – we display flowers here where we practice our religious faith, not just to have something pretty to look at, but to indicate that we are in a search for the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Speaking of religion, I grew up in a state – Texas - where Friday night high school football was, and is, a religion. And part of the rite and the ritual of that religion is the wearing of chrysanthemums. Decorated with streamers in school colors, with school names and team mascots and slogans painted on them in glitter, these mums are worn by women to show one’s relationships – to a boyfriend, to a team, to a school, to a community – that mum speaks to one’s relationship with the whole world. My friend whose mother didn’t want her to be a minister remembered the same phenomenon at the University of Michigan football games. She remembers it being one of the happiest times of her life, sitting in the stands with seventy- or eighty-thousand like-minded people, wearing a yellow mum surrounded by blue ribbons, with a big blue M right in the middle, bought fresh for every game by a boyfriend, a husband, and sometimes even by that mother that she couldn’t get along with.

So why flowers? Because they’re all about relationships.

And maybe not in spite of the flowers’ temporary nature, but because of it. They’re beautiful, of course, but also temporary, like we are, like everything we do is. Flowers are sometimes difficult to grow, hard to keep, expensive in many ways – just like we are, sometimes.

But that doesn’t make flowers less important, and it doesn’t make us less important. Maybe it makes flowers – and us - more important, because the lives of flowers – and the lives we lead - are short and ephemeral and delicate, and often beautiful.

And motherhood is like that, too. We have such a short time to have a mother, or to be a mother.

We don’t all have a strongly developed sense of home. We can’t always just tell someone else how to go about their search, how to get back on track, how to get back to their own personal sense of home. If we can’t give each other a sense of home, we can certainly offer to each other and to those who come to visit with us a sense of a church home. We can be genuinely open and welcoming to our visitors. We can clean up the highway together, we can participate in the pledge drive. We can visit those who can’t get to church every Sunday, we can take care of each other in whatever ways we can. We take each other seriously, and we have a good time together.

And we can share flowers - we can link ourselves to a tradition that has touched hearts and lifted people for many decades through good times and bad. We can live out our faith as a community, and we can nurture our relationships.

Mothers’ Day is about relationships. Mothers’ Day is about flowers.

My mother was not perfect – far from it. But she did what she could, and as it turns out she was good enough as a mother. She showed me how to cross the street. She showed me how to get back on track if I ever got lost, which I do often. She showed me ways to get home.

I’ve usually been able to do all that for myself since then – cross streets, get back on track, find my way home. But sometimes I need help, as do we all. I hope that we can help each other, and that we can help people who come to us lost and looking for a church home.

If you’ve had someone in your life who taught you how to find a way for yourself, a way to get back on track, a way to get home when you’re feeling lost, then Mothers’ Day is a good day to acknowledge those mothers, teachers, friends who have taught us so much and helped us become the people we are and will be.

Today we honor those people.

Today we show our gratitude for all we’ve received from them.

Today we give thanks.

Today we carry on traditions.

Today we share flowers.

So may it be.