SUNDAY SUNDOWN AT ALL SOULS

This is an excerpt from a Service Opener on November 3rd by an enthousiastic fan of the All Souls At Sundown Services.

Jazz and Unitarianism are linked in a special way for me.

When I was 17, my family moved from here to Miami. It was a shock to me, having to start over in a new place, and I didn't have any friends. But I had just begun to be smitten by jazz music, and I heard about a Saturday-night jazz series at a Unitarian church in South Miami. The church was hidden by a dense covering of palm trees, a kind of tropical paradise. It was close enough to the ’60s that women in peasant dresses danced free-form in the back of the sanctuary, and in between sets, fathers and sons passed thickly rolled cigarettes back and forth, inhaling deeply. And the music, led by the dean of Miami jazz musicians, Ira Sullivan, was divine. I found it all somehow liberating.

While my jazz education continued, my Unitarian education did not, at least not directly. In college, I found myself drawn to Herman Melville, who as Forrest noted recently, was a backbencher at this very congregation, and also to Emerson and Whitman. But life has a way of bringing you back around.

So when my wife and I were looking for a religious education for our little girl, we hit upon All Souls. And there it was, all those years later, All Souls at Sundown, a jazz series at a Unitarian church, and all the better that it joined jazz with poetry.

It seems to me that Unitarian Universalism is the jazz of religions. Without a sacred text to lean on, Unitarians are forced to improvise—to think on their feet. There are some familiar chord changes, some harmonies that resonate. But Unitarians are freed up to create the melody, so to speak, and that act of creation is what binds us together.

For one of his Sacred Concerts, which bridged jazz and worship, Duke Ellington wrote a beautiful tune called "Come Sunday". Come this Sunday, and on others on the first of each month, the sense of freedom inherent in the jazz player, and the poet, and the Unitarian-Universalist believer will come together to make a sweet music.