A word has been tumbling around in my head recently. In a conversation about book bans in public schools, it came up almost as a whisper. Erasure. To speak it had gravity. The concern shared is that people’s stories that include complicated history, race, gender, and sexual orientation are trying to be erased. When we erase someone’s story, we erase them.

Policy around banning books in schools has a fairly short history. In 1982, a group of parents and school staff ordered that certain books they deemed as “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy,” be removed from their school library. In response, students sued the school board.  The case reached the Supreme Court (Board of Education, Island Trees Union School District vs. Pico) to clarify if it violated the First Amendment right of free speech, which combats censorship. The court ruled 5-4 that public schools can ban books that are vulgar, obscene, or inappropriate for curriculum, but not because one disagrees with the ideas it includes. Later cases would clarify that there is no national definition of obscenity–this is left up to individual districts to define.

I am not a proponent of having schools carry or assign books that are inappropriate for curriculum. School librarians and teachers have a duty to do this, and there are checks and balances in place. Yet I am deeply troubled by book bans in school. For one, censoring some material makes all material vulnerable for censorship. Currently in Utah, they are responding to an initiative to ban the Bible and Book of Mormon from public schools because the texts include sensitive topics. According to the PEN America, there are 2,532 school book bans are in place. The most frequently banned books of the 2022-2023 school year include classics like The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970) to more contemporary titles such as Milk and Honey, a book of poetry and prose about surviving abuse and loss by Rupi Kaur. Books become suspect when they are deemed divisive and thus disruptive. Divisive to whom and disruptive to what? Who gets to control the narrative?

Banning books comes under the authority of a school board, and school boards are governmental bodies. Ultimately, banning books in schools is government censorship. This is my fundamental concern as a minister. I don’t believe any government body should have the power to censor whose stories get told.

One of the most egregious examples of government censorship around books is the Nazi regime. In 1933, at least 34 university towns hosted Nazi student group book burnings for titles they claimed were ‘un-German.’ Jewish and liberal authors, including Ernest Hemingway, were blacklisted. This paved the way for mass book removal from stores, libraries, and even publishing warehouses by the Nazi party. It paved the way for shoah, the catastrophe.

I’ve been reflecting on this as I’ve prepared services and events in honor of the 100th centennial of the Flower Communion. When I first learned that Unitarian Universalists had a flower service, I thought it sounded, to be honest, a bit hippie. But after learning its history, I now understand it as one of the most important services of the year.

A Unitarian minister named Norbert Capek led the first flower service in Prague in 1923. He was moved by how the Unitarian community that gathered held such diversity of beliefs and worldviews yet came to be in fellowship together. He likened his congregation to a bouquet of flowers. Each individual came with their own unique beauty, and when they came together, it was the differences that truly made the bouquet outstanding. Conformity was not expected, letting one’s true colors shine was celebrated. And in this, in each flower, Capek saw the hope for humanity.

He developed the ritual Flower Communion where each person brings a flower to the service and puts it in a common vase or on a common altar and then leaves with someone else’s flower. By exchanging flowers, we commit to being a community where different ideas are welcomed and exchanged. We leave holding another being with appreciation. Capek believed we could build a church with this understanding, which would then build the world.

For his work, Capek was arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis. He held one final Flower Communion with the flowering weeds in the Dachau Concentration Camp before he was killed. His wife returned to the US and brought the story of the Flower Communion with her, which endures to this day.

It is a ritual of beauty right with the solemnity of history and the world today. Capek was convinced that each and every person has dignity and worth, that every story matters. He died for this belief, but his conviction lives on in the ritual; it has not been erased.

Rev. Stacy Craig serves as a Unitarian Universalist (UU) minister with the Keweenaw Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Houghton, MI and the Chequamegon Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Ashland, WI. She can be reached at minister@keweenawuu.org