George Wertin is now a part of who I am and what I teach. I can’t get his spirit out of mine—and that’s a wonderful thing.

I can’t begin to tell you all the things that George has taught me in his time at St. Joan’s, but I can list a few of them. First, he taught me about holiness, with his insistence that we look for the holy in the here and now, in the routines of our everyday lives. In this way, he reminds me of the minister in Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Gilead, describing a young couple, shimmering in the wetness of droplets shaken from a branch:

It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of it now, except perhaps it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. . . . This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

George taught me about the boundaries of justice. Before he came, I was proud of St. Joan’s and its stance on social justice issues. I didn’t particularly believe that we needed to do much more. But George thought differently, and helped us to institutionalize our commitments, with the Isaiah Project and Tierra Nueva Dos and missions to South Africa and many other programs that embody our ongoing continuous solidarity with people who need an institutional friend.

Without saying much at all, George taught also me about collaborative ministry, the ways that we work together for the common good. George’s leadership style is subtle but effective. He’s a catalyst, so the mark of his success isn’t his life, but our lives as we perform the ministries of Christ in our own work and families and communities. Looking at you, I’d say he’s doing pretty good.

George also helped me to value the great spiritual writers. Before George, I tended to think of spirituality as the antithesis of the activism I valued. But George’s example—and especially his essays in the bulletin—let me see how spirituality isn’t always active, but it’s the surest foundation for activism, the launching pad for protests and participation.

Most importantly, George taught me about Superman. I always thought that Clark Kent had to get into costume to save the world. But George showed me that a cardigan sweater works just as well as tights and a cape. George showed me that Clark Kent is always Superman when he acts for truth and justice and/or the American way, depending on the truth and justice of the American way.

Like Clark Kent, George is an ordinary person, and that’s a good thing. He’s no good to me if he’s an extraordinary person, because I know very well that I’m not. Fortunately for me, George isn’t unusual. He isn’t special. He wasn’t chosen by God, except in the way that all of us are chosen by God. He is an ordinary man who accomplished great things by making ordinary and courageous choices.

We honor people like George not because they are great people, but because they use their ordinary gifts to help other ordinary people do great things. Like other people we celebrate in this community—Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero—George reminds us of ideas and ideals that matter to us—equality, justice, human dignity, compassion, community, nonviolence and love. But people like these—people like George—don’t just re-mind us; they embody our ideas and ideals. They show us how to live our virtues instead of just talking about them. They exemplify choices that we too might make in the world.

We are all ordinary people, with ordinary gifts. But when we use our gifts in the service of our religious and political ideals, as George does, we can make an extraordinary difference in the world. We can make a difference in our own families and schools and businesses. Small actions like these aren’t earth-shattering, but they are an essential element of what I would call the politics of insignificance, which does, in time, change the world. As Gandhi said, "Almost anything you do will be insignificant, but it is still very important that you do it."

One last comment. George is my confirmation name, and I chose it in part because of the heroic story of St. George and the dragon. In 1969, however, the church revised its calendar of saints and demoted St. George to the lowest category of commemoration because, they said, most of the stories about him were either apocryphal or incredible. For a while, it was troubling to have chosen the name of a mere myth. But now I don’t care because I have my own St. George, a man who would never slay a dragon, although he might domesticate it and convert it to a source of heat and light in the community. This St. George offers in both word and deed a wonderful vision of “the good life”—in the very deepest meaning of good.

So, my profound thanks to George Wertin, one of the miraculous ways that God puts the skin on love.