What Am I Living For? God

Autumn Lectures, St Martin-in-the-Fields September 26, 2022

What Am I Living For? God

Samuel Wells

Introduction

I’m feeling a bit sheepish because I’m here to talk about God; but the title of my address has a very prominent ‘I’ in it. As I’ve searched my soul and pondered my honest answer to the question, I’ve realised the only way I can answer it is to speak more personally than I’ve ever spoken in public before. So that means you’ve been invited tonight to hear about God, but you’re going to hear rather a lot about me.

I’m going to highlight four moments, possibly the four unhappiest episodes of my life. I want to use them as lenses to explain what they showed me about myself and what they revealed to me about God; and how in each case, once I’d been restored from my despair, I had a new and deeper answer to tonight’s question. I don’t imagine you’ll be unduly interested in the details of my personal struggles, but I hope the perceptions I’ve come to may encourage you that your struggles are valid and important and that in and through them you too may find truth. The curious thing is that the four moments I’m going to describe happened at five-year intervals in my young adulthood.

I’ll take them in the order in which they occurred.

Twenty

I was 20 years old. I was overwhelmed by two paradoxes. One was the contrast between the language and reality of poverty in which the gospels are saturated and the way the Christians I mixed with seemed largely oblivious to it. The other was the contrast between the glorious surroundings of my wealthy university and the squalor and suffering of the two-thirds world as I then knew it. The two paradoxes made me explosively angry.

In fact, on a deeper level, I suspect I was really struggling with two other things. One was the grief of my mother’s death a year before. The other was the fact that, while I’d been an academic success at school, things weren’t turning out as well at university, and I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. So what I thought I was angry about was injustice and selfishness, whereas I now reflect that what was really making me angry was the unspeakable terror of mortality and the creeping experience of powerlessness.

Anyhow, the one thing I was sure about was that it was everyone else’s fault. I really must have been intolerable to be around. I told my tutor in my first term I was horrified at the intellectual mediocrity of the place; I told my college principal I’d learned nothing in my first year. Ghastly. How arrogant. But I wasn’t really arrogant: I was desperate. That summer I had a real crisis. I thought maybe I should drop out of university and inflict my transformative talents on some organisation dedicated to saving the world. I was in a tremendous hurry. I had a lot to learn about humility. But it was more than that.

That summer I went on holiday with my father and my sister. One afternoon we found a beach. We must have missed the flags. In no time we were dragged down by a rip current. My sister was a decent swimmer, and she just about made it to shore. I wasn’t a great swimmer. My father was even worse. I realised he wasn’t going to make it. But somehow I kept hold of him, and, by some miracle, inhaling sea water and delayed shock, we got to the shore. Not letting go of him that day is the single best thing I’ve done in my life. But I didn’t decide to do it. I just realised I’d done it. There was a brief moment when I accepted we were both going to die. But there was no instant when I contemplated letting go. I was amazed to find I’d done it, because life had already shown me what a profoundly selfish person I could be.

By the time I started my second year at university I’d learned some important lessons. My life was not my own to squeeze events and experiences out of as if I were sucking on an orange quarter. My life was God’s, and I needed to develop a sense of humour about what God seemed to want to do with it. Rather than become furious with everyone else for not being holy or humble or just or clever, I would draw close to Jesus by being prepared to lay down my life for others – not dramatically or publicly, but naturally and instinctively. Rather than renounce my intellectual interests and squander my friendships, I would let the Holy Spirit put whatever talents I had to work as it saw fit. Most of all, if I wanted to discover what love meant, I needed to remember how good it felt, when my lungs were half full of sea water, not to let go of my father’s hand. I’d discovered what – and who – I was living for.

Twenty-Five

I was 25 years old. I had everything planned out. I was going to India. I would teach in a seminary for a summer. (What possessed me to think I had any capacity to teach now acutely embarrasses me.) I would meet a friend and we’d spend the last two weeks doing the Taj and the delights of Rajasthan.

