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  • Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
  • Stewardship and Gift Policy
    • Saints We've Known
    • Charitable Giving and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
  • Sermons 2022-23
    • A Waste of time
    • The Seventh Principle
    • Make Light of It
    • A Turn of the Screw
    • America: Part II
    • What Do You Expect?
    • Good Mourning
    • Beyone Repair?
    • No Signal
    • Absolutely, Maybe, Definitely Not
    • Do Guardian Angels Exist?
    • Right Here
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  • Religious Exploration
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  • Making the BUUC Accessible
  • LOVEUU
  • Community Resources
    • Mental Health Providers, Worcester MA
    • Southern Worcester County Parent Guide
  • Contact Us
    • Sermons 2021-22
  • Sermon Archives
    • Finding Joy in Uncertain Times
    • The Arithmetic of Joy
    • Of Muck and Martyrs
    • Doing Dishes
    • Idle Worship
    • The Fear of the Refugee
    • It's Not Just You
    • If We Choose
    • Lazy Busy
    • A Most Human Season
    • Running on Empty
    • Alone Together
    • Come Home
    • Winter Warmth
    • How Big Is Your Circle?
    • Thanksgiving Life
    • Kurt Vonnegut: Humanist Hero
    • In Costume
    • Again
    • Borderland
    • The Geometry of Life
    • Transformation and Growth
    • Come Build a Land
    • Our Brains, Our Minds and Our Hearts
    • Gifts
    • Repairers of the Breach
    • The Times They Are A-Changin'
    • Mission Possible
    • It Matters
    • Thanksgiving Reflection
    • Shoes That Fit
    • Winter
    • Ignorance, Answers, and Bliss
    • Questions, Questions
    • Living to the Point of Tears
    • Lost in the Shuffle: UU's Less Popular Principle
    • On the Turning Away
    • A Matter of Degree
    • A Collection of Near Death Experiences
    • I Know Her So Well, I Think. I Thought.
    • Faith-based Resilience
    • To Abet Creation
    • Who Cares?
    • A Matter of Life and Depth
    • Pass/Fail
    • Enough
    • O Holy Light
    • With New Eyes
    • Coming Alive
    • Beyond Words
    • Becoming
    • A Miracle Even Thomas Jefferson Could Embrace
    • Fear Not!
    • The Miracle of Change
    • Meeting Grace
    • R-E-S-P-E-C-T
    • Serving with Grace
    • The Pursuit of Happiness
    • When Heresy Met Sally
    • The Souls of All Living Creatures
    • What Are You Looking For?
    • Beloved
    • Let Me Count The Ways
    • Happiness
    • Chosen
    • Faith and Belief
    • Room To Grow
    • Blessed Fools
    • Don't Be a Superhero
    • Getting There from Here
    • Unfinished Business
    • Universalism's Origen
    • Yearn to Learn
    • Beauty Saves
    • Commentary on Freedom
    • Being Human: Religious Community in a Plastic Age
    • Questionable Certainties and Faithful Doubts
    • Commentaries on Murphy's Law
    • Children of a Lesser God
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Life Incarnate
    • So You Want to Be Happy
    • A Year's End Resolution
    • Where Stars Are Born
    • Thanking Eve
    • Anger, Our Teacher
    • Everlasting Punishment
    • Comprehending Moral Imperatives in a Me-centered World
    • Promises Kept
    • Dancing With The Stars: Science and Religion
    • Two Steps and Missteps: Church Membership for Human Beings
    • Light of the World
    • Dear God
    • Imago Hominis
    • CESA: Reflections on Drug Addiction
    • Falling in Love Again
    • How Does Your Garden Grow
    • Repent! No Guilt Trip Required
    • Go Out into the World
    • Thanks-living
    • Life and Not Life
    • Guilty As Charged
    • Dare To Hope
    • Don't Forget To Chew
    • Break the Silence - Stop the Violence
    • Living Among Strangers
    • What Is Religion Anyway?
    • East of Eden
    • Praying Attention
    • Wholly Human
    • The Healing Power of Forgiveness
    • All I Want for Christmas
    • Let It Be...Let It Go
    • Why Not?
    • People Like You
    • Vulnerable Trust
    • Thin Places
    • Now What?
    • Courageously Humble
    • The Last Butterfly
    • The Good, The Bad, and The Whole
    • Sacred Souvenirs
    • Made Whole
    • This Wild and Precious Life
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Where Our Future Can Begin
    • Taking Stock: Managing Our Spiritual Inventory
    • To Convert Life into Truth
    • Are We There Yet?
    • Family Matters
    • Ordinary Saints
    • All I Wanted Was Everything
    • Giving Thanks
    • To Be or Not To Be
    • Entering the Christmas Story
    • A Great Light
    • What's Real?
    • Troubling the Water
    • The Amazing Mr. Wedgewood
    • Lend Me Your Ears
    • Work That Is Real
    • Happy Melba Toast Day
    • The Great Pacific Garbage Dump
    • Plastics, Benjamin!
    • Surprise Beginnings
    • A Place at the Table
    • Norbert Capek’s Flower Communion: A Call To Honor Life
    • Voices of God
    • Hold On To What Is Good
    • The Little Stone Church That Rocks
    • What Would Jean-Luc Do?: A Tribute to Humanist Hero Gene Roddenberry
    • From Who am I? to Whose are We?
    • Turning
    • Spirituality
    • R & R
    • Spritual F-Words
    • Does Anyone Really Like Herding Cats?
    • Prepare to Be Amazed
    • The Greatest Gift
    • The Impossible Will Take A Little While
    • Taking Sides: Journey to the Center of the Universe
    • Help Wanted, Apply Within
    • Two Truths & Plastics and Water Don't Mix
    • The Third Conversation
    • Good People >
      • UU You >
        • Twitter and Covid and Wall Street, Oh, my!
        • I Do Believe in Spooks >
          • Holy Homophones >
            • What's in a Name?
            • So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye!
            • Open-Mindedness, As Assigned
            • Going on a Journey
            • Cheap Love
            • Nonproductive Delight
            • The Persistence of Memory
            • Thoughts about the Historical Jesus
            • Lindens and Tiarella and Bearberry, Oh My!
            • Season's Greetings
            • I Still Have A Dream
            • Peace Corps - A Lesson in Caring
            • Spiritual Engineering
            • Thanks for the Memories
            • Our Stories, Ourselves
            • Anxious Gardeners
            • The Best Sermon Ever!
            • UUnited
            • We Are Courageous
            • A Right Way to Be Wrong
            • Sacred Ideals
            • This Wild and Precious Life Revisited
            • 20/20
            • Home
            • What About Now?
        • Fragile
        • Time Ravel
        • Now Is Not the Time for Hope
        • The G Word (It's Probably Not what You Think)
    • No Thanks, I'll Walk
    • Be the Change
    • I Don't Know
    • What Lies Within
    • Guest Perspective
    • Growing Panes
    • De Colores
    • Roots and Wings
BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH

