First came the pagans - the worldwide web of nature worshipping and nature-based religious believers - then much later came the Christian Church. For the early church, it was official policy to supplant pagan observances with Christian ones - what better way could there have been to virtually and eventually wipe out any memory of the past. All Saints Day, observed tomorrow and on every November 1was just such an opportunity - given official authorization by Pope Gregory IV in 835, it replaced one of the four great festivals of the pagan nations of the north. Also called Allhallows or Hallowmas - and in some protestant circles All Souls Day - it's juxtaposition to Allhallows Eve, what we now know as Halloween, is a clear reminder that as hard as the Christian church might have tried to wipe out all observance and memory of indigenous, pagan celebrations, they just couldn't do it: it was if to say, you can't take the pagan out of the people's bones - it was there first and will remain, forever it seems.

Of course for some, neither pagan nor church observance makes much difference. I definitely fell into this category. I grew up in a religious environment that paid no attention to All Saints Day - I don't remember hearing anything about it at all. The lives of the church saints were of simply no importance whatsoever. And as I was slowly introduced to their existence by way of lunchroom, sleepover and Sunday School conversation, my confusion and disinterest remained unchanged. And then there were the stories, like this one:

Remarkable indeed! But it was just this sort of story - obviously an affirmation of sainthood for some - that drove me further and further from the lives of these unordinary souls. I just didn't have what it took, which reminds me of another saint story:

Well, me too - it was the first step that counts and I just couldn't take it. So, the saints never became part of my life. And they still haven't, at least not in the way the eastern and western orthodox churches might have them in my life. Which is to admit that the window was opened a bit some year's back and slowly it's been inched up a little at a time. Here's what happened:

Ten years ago, as part of my Doctor of Ministry work, I was required to take a preaching class. To my shock and surprise, as a primary text we were using the Christian lexionary (which contains thematic descriptions of every Sunday and church observances including lesson topics, readings, liturgical colors, the proverbial "soup to nuts" and how to do it). Each student had to pick a Sunday and then we were assigned one church observance - and you guessed it, I was assigned All Saints Day. It could have been worse - I realize that now; but at the time all I could think about was how a non-Christian, agnostic, Unitarian Universalist was going to create, observe and lead a group of Christian ministers through an authentic observance of their All Saints Day. After some research, which included a lot of reading, but most significantly after some deep soul searching and reflection, I came up with what I feel was one of my better efforts and an appreciation for tomorrow's observance in a UU context.

It all started by coming to grips with sainthood. I mean, just what did that really mean, to be a saint. Was there someway to look at saintliness outside of the church, a way that any person could appreciate it. In other words, stripped of all the institutional, hierarchical, ceremonial and liturgical language and symbolism, what did it mean to be a saint? Was this something I could really understand and feel? It was while I was asking all these questions, that I found this quote in a UU church newsletter (imagine that!):

Becoming and being a saint does not mean being perfect but being whole; it does not mean being exceptionally religious, or being religious at all, it means being liberated from religiosity and religious pietism of any sort; [becoming and being a saint] does not mean being morally better, it means being exemplary; it does not mean being godly, but rather being truly human; [becoming and being a saint] does not mean being other-worldly, but it means being deeply implicated in the practical existence of this world without succumbing to the world or any aspect of this world ... (William Stringfellow)

These then are the qualities that make for sainthood: wholeness, liberation from religious pretentiousness, being exemplary, involved in living. Saintliness, then, is living out all those qualities of personhood that strive to embrace life, qualities that are always known to us yet often remain just out of reach. Another person puts it like this:

To be a saint is to live not with hands clenched to grasp, to strike, to hold tight to a life that is always slipping away the more tightly we hold it; but it is to live with the hands stretched out both to give and to receive with gladness. To be a saint is to work and weep for the broken and suffering of the world, but it is also to be strangely light of heart in the knowledge that there is something greater than the world that mends and renews. Maybe more than anything else, to be a saint is to know joy. Not happiness that comes and goes with the moments that occasion it, but joy that is always there like an underground spring no matter how dark and terrible the night. To be a saint is to be a little out of one's mind, which is a very good thing to be a little out of from time to time. It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full. (Buechner)

Put in these terms, it's much easier for me to talk about saints, to talk about the people who through their wholeness, generosity of self, joy and insanity have changed the lives of so many, have changed my life. And what I have discovered as remarkable is that very few - if any - of these saints started in unordinary ways. The saints who have shaped my world, began in the most ordinary of ways, you might even say that they were - well, they were a little crazy.

