It Just Happened - submitted by Nicholas Shifrar



The energy is a peaceful morning vibration. It’s not the frenzy of a festival. It’s not the excitement of a campus during the first weeks of fall or spring. It’s the steady radiation of an engaged movement. Some set tables with fliers and sign-up sheets on the patio. Others are parking their cars, locking up their bikes, and walking through the front doors to snag a seat in the red-padded, white-wooden pews. The choir is rehearsed and ready to groove. It’s 8:55am and the service is about to start.

I’m on the fly. Jog at 5:50, breakfast and an email or two at 6:20, work by 7. God supposedly set this day aside for rest. But I’m a Unitarian, I’ll rest when the world is just. My employer gave me a two-hour window to attend the Sunday service that I cherish. I’m grateful for this. Unfortunately, it means I’m unable to stand at any table or chat with the active members to hear about their organizations and commitments after the service. The Unitarian Universalist Young Adult table, the Social Justice table, the Environmental Justice table, the Choir table, to name a few. They’re all set up on church’s front patio beneath a solid blue September sky ready to re-enlist folks or to sign them up to various activities for the first time. I walk briskly through the small crowd and swoop in to snatch a seat with the choir. So, maybe my sense of the air isn’t fully encompassing. I’m fallible and finite, but service is about to start with the singing of “Welcome, Welcome,” by Clif Hardin. I’ll nip the rumination in the bud.

After the song, it’s Rev. Matthew’s turn. He moves up to the pulpit. “Come in,” he says with a peaceful, welcoming voice. “Come in, you agitators and thinkers.” I can feel the space opening up with the characteristic language of our engaged progressivism like the first deep breath of the day. His voice is smooth and warm like a space heater in winter.

“But seriously, come in.”

The doors are then opened for those agitators and thinkers who are currently categorized as latecomers. We’re all settled in now and at the end of the opening words, Rev. Matthew lights the chalice. We’re here to reconnect with Hope and Knowledge and for a weekly reorientation to the infinite possibilities of Love.

Today’s sermon from the great Rev. Goldsmith is many things. It is an extraction of Thoreau’s Walden-grown wisdom; it is a relaying of history from William Ellery Channing to the American Unitarian Association to the convergent evolution of Unitarians and Universalists and their merger in 1961; it is a lesson on the non-dogmatic, non-creedal, universally applicable bylaws established by the UUA in 1984. If, though, I were to whittle it down to a single thing (and the last time I whittled thusly I told my date that the grand October sky this evening was “Blue. And beautiful,”), I would whittle it down to a call. It was a call for us attending members to engage in the Unitarian Universalist tradition.

The rich history of agitators and immense minds is why I am here. I sit in the chapel this morning because Thoreau didn’t reject the world, he criticized it on his quest to live the good life. He dismantled cultural practices to better understand purpose and intention. He sojourned in a natural setting to discover the worth of patient, determined, simple labor and to uncover the meaning of a person’s encounters with the surrounding world: the occasionally overwhelming and perpetually perplexing umwelt of the human organism.

It seems to me that we sit in church on a Sunday morning because this religious alternative is one that embodies positive change for the sake of our earth and each of its beings. The transcendentalists reawakened the divinity in our own breast; the humanists gave us a manifesto to centralize our humanity, and raise our attention to the responsibilities bequeathed by that humanity; the early Unitarian ministers like Theodore Parker pushed the limits of what could be said behind a pulpit and uncovered the tendency of some preachers to conceal things that should be said behind a pulpit. This church is a piece of a great movement. We are its rational and compassionate agents.

I sat in my little chair feeling the undercurrent of history’s unseen ocean moving within me. From Rev. Goldsmith’s soul emerged the meaning of the word soul. It isn’t an irrational concept or unscientific, otherworldly thing. The soul is a person’s relation to the beauties, the mysteries, the simplicities, the mundanities, the profundities of an individual lifespan caught in the molecular shaking of a cosmos that has temporarily coalesced into the spherical rock we call Earth. I could simplify this. The soul is our connection to the many fragile and finite things of this life as well as our connection to the infinite. The soul is a way to express the ideals contained within us or the fears we never thought we’d have or the ones we face daily. The soul is the mind’s ruminations about our mortality and meaning that sometimes are manifest into speech or writing and other times drift off into the graveyard of thought. The soul is the connection to grandma’s cooking, the expansive evening sky, and the writings of 19th century New England essayists. It is everything we are, seen and unseen.

This sermon was a call to sustain our engagement, to walk forward with principle, and to understand again the lineage behind our forward motion. Coming from Rev. Goldsmith who has been a minister for Salt Lake’s First Unitarian church for almost a quarter of its history, we are given greater reason to step up. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Those who are ignorant of history miss out on its bone-quaking inspiration. Those who engage in history write it.

It’s not possible to portray each detail of the sermon or the service. That doesn’t mean erasure. It means there’s unexplored stardust in this universe of experience. From Rev. Cockrum’s playful musical antics and wit to David Owens’ outstanding musicianship and ever-present empathy, this is a small reflection from the First Unitarian church in Salt Lake City. These details are not lost on open souls.