Ordinary Saints

Rev. Craig M. Nowak

Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
November 3, 2013

 “Nothing is settled.  Everything matters.”[1]  A number of years ago I gave a New Years Day sermon at a church in Connecticut in which I told the congregation assembled that I was giving up New Year’s resolutions that were too difficult for me to keep and instead had settled on one I was sure I could follow through on.  That resolution was simply: To change the world.  The seeming immodesty of my resolution generated laughter among those in attendance. 

Laughter of course is sometimes a great ice breaker, it can be a sign of comfort or ease among a group of people.  But laughter can also mask or disguise our unease.  To be honest, I’m more often met with laughter than serious commitment from people when I talk about changing the world.  It’s not difficult to see why. 

Every day we are bombarded with news of war, disease, greed, and violence… stories highlighting our inhumanity towards one another… stories of injustice and suffering that weigh heavily on our hearts and minds.  And as our spirits are worn thin by the sheer magnitude of the world’s problems, we find ourselves doubly pained by the pang of our apparent powerlessness and unease of inertia.  Changing the world can seem an impossible task. We hunger for inspiration to break the bonds of despair and inaction.                          

“Nothing is settled.  Everything matters.”  

          On November 1st many churches celebrate All Saints Day, a day to remember and honor all saints known and unknown.  While the definition of who or what a saint is varies widely among the world’s religions, we can say with some confidence that saints, regardless of the religious tradition with which they are identified, are called to act in service of something larger than themselves; they are called to shine the light of the Holy in the dark places of our world. Contrary to our cultural assumption, saints are not flawless individuals, even the saints immortalized in stone and stained glass, legend and lore, were imperfect.  

The esteemed psychologist Abraham Maslow reminds us, “There are no perfect human beings! Persons can be found who are good, very good indeed, in fact, great. There do in fact exist creators, seers, sages, saints, shakers, and movers...even if they are uncommon and do not come by the dozen. And yet these very same people can at times be boring, irritating, petulant, selfish, angry, or depressed. To avoid disillusionment with human nature, we must first give up our illusions about it.”[2]  Saints are ordinary people who happen to be extraordinarily human.

“Nothing is settled.  Everything matters.”

The ordinary saints among us are living embodiments of these words.  They are profoundly human people who remind us that we are co-authors in life whose choices determine the outcome of our stories… and ultimately the meaning of our lives.  The ordinary saint possesses a deep and abiding awareness of the interconnectedness of all life and acts accordingly. 

One of the pitfalls well meaning people fall into in the face of  the world’s suffering is to focus on the magnitude of the problem.  But doing so only increases our likelihood of becoming trapped in a vicious cycle of powerlessness and inertia. Instead we might learn the way of the ordinary saint.  The ordinary saint learns to see with clarity, discerns what is truly possible in a given moment and then responds to that awareness because it matters; the ordinary saint refuses to condemn humankind to ugliness; he or she reveals to us the beauty we all posses, beauty which resides, according to R.C.A. Moore, “in our entire selves; our nerves and muscles, our histories and minor choices.”[3] 

“Nothing is settled.  Everything matters.”

When I was in middle school there was a boy in my class who used to bully me mercilessly.  One day Mr. LeBlanc, my gym teacher, witnessed this boy humiliating me in front of some other boys.  Mr. LeBlanc reprimanded the bully then took me aside and asked if I was okay.  He told me to let him know if the boy made any more trouble for me.  Mr. LeBlanc was an ordinary saint.  He saw suffering, figured out what he could do, and took action. 

Today, Mr. LeBlanc is one of the few teachers from middle school whose name I still remember, and not because I loved gym.  I remember his name because he chose to respond to my suffering when others stood as silent witnesses to it.  He modeled compassion and affirmed that I was worth caring about when the inaction of my peers denied my dignity as person.  He brought the light of God into the darkness of my world at that time and for that I will always be grateful. 

“Nothing is settled.  Everything matters.”

          Ordinary saints are people whose very way of being in the world changes the world.  They are all around us giving us refuge from life’s troubles with a kind word or a smile.  They are the people who don’t lose their temper with a new cashier and people who slow down so you can get out of a driveway on a busy street.  They are strangers who show up at candlelight vigils to stand with the suffering and the person who takes the time to write a letter to Congress.  They are people who suffer and celebrate with us as we co-author the story of the world with our lives.  They are people… just ordinary people who choose a different path, people whose minor choices beautify the world moment by moment, life by life. 

Writer Robert Benson reminds us, “All of the places of our lives are [potential] sanctuaries; some of them just happen to have steeples. And all of the people in our lives are [potential] saints; it is just that some of them have day jobs and most will never have feast days named for them.”[4]  Ordinary saints are just people; people who understand, “Nothing is settled.  Everything Matters.”

It seems only right that we should set aside time to honor the ordinary saints in our lives.  Those people who by their words and deeds have shaped the direction of our lives and have inspired us to plumb the depths of our humanity that we might live more fully and more kindly this precious life we’ve been given. 

How might we honor our ordinary saints?  The following excerpt from an anonymous poem I was given is a good place to begin…

“Remember me in your heart:

Your thoughts, and your memories,

Of the times we loved,

The times we cried,

The times we laughed,

For if you always think of me, I will never have gone.”[5]

“Nothing is settled.  Everything Matters.”

“All of people in our lives are [potential] saints”, Robert Benson reminds us, and most of them ordinary.  And friends, this means you too can be someone’s saint…the bearer of light in another person’s moment of darkness or the flame which brightens their day.

Now perhaps to some of you this may sound a bit sentimental… a little too saccharin for those of you who prefer your religion with a little more grit.  Trust me, it is not my intention to fill your heart and minds with the theological equivalent of marshmallow fluff.   Rather, I hope that you will take my words today as an invitation to pause and reflect, to become a little more aware and appreciative of those ordinary saints who have come bearing the light of Holy into your life and that in so reflecting you will grow in awareness of opportunities and courage to do the same for others.  Our world needs ordinary saints. You and your children and your children’s children can change with world...we all can by learning the way of the ordinary saint.

The ordinary saint shows us how to be human.  They change the world one person at a time through words and deeds that reveal to one another the love of that which we call God.  The call of the ordinary saint is echoed in the rallying cry of our Universalist forbear, John Murray who said, “Go out into the highways and by-ways …Give the people something of your new vision.  You may possess only a small light but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of women and men.  Give them, not Hell, but hope and courage.  Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.”[6]  Remember, “Nothing is settled, everything matters.”  The choice… is yours.

Amen and Blessed Be.



[1] Robert R. Walsh, “It Matters” from Noisy Stones. (Boston: UUA, 1992)


[2] http://www.philosophersnotes.com/quotes/by_teacher/Abraham+Maslow


[3] R.C.A. Moore “Words for the Wind” in Freethinking Mystics with Hands: Exploring the Heart of Unitarian Universalism Tom Owen-Towle (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1998).


[4] http://www.wisdomquotes.com/003646.html (Robert Benson is a writer and leads seminars and retreats on prayer, silence, writing, and spirituality.)


[5] www.funeralhelper.org/remember-me-in-your-heart-unknown-remembrance.html


[6] http://www.jsmsociety.com/John_Murray.html


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