Then it all went wrong. I couldn’t sleep. At all. Day after day I tossed in my bed all night. After a week I was in a terrible state. After two weeks I had a depression like I’ve never known. It wiped out my faith, my confidence, my energy, my ability to hold a conversation. It turned out I had a particularly acute form of glandular fever. My throat was agony, my mind was pulp. India was never going to happen. Those students who’d have learned a lifetime’s wisdom from 25-year-old me would remain forever ignorant. The sightseeing was off the agenda. I spent a week in hospital waiting for the pain to subside and the depression to lift. It’s amazing what sleeping tablets can do.

If the experience on the beach with my father taught me that life could end anytime, with no grand build-up or any sense of timing or logic, the experience of that depression taught me that life could be hell. I’m not sure it’s exaggerating to say the episode changed my personality. I went from having lots of energy, keen to make the party go, teasing the latecomer and chatting to the stranger, to a more reserved, understated, measured character who never wanted to get out of his emotional or energetic depth.

But more importantly it showed me what life was and what mattered most. As I lay in that hospital bed, lonely, hurting and miserable, I learned to break pain down into segments, to set myself targets of getting to the next mealtime, the next ward round, the next nurse visit. I felt the value of companionship, as a close friend travelled 150 miles to visit, and a man I didn’t know well and hadn’t previously admired sat with me silently as I wept with pain. I realised that, for all my fears about my physical plight, what horrified me most was the glimpse I’d had of utter isolation. I began to see that if I could be with people, and they could be with me, we could discover a kind of life that transcended physical adversity. I started to imagine what it would be like for God to be so with me that we’d be bonded in a way not even death could divide. I wasn’t so interested in a God who made dramatic gestures for me – even dying on a cross. I sought a God who was with me, even in my isolation and pain.

One morning a nurse briskly walked into the hospital room and said, ‘I know what you’re worried about. You think you’re going to stop breathing again.’ Four years previously I’d sustained a neck injury playing rugby. I’d got the heel of a boot in my neck. Over the course of the next four hours bruising grew and breathing got increasingly difficult. Eventually it became impossible. By this time I was in a hospital, and I was given a tracheotomy, and for the next two weeks I breathed through a tube in my neck. I couldn’t talk. The surgeon said, ‘I hope you’re not planning a career that involves public speaking.’ So four years later the nurse was spot on. She’d named my fear. Then she said, ‘Well you’re not going to stop breathing. You can stop worrying about that.’ I can’t describe the relief that nurse gave me. Somehow she had the perception to realise what was terrifying me, to name it, evaluate it, and take the fear away. I wanted to be someone who could listen to people so deeply that I could perceive their worst fear, even if they couldn’t name it themselves. I’d discovered who I was called to be and what I was living for.

Thirty

I was 30 years old. My wife and I were driving on a French motorway at 80mph. Too fast, as it turned out. Suddenly we entered a large stretch of standing water from a recent storm. The car aquaplaned, started to spin, and for a terrible moment hurtled between the front and back wheels of an articulated lorry. Somehow I twisted the steering wheel in a better direction, we thudded into another car, and came to a halt facing backwards in the middle of the three lanes. We emerged largely unscathed. But I still get flashbacks of careering under the trailer of that truck.

A few months later I found myself seriously confused. I’d come to the end of my curacy and my wife had picked up a fascinating job 200 miles away; so we were moving. But a mixture of bad luck, administrative oversight, and poor judgement left me with no clear sense of where I was headed. I completely lost my bearings. It was like I was replaying the incident on the motorway over and over in my head and felt I was spinning round, sometimes facing the lorry’s wheels, sometimes thudding into the other car, sometimes stuck motionless in the middle lane facing the wrong way.

I realised for the first time how much we live our life in stories, and how, without saying it out loud, I had a very clear idea of how my life was supposed to turn out – and it was not going that way at all. I was utterly bewildered. I wanted to be spontaneous, and trusting, and happy-go-lucky, but I was none of those things. I

was cross, perplexed, paralysed. Like the previous two episodes, I was powerless. And I hated it. A friend looked me in the eye and said, ‘Where’s your faith?’ I shook my head, but the honest answer was, ‘Spinning round on that French motorway.’

Experience has taught me that in my 30 years as a priest, from deprived rustbelt to shabby-chic urban village, from outer-ring sink estate to leafy American university campus, from mock-mock suburban newbuild to throbbing Trafalgar Square, the one continuity is powerlessness. It’s not poverty; it’s not sin; it’s not even oppression: it’s what all these things lead to – and that’s powerlessness. I learned at the age of 30 that ministry is all about sitting alongside people as they come to terms with and develop strategies to cope with and find God in powerlessness; as I’ve had to do myself, with immense gratitude to those who’ve sat beside me.

Ten years before, I’d been living for an end to poverty, not just in Britain but globally; I’d been longing for for a simple walk with Jesus, if not with sandals, then at least with few possessions; I’d been cultivating, if not a Galilean beard, then at least a righteous purpose and passionate convictions. Now I felt overwhelming failure: because having a high-minded idea what I was living for was all very well, but getting a job that gave me a chance to get anywhere near realising those ambitions seemed way out of reach. And, with the collapse in confidence that often accompanies an unsuccessful and drawn-out job quest, I began seriously to wonder if was capable of doing the job I’d so long sought.

What I needed to discover was grace. Grace meant that I was defined not by my ministry but by my baptism, not by my success but by being God’s child, not by my worthiness or righteousness but by being precious, honoured and loved by God. I’d grown up thinking if I was clever, people would admire me, if I was handsome, people would love me, if I was passionate to address poverty and committed to rectify inequality, I’d dwell in the company of the angels evermore. But at 30 years old I didn’t feel very clever or very handsome, and I certainly didn’t feel very worthy or righteous, and the passion that had filled my sails and the commitment that had driven my energy had eroded like a glacier in a decade of hot summers, leaving me with an ugly husk of sadness, guilt and anger.

I had to learn what we all have to learn, what we say tritely but discover intimately and often painfully, that what I’m living for is nothing of my own making or deserving, but is all gift. We all want to feel we’ve earnt what we have in life, that our accomplishments and triumphs and trophies are like bristling medals on a beret-wearing arch-backed veteran’s left breast on parade day. But the truth is, we did absolutely nothing to achieve the right to be born; no choice or quality of ours played any role in the mystery and astonishing miracle of our coming to exist; we live on earth just the blink of any eye; and no skill or talent of ours will have any role whatsoever in the life God has prepared for us beyond this one. These are things I suspect you can only face up to when you’re as miserable as I was at the age of 30. But once you realise them, they become the most important discovery you ever make, and thenceforth you laugh at your triumphs and no longer despair at your disasters, because this is not your life, it’s God’s life that’s on temporary loan to you, so you can treasure it and cherish it and be glad and grateful for it and ponder it in wonder and praise – but you can’t ruin it or destroy it or ultimately lose it because its destiny is in God’s hands not yours.

What I learned, and it took months not moments, and I’ll be forever grateful to those who waited patiently for me to learn it, was that worrying about posterity or maximising the possibilities of your life was living in far too small a timeframe. Only one thing matters, and that’s eternity. What I wanted to live for was to invest in and align myself with what would last forever. Everything else, whether it lasted a hundred, a million, or a billion years, was a flash in the pan compared with eternity. What I’d lost sight of in my despair was gratitude: gratitude that captured my heart with the recognition that my existence was an infinitesimally small possibility that yet came about; and humility: humility that said, ‘Ok, I’ve been given this astonishing gift: I might as well enjoy it and put it to work.’ And trust: trust that said, ‘Whatever I waste or fail to use, God will sweep up in eternity and fulfil to the utmost. Because in God, nothing is wasted.’ I’d discovered eternity was what I was living for.

Thirty-Five

Having realised at 20 that life was fundamentally about relationship; having discovered at 25 that I was called to be with people in their places of bewilderment and powerlessness; and having learned at 30 that it was all grace, and there was nothing I could do to perfect it or ruin it, it’s hard to admit that, five years later, at 35, I was still angry. That may surprise you, because I’m not one for letting my emotions take over or losing my temper. But don’t judge a book by its cover.

You’ll be familiar with the themes by now. I was angry about poverty and inequality. I was actually happier in my work than ever before, because even though being vicar of an underclass parish was the hardest job I’ve ever done, then or since, I was at least daily in the mix of the issues I remained passionate about. But I still lived in a world of blame and recrimination, where in retrospect I was trying to make sure I was on the side of the good guys – a location that gave me permission to be self-righteously cross with the bad guys. It was supposed to be virtue, but in fact it was way too much wrapped up in guilt and the perennial companion, powerlessness.

