Buber's I and Thou and a Bit of Nietzsche Kelly Moody

I have really been perplexed by what we have been reading in class lately, Martin Buber's I and Thou. I remember reading it last semester and it never clicked and dominated my mind like it does now, the 2nd time through it.
I was thinking about the I-you versus I-it relationship that occurs when picking a flower. You find a flower, one of a kind, and you stare at it, encountering it, it is encountering you, you are both breathing the same air, sacred space, both alive and equal.
Then you pick the flower. Suddenly the flower turns into an 'it'. You just couldn't help yourself and you wanted to keep it all for yourself, parade around with this flower, but in the process of that you box yourself up, you kill the flower, and all for the price of temporary enjoyment.
You encounter the flower and initially the relationship is an I-you one. Then, you pick the flower, dominate it, you don't even allow it to choose its own fate, you force yourself on it for the sake of your own indulgence, and the relationship changes to an empty 'I-it' one.
I also think about the flowers in grocery stores. We pick them, we take them away from the sacred all really to just sell to people who are nostalgic about their lack of the sacred. We sell these symbols because we have that void, we are becoming more and more like those drones in Baraka, like those chicks in the factory, so we try to compensate for it by picking flowers, selling them in grocery stores, to buy and enjoy (one sided that is, i-it, because the bouquet is merely an empty symbolic object that can't participate) for a temporary time. Why don't we just go for a walk in the woods and admire the art of creatures? Encounter but not experience(taking away from the reciprocity and then resulting in that void of your own "i")
Thinking about the I-you and I-it relationship among all things we do, and realizing it as an underlying theme in our interactions is really important and puts things in such a better perspective.
When i was reading the section on religion, i was thinking about what Nietzsche said, "God is dead". We have turned God into an "it" i feel, Buber talks about how the idea of spirituality originally had the i-you but transformed into dominantly an i-it kind of practice. There can be individual interpretations among people on this, everyone has their own way of treating religion, of treating their relationships whether with people or God, but the overarching picture of religion seems empty, because of this void that i-it creates. A friend of mine was telling me once that he was having a tough time in his life, he was homeless, and distraught, confused, and was walking around a city one day and decided to seek help in a church. He went in, and asked the priest to please help him, comfort him, give him something to read, some insight, and the priest refused and made him leave because of the way he looked. Where is the sacred here? This is a perfect example of how the church is often turned into an i-it kind of relationship. that priest would not have turned him away if he has an i-you relationship with God and other people. my friend was merely an 'it', something he could yay or nay salvation for, he could choose to help or not, but his own value system had been dominated by that i-it perspective with the cover of i-you. he proved that he had the cover, the mask, when he chose to prove that God is Dead.