Showing everything tagged as Revd Dr Sam Wells

I wonder, when you lie on your bed, how long it takes you to get to sleep. There’s something extraordinarily vulnerable about lying down with your eyes closed not knowing what will happen next. It puts us on touch with our isolation.

I don’t really like the term practical theology. I don’t like it because for me all theology is practical. So to employ the term practical theology is to suggest two things that in my view are mistaken. The first is that theology is abstract and arcane, and that practical theology is the part that brings it down to earth.

There are two kinds of things: those that abide forever; and those that don’t. The things that abide forever we call essence; the things that last for a shorter period we call existence.

We human beings are in the first category. We exist: we think that because we exist we’re the heart of all things. But we forget that existence isn’t all there is. Existence is not the same as essence. Existence is subject to change and decay – and death. Essence isn’t. Yes, we do indeed exist. But we’re not essences: we’re not permanent. We’re not essential. Take us away and there still is. Our being depends on the existence of others.

Two weeks ago I sat in the deanery garden of St Mary’s Cathedral, Johannesburg, with Godfrey Harwood, who was dean from 1986, during the transfer of power, and who had become a close friend of Geoffrey Brown, vicar of St Martin’s during the same period.

Last week in the US Open tennis championship, the Australian Nick Kyrgios, at that point a set and 0-3 down, let a couple of serves pass him without attempting to play them. The hugely experienced and respected umpire Mohamed Lahyani, wondering whether the player was having a physical spasm or a mental meltdown, got down from his chair and said to him, ‘You’re great for tennis. But this isn’t good. It’s not you.’

When I was at an American university, each year the head of undergraduate studies would give the same address to the entering class: ‘find your passion.’ It gave the impression the faculty offered a beauty parade and the students surveyed the catwalk and eventually decided – ‘That’s the one for me.’