Walk Humbly: Encouragements for living, working and being
By Samuel Wells
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Samuel Wells
Dr. Sam Wells is a visiting professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Kings College in London, England.
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Walk Humbly - Samuel Wells
Walk Humbly
Encouragements for Living, Working, and Being
Samuel Wells
Canterbury_logo_fmt.gifWilliam B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Grand Rapids, Michigan
© Sam Wells 2019
Published in 2019 by the Canterbury Press Norwich
Editorial office
3rd Floor, Invicta House
108–114 Golden Lane
London EC1Y 0TG, UK
www.canterburypress.co.uk
Canterbury Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd (a registered charity)
Hymns Ancient & Modern® is a registered trademark of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd
HAM.jpg13A Hellesdon Park Road, Norwich,
Norfolk NR6 5DR, UK
Published in the United States in 2019 by
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, Canterbury Press.
The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
978 1 78622 150 6
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by CPI Group (UK) Ltd
For Andrew and Frances
Contents
Preface
1. Be Humble
2. Be Grateful
3. Be Your Own Size
4. Be Gentle
5. Be a Person of Praise
6. Be Faithful
7. Be One Body
8. Be a Blessing
Wonderings
Preface
This is a short book: but it may not turn out to be a quick read. It’s designed to be pondered, weighed, tasted, and digested one chapter at a time – maybe one paragraph at a time, perhaps even one sentence at a time. If you find it a little dense, perhaps you’re seeking to read it a little too fast. Its reading demands of the reader what its argument asks: humility, gentleness, patience, gratitude.
It is shaped to move, inspire, encourage, persuade, challenge. What it commends is first a way of seeing and inhabiting existence; but second, a way of living, relating, and seeking. It’s based around a single idea; but it doesn’t promote simply an idea: it isn’t shy of describing the implications of that idea. Those implications might be called essential existence.
In 1927 the American writer and lawyer Max Ehrmann wrote a prose poem, beginning with the words Go placidly,
that he published in 1948. It achieved fame, after his death, under the title Desiderata.
The rector of St. Paul’s Church, Baltimore, included it in an anthology in 1956, and an urban myth grew that suggested it had been composed in the year of the church’s foundation, 1692. It was extraordinarily popular in the 1970s but has more recently largely returned to the obscurity from which it came. It offers a number of platitudes, among them Be yourself
and Be gentle with yourself
; but it also has some deeper wisdom, such as the observation Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
If this book speaks in an assertive, direct voice, it does so in the spirit of the prose poem that inspired it. I hope that readers who are not used to receiving such unabashed counsel will quickly recognize that I am invariably addressing myself. Much more than to Ehrmann, the style and content of my words are indebted to Thomas Traherne. His Centuries of Meditations have had the effect on me that I hope this volume will have on its readers. Traherne is always teasing, dancing, inciting, and pirouetting. But he has the ability to stay still, and dwell deeply on just one moment, one artifact, one insight – as Mother Julian once cradled a hazelnut, and as God treasures us. It is such intensity, such wonder, such concentration, such joy that this book seeks to enliven. It is an invitation to a way of being, a way of becoming fully alive, in which reading, contemplating, celebrating, discovering, and praying meet, and gradually become indistinguishable from one another.
What I want is for a person to ask, How should I feel when I have prayed?
– and for their companion to reply, "You know how you felt when you finished reading Walk Humbly? It should feel like that."
1. Be Humble
Be humble. Ponder your moment – your location in time. There are things that abide forever; and there are things that last for a limited period. The things that abide forever we call essence; the things that last for a limited period we call existence.
We human beings are in the second category. We exist: we think that because we exist – because we are aware that we exist – we are the heart, the center, the purpose of all things. But we tend to forget that existence isn’t all there is. We are missing something: something important, something vital. Existence is not the same as essence. Existence is subject to change and decay – and death. Essence isn’t. Yes, we do indeed exist, and that is precious, and remarkable, and the basis of all the joys of life. But we are not essences: we are not eternal, ineradicable, permanent. We are not essential. We are simply existential. There is, without us. Take us away and there still is. We are contingent