At 26, Martin Luther King, Jr. moved to Montgomery unclear of what he wanted, of where he was going. Many of his early initiatives were flops, failures by anyone's measuring stick. Lech Walesa was a shipyard electrician before events threw him into a leadership role in Poland's Solidarity Movement and eventually people making him their first freely elected President in decades. Wei Jingshen was a technician at the Beijing Zoo when he felt compelled to write his thoughts about democracy on a public wall, thoughts that helped inspire the Tiananmen Square protests and resulted in his long-imprisonment. Lois Gibbs was just a housewife wanting to care for her family when she organized her neighbors at Love Canal and then founded the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste. None of these folks, and the other thousands and thousands just like them, were preordained to step into unordinary roles that would change people lives. Each one of them was merely acting as themselves, doing what they knew was right, what they wanted. Maybe you've heard the way 18^th century Hasidic Rabbi Susya once put it, "God will not ask me why I was not Moses, God will ask me why I was not Susya," which is to suggest that there is something quite extraordinary in the ordinary.

Rather than naming this sermon "Unordinary Souls," I could have titled it "The Ordinary Lives of Saints." Just as the church has led many to believe that those having received sainthood have shaped the church, the holy catholic tradition, and continue shaping our world today, I would assert that each of us, as is suggested in the "Reflection" I've reprinted in the bulletin, is surround by a "cloud of witnesses" - the equivalent of saints - by which our lives are led, buoyed, challenged, supported and comforted. These souls - despite the appearance of ordinariness - this cloud of witnesses, are made unordinary because they have made us who we are today, sometimes in ways that we will never fathom. These unordinary souls include many whom we might all agree are saints, but among them are those who are not so well known, or maybe only known to you. Let's call them our ancestors, ancestral saints. Alice Walker tells of them in this way:

To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps, to God; or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrows, is always a measure of what has gone before. (Billy Blue)

Our ancestral saints come in all kinds of ways. Ken Bode (in the reading) speaks about remembering the fictional characters that have shaped his life, that, when walking on the beach or sitting in his bedroom, he recalls and talks with in spite of some people's protest that they "never existed! Somebody made them up!" These are his cloud of witnesses.

Every time I come to this church, as I know is true for many of you, I think of the long heritage of Unitarians and Universalists in America, and now in the Philippines; I remember the mothers and fathers of this congregation's tradition who blessed us with their hard work and foresight; every time we gather on a Sunday morning, their memory and presence is evoked.

And then each one of us has family and friends-that-might-as-well-be-family that have shaped us and are shaping us still - they have made us who we are today. In the last verses of a song entitled "The Family Reserve," Lyle Lovett sings of his thoughts and feelings prompted by a reunion, the kind of thoughts and feelings that many of you have had and in this way, you might be able to write your own lyrics. He says:

They all comprise the unordinary souls in our lives, our saints, the cloud of witnesses whom whether we want them or not, they are there - without them we would not, we could not be who we are.

Or will be - there is a future tense to all of this. Saints and unordinary souls don't die with recognition - in fact, that's when it all begins! Because in recognition comes a realization, an "ah-ha!!" Because now we understand - or least soon you will if you haven't already - that you too will be a saint one day, you too will be an unordinary soul, you too will be part of someone's cloud of witnesses. In fact, it might already be happening.

Are you uncomfortable thinking of yourself in these terms? Listen to the way Maya Angelou talks about it. She was being interview by Cornell West at a college gathering when she said:

Everybody here has already been paid for. And if you understand that in a part of your mind and spirit - whether the ancestors came from Ireland or Asia, Eastern Europe or South America, or from Africa, lying spoon fashion in filthy hatches of slave ships - if you understand that somebody already paid for you, and that all you have to do is prepare yourself so that you can pay for someone else who is yet to come. And act on it, act with kindness and courtesy and generosity, develop patience so that your words don't just jump out of your mouth with rudeness and you cut somebody's heart away. Take a moment. (Restoring Hope, 196-7)

In Angelou's context, this realization that we are here because of others and that it is now our turn to mark the path for others to come, it's this "ah-ha" that is symbolized in the Matthew 13 parables (I shared earlier). In each of these stories, the character sets aside what is in hand for something he feels (and believes) will prove to be of far greater value and significance. And this, Jesus says each time, is like the Kingdom of Heaven: it's not what it appears to be - a tiny mustard seed, a common field, a small pearl. But each time, this ordinary thing or place is a path to the unordinary, the extraordinary, the fantastic!

Each of our lives might feel ordinary, far from saintliness. But each of us has the potential to be an unordinary soul for at least one other, if not for many. To be a saint, to be fully human, to be a witness in someone else's life - that is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Today, tomorrow, on any day, think of all the unordinary souls that form your cloud of witnesses, the saints in your life. And remember these words: "There are stars whose radiance is visible on earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living. (Hannah Senesh)

May they be a blessing on our lives. May we so live that we too will bless the world.

© the Rev. Fredric J. Muir
October 31, 1999

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