Then I found myself chairing a scheme that had £35m of government money to spend. This was transformative. Why? Because I discovered how difficult it was to put money to work to make things better. I realised I’d spent the last 20 years thinking poverty was about money. Instead I discovered poverty was about imagination – perceiving what to do; and confidence – finding people with whom to do it. In short poverty was about powerlessness. They were practically the same thing. From this moment on I now discern I was beginning to appreciate that it all came down to the word ‘with.’ With was the word that combined my longing for intimacy with God, my desire for companionship with others, my calling to accompany communities of faith, my intuition that the answer to the problem of the rich and the poor is each other, and my recognition that our human problem is not limitation but isolation.

At the same time and for much the same reasons I learned that I’d been captivated for 20 years by the notion of scarcity. There were not enough resources, money, justice, revelation. Fundamentally there was not enough God. And then the penny dropped. I was, at root, angry not with the rich, or with the cruel – or even with myself. I was angry with God. Angry with God for not giving us enough – fundamentally not being enough. What I discovered was that the real problem was not that God was not enough – but that God was too much. God was totally overwhelming.

But I couldn’t bear that. Being overwhelmed took away my identity, my ability to do good, to get it right, to justify myself by being on the side of the good guys and laying down my life for the poor. It took a penny-drop moment to realise that this wasn’t bad news, but indescribably good news. I was fundamentally irrelevant to the real story of the universe, but God had miraculously invited me into that story, and rather than complain I didn’t have the main part, or demand to know what my lines were, I’d be better advised to splash around in the story with the joy of a child standing under a waterfall or the exultation of a retriever chasing a ball. There was far too much of everything – too much truth, too much beauty, too much love. I got to experience a tiny segment of it. It was time to stop blocking it out in a fruitless effort to protect myself and begin to enjoy the glory of God’s inexhaustible creation and the infinite essence of the Trinity that lay beyond it.

Only then did I feel I could become a parent, because being a parent wastes so much time that previously I’d thought I needed to spend compensating for the world’s scarcity. Only then could I give myself permission to write books, because I found in writing not what I’d previously thought, an indulgent distraction from the urgency of making the world just, but a way of worshipfully entering the myriad complexity of God’s ways with the universe. Only then could I let the Holy Spirit lead me where it willed, which took me to the tall trees of North Carolina and even to the wild and rugged terrain of London, finally without the fear I would somehow get the story wrong and make a misstep, because at last I trusted God the improviser who turns every unexpected development into the pretext for a new, more surprising and wondrous, story. Only then could I let my wife persuade me to get a dog, because being with a golden retriever was not a bourgeois luxury in the face of global desperation but a constant invitation to imitate one who perpetually exults in the playful abundance of God. Only then could I stop being miserable and curmudgeonly and perpetually resentful of wealth and plenty and gladly join the dance of the Trinity with unceasing wonder at the scarred hand stretched out to invite me in. I’d not only discovered what I was living for; I’d started actually living.

Conclusion

John Wesley said, ‘Consider yourself the first among the poor you are called to serve.’ John Calvin entitles the very first paragraph of his Institutes, ‘Without knowledge of self, there is no knowledge of God,’ and he begins, ‘Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.’

This could have been a much briefer lecture if I’d been content just to share the insights of Wesley and Calvin. But the Holy Spirit doesn’t shape us by simply putting before us the pearls of ancient sages. The Holy Spirit draws out of the valleys of our despair and the caverns of our confusion manna for our journey

through life’s wilderness. I believe in making decisions in good times and trying to stick to them in bad times. I also believe the wisdom hard-won in adversity is written more deeply on the soul than any conclusions surmised in prosperity.

Here’s what I’m living for: to be so enraptured and embraced by the mystery, glory and playfulness of God that I lose sight of my own self-preservation, self-justification and self-assertion, and rejoice in the wondrous companions God brings my way; entranced by the precariousness of my and the universe’s existence, captivated by the prospect of entering God’s eternal essence, resolved to expend my energies embodying and sharing now the abundance of God’s forever; and lost in gratitude for the invitation to join the dance.