Sam Wells

Kate Bowler: How do you be a friend to someone who’s going through something you cannot fix? I’m Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. One of my colleagues turned dear friends wrote an article I have never forgotten. He had just heard that our other colleague, Richard Hayes and I had both just received a difficult diagnosis in the same week. This was about like nine years ago, but I still remember his words so clearly. He wrote so lovingly about what it means to be near someone facing intractable problems. So today I wanted to ask him about his wisdom for how to show up with courage and empathy in the face of so much we can’t explain or can’t fix. My guest is the Reverend Dr. Sam Wells. Reverend Dr. Sam Wells leads one of the largest churches in London, Saint Martin in the fields, which also has the city’s largest ministry serving the homeless. As a priest for decades, he obviously spent seven of his favorite years in North Carolina, where he was dean of Duke University Chapel. And I had such a good time getting to know him and his wonderful wife, Bishop Joe Wells. Sam has written a whopping four, I think when we talked, it was like 44 books. Pretty soon, we just talked the other day, it’s going to be like 50. He is such an important public voice. He’s a regular contributor for the BBC, talking to them about pressing theological and ethical issues. And he has such a wonderful, devastating British wit, which is my favorite kind of humor. We sat down for a live conversation as part of Duke Divinity Convocation and Pastor School, so it isn’t a laugh track you’re hearing in the background or paid actors, it’s, you know, people. Without further ado, Sam Wells.

Kate: Sam, I saw you a couple of days ago in London, and it was the nicest feeling to walk into your home and to see all these beautiful photos. And you said that there was one in particular that was your most very precious, which is one of your mom as a little girl. And I kind of wondered if you don’t mind starting on such a personal note, if we could start there.

Sam Wells: Well, I gave it to my son on his 21st birthday with the words this is probably the most important photograph you’ll ever see. And that’s because my mother was eight years old. She was standing next to her twin, Siegfried, who was also eight years old, as twins tend to be. And behind them was a group of about 8 or 9 people, two of whom were their parents. My grandparents grew up as Jews in Kiev, in Ukraine, it was called Kiev then, and for different reasons, they both left. My grandfather escaped from Stalin in the 1920s. My grandmother left legitimately, and they chose, in retrospect, it was a very poor decision to live in Berlin. They had become Christians and my mother and her twin were born in 1930 in Berlin. And that photograph was taken in 1938 when they were standing on Berlin Station, about to leave Germany to escape to England. So what that picture doesn’t tell you is one story that I’m fond of about my grandfather, which is about five hours after that photograph was taken, they were stopped on the border with the Netherlands. And my grandfather was asked to hand over in a suitcase his most precious possessions. My mother always used to tell me that she was only allowed one suitcase. And you can see that suitcase in the photograph. My grandfather took two suitcases, one with his pajamas and so on, and the other suitcase he gave to the SS. And when the SS opened that suitcase, it was full of Bibles. And those were his most precious possessions. It’s not a good time to try out your sense of humor in those kind of scenarios. But it goes without saying that my mother did make it to the UK and I owe my existence that photograph.

Kate: I think maybe because I met you, you were already so learned and fancy. And I think I just, I think it took some time before I realized that so much of the tenderness in your personality comes from this place of knowing where I didn’t have to explain to you that sometimes life is difficult and people go through personal tragedy because it’s a part, it’s like woven into who you are. Your mom knew sadness through and through, and then you knew it as a boy.

Sam: Yeah, I think my mother, I mean, I divide my mother’s relatively short life, she died when she was 53, into three sections. The first was the refugee and the child of refugees. The second part, during the second part, she had two children, but she lost two children shortly after birth, which obviously is a grievous thing for anyone to go through. And that rather dominates in the middle years of her life. And then she spent the last 14 years of her life with cancer. There wasn’t really a big let up, you know, in that story. But I think when people approach something like suffering, since we’re on the subject, it’s all about what you think the normal story is. But I’m firmly convinced we live our lives in stories and the story of suffering for somebody who thinks they are born with some sort of entitlement to a life of a certain security and well-being and health and modest success, understated success. Don’t want to be greedy. If that’s their implied story, then suffering is made up of why me? This is a terrible scar. You know, surely there’s no God, etc.. But I didn’t grow up that story. You know, that wasn’t my mother’s story at all. And my father, who was always, you know how in a relationship that is the one that suffered and there’s one that’s had the easy life and my father had had the easy life, if you call an easy life, that meant losing a sibling who died when he was 18 and she was 30. And then another sibling who was the light of his life, who died having an epileptic fit when he was 42, leaving four children under ten. My father went to fight in the Second World War when he was 20. And, you know, and I’m sure many people have got this in their family experience, either about the Second War, Vietnam or Iraq, that there’s the ones that talk about it, and you wonder if that story’s true and the ones that don’t talk about it, and you know that story’s true, they’re just not telling it. And he was the second kind. So the default in our household was never, you know, why doesn’t it work out okay for us? That, I think, did give me a different approach when my mother, you know, became very ill when I was very young. I think the whole household.

Kate: So how little were you?

Sam: I was five.

Kate: Yeah.

Sam: And she died when I was 18. But I never prayed for her to get better. Because, and I’m not proud saying that, but none of us did. We. We just took this as part of what you know, on the West Wing, the president Bartlet says, what’s next? You know, what’s next is you just do whatever is next.

Kate: Yeah.

Sam: We didn’t live an implied story that this has to turn out as cupcakes and crumbly candy bars.

Kate: Yeah, but I wonder how it shaped your early sense of faith and expectation, then, since suffering was not the operation. It was the–

Sam: Well, to me, the heart of being with and the heart of being a pastor really is sitting beside someone as they look down into the well of the most intractable parts of their lives, whether that’s external circumstances or things about themselves that they’re facing up to, and staying there even when there’s nothing to say. You know, not making a joke, not saying, you know what, something far worse happened to me. I’m not providing a solution, but simply looking down into the pond as far down as the pond goes. That is what I felt called to in ministry. And I guess that evolved really during my time here into articulating this notion of being with, that wasn’t a working for notion that fixes things for people or even to working with where you’re still, where you’re more collaborative, but you’re still obsessed with the fixing but a being with that says actually us together is more important than any fix.

Kate: Because there’s a, I imagine when you’re little that so much of the experience of suffering and seeing someone you love suffer is helplessness and how terrible that feels to want to change things and not be able to. And so for you to make that move between, because there’s a that there’s a powerful difference in what you’re describing between just the frustration and the pain of having no agency and then deciding in the middle of that that there actually is something to do. And that’s just, that the proximity is actually really tough loving work.

Sam: You know, in a place like Duke University, you meet people who’ve won Nobel Prizes and they they always say, it was very easy year, it wouldn’t, you know, if it had been two years later, I would never be given it. They’re always playing it down, but they but you often find that was the person who didn’t think they were very clever at school. And so they sort of overcompensated and then they overcompensate so far that they end up with Nobel Prize. And I think that for me that there’s a compensatory element to a lot of my later life from the crucial moment, which I think is when I was about 15. The important part of my upbringing was not that my mother died, but that she was always dying. And that sense of seeing the story, to go back to an earlier theme through the lens of terminal illness was more significant than the actual death, which is me at 15, with my mother still being well enough and selfless enough to train me to live without her, and in doing so, to teach me to use a washing machine, to wash clothes by hand, to make a shopping list, to cook, you know, to all the things I was going to need to do. She wanted to empower me. So I then faced a choice about making a meal for her, working for you see, that the truth was she was never going to eat or sitting in her bedroom feeling powerless. And of course, my regret is I made too many meals. My overcompensation has been to explore this notion of being with that I didn’t live myself at that crucial moment in my life, and I didn’t live it because the same reason that anyone who’s here tonight or listening to the podcast that this will become will understand, which is you feel empowered when you’re making a meal for somebody and you feel disempowered when you’re sitting and the person is maybe sleeping and maybe frankly and this is another thing that, you know, people never say about being with somebody who’s dying is that they’re not always great company. They don’t always sit there and say these incredible things they do in Little Women. And I remember saying to a family member, I was preparing a funeral for his mother and he was determined to speak at the funeral. But the night before, he was driving his father crazy because he hadn’t written anything down and his father coped with grief by getting everything absolutely nailed down for the funeral. Very well organized funeral. But his son wasn’t playing game. And so I took his son in the front room and I basically said to him, so what? So what’s the block? You know what? And he said, well, my father’s determined to make this a celebration. And I said, and so that’s not really how it feels for you. And he said, no. And I said, say a bit more. And he said, Well, the last week she turned into a horrible person.

Kate: Yes.

Sam: And I said, Well, why don’t you say that? And he said, well, everyone’s so determined. I said, you sure? You know, some people that could be a moment of telling the truth and maybe that’s exactly what they need to hear. So, you know, talking to my mother when she was either asleep or not on best form or in a lot of pain, not able to express, you know, how she really felt was, you know, was tough. And I didn’t do as much of it, I’m not proud of the fact I didn’t do as much of it as I wish I could now say that I did so, but what I realized through that experience was what the heart of being with another person actually is. It’s not really about what you say at all. It’s really the courage to stay there when you have no idea what to say or do because it’s not about you.

Kate Bowler: We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere.

Kate: You and I became friends in that exact moment when, I mean, you just moved back to the UK. And I got sick in the same month as another person in our community, Richard Hayes, who is also beloved in your site. And then we both felt ridiculous. I mean, I don’t think Richard would mind me saying we both felt a little silly being as devastated as we were. And he would say things like, well, I feel like I’m supposed to be old and I’m supposed to have accepted something and I feel like I accept nothing. I’m like, I totally agree. I am accepting not a single thing. And we would take these very depressing walks from the hospital around the garden and both kind of half cry for each for each other because it was so good for me to see him struggle because I thought I would have arrived someplace. And you wrote this beautiful piece about what it feels like to not know what you’re facing and to feel overwhelmed. And I think you wrote well, I know you wrote it for Richard, and I was hoping you a little bit wrote it for me because that’s the narcissism of grief. And I know it’s awkward to ask you to quote yourself, but I took a little quote from this beautiful piece and I wondered if you wouldn’t mind reading it.

Sam: Let’s take an inventory of what walking toward the storm would mean. It would mean going into your bottomless fear. Naming it facing the worst thing that could happen. Feeling the impact of that thing and then trusting that God will meet you so that you go through and beyond your fear and out the other side. That’s courage, trembling, courage. It would mean facing up to the unspeakable ways, the dream of what your life was supposed to be. The template for what you thought God had in store for you. The good things you thought you were entitled to hope for. The goals, prospects and options. And instead focusing on this thing you’re walking towards as perhaps the only thing God wants you to concentrate on right now. And believing that God would look after the rest. That’s trust. Quavering trust. It would mean entering into the convulsing, grief, loss, fear of separation, of isolation, of not mattering any more, of being snuffed out like a candle, of it seeming as if you’d never been, of having no meaning to your life except what God makes for you, and believing that that’s all that counts. That’s faith, shattering faith. It would mean accepting the prospect of harrowing pain, of uncertain duration, unpredictable depth and relentless intensity with no protection except the everlasting arms, and believing those arms will never let you go. That’s hope. Quaking hope.

Kate: Sam. That’s the being-withness that you’re so… But it’s not, I guess what I love too, about it is it’s not glamorous at all, it’s that the more we enter into suffering in our own life or suffering the lives of others, there’s such a sense of our own incompleteness, and none of it is glamorous or shiny or narrateable often, like, we lose the thread almost as quickly as we start to face it.

Sam: A close friend of mine, Lucy Winget, who’s also my closest colleague in the neighboring parish in London, has a phrase she likes to use that I’ve found incredibly helpful. She says forgiveness is losing the desire to have had a better past, letting go of the desire to have had a better past. If you look at the end of the Apostles Creed, where it talks about forgiveness of sins and the life everlasting, that’s about being given the past back as a gift and about having the future opened out for us as an invitation. That is really the gospel. Just imagine, just everyone here tonight imagine if you took away all the energy that you expended trying to rearrange the past and the energy you expend panicking about the future, just imagine how much energy would be released into the present. You’d be on fire. The fire that’s released. It’s called love.

Kate: That’s so nice, Sam. I guess that’s like, so much of that is like the fog of suffering, right? It’ss like you’re moving backwards, moving forwards and then trying to scuttle back between them to kind of rearrange a bearable present. I think that’s what I learned from you right away, is also I love the fact that I’m going to, and I never do this, read a personal email you sent me a public. Dear Kate-

Sam: Is that the one that said confidential on the subject?

Kate: It’s weird. It doesn’t it doesn’t say that here.

Sam: This is between us.

Kate: I mean, you can try to add that tofuture emails if that’s, if that puts you at ease. But good luck. I wrote when I when I loved the article and you said Joe and I were deeply grieved to hear your news. I share your sense of panic and dismay about being erased and about all that you hold dear being jeopardized. And then you said that you are doing this in a beautiful way. I don’t think there’s anything we can do besides do beautiful things. I don’t imagine walking toward the storm is something you’ll feel able to do every day. But I do know that countless people are willing you on. Thank you for counting us in that blessed company. We are walking with you. I don’t think there’s anything like more deeply comforting than you can say to somebody then like we are, I mean, we are walking with you. How do you walk with somebody even when their suffering isn’t anything you can possibly fix? You have this beautiful friendship with your dear friend David.

Sam: So I think the David you’re referring to is somebody I’ve known since I was about 16 or 17. We went to the same university, Oxford University. David has remained a close friend, perhaps becoming increasingly close friend ever since. And even in the years that I lived here, I still managed to get back to see David pretty much at least once a year if I was doing some sort of speaking engagement somewhere in the north or north of England. And the thing about David’s, I don’t know what you call the particular disease he’s experienced or condition he’s experienced, it’s a post-viral thing. And he developed that in 2003 or so, and he still has it. But for a number of years he was more or less confined to his own house and even for some periods to his own bedroom for months at a time. I do remember particularly vividly one time when he was actually limiting the number of words he was saying. And I was in his bedroom and he said Eucharist. So I used my initiative, which is not something I’m usually known for, for doing. I went down to his kitchen, found a bottle of vermouth, I think it was, and a cheese cracker, and brought them upstairs. And then had 20 minutes of the sort of most memorable 20 minutes I can remember in any friendship, because through the liturgy we start with confessing sins, what would be his sentence? And yet, and this is an insight I’ve always found really significant from early in my ministry, recognizing that even in the indignity of his pajama life, he still committed sins, was actually affirming him as having agency that he, you know, often wondered if he had. And then we moved on to the gospel and together, him more with grunts and me more with suggestions, explored what gospel would speak to his situation. You know, would it be the four men carrying the stretchered man through the roof? Were we are asking for a miracle? Or was it a very different kind of story of perhaps the disciples in the boat with Jesus and saying, Jesus, get your act together, this is really bad, why won’t you do, you know, we talked about 3 or 4 stories and we didn’t read one. We just talked about the stories at that point in the service. And then somehow the most significant moment was the intercessions. What do you actually pray for? What do you ask God for? And I you know, I can’t actually remember the prayers we sent, but I just remember the intimacy of sharing our deepest desires with each other. And then, of course, finally I broke the cracker in half and we had, you know, a rectangle each with all the bits that fall off the cracker. And then I got a little, you know, one of the little plastic cups that he had in his bedroom. And we, we had a little plastic cup each of, of the vermouth and I guess what he’d let me do was enter into the heart of his experience and turn that experience into a prayer. I can’t think of a more rewarding priestly moment in the last 32 years.

Kate: There’s such a weird kind of awe that you get when you get up close to somebody’s like the heart of their, I mean, their pain, but also they’re like, the expansiveness and limits of their hope. Because when you can see it through your eyes, their eyes, you can see like this beautiful beating.

Sam: So there’s two contrasts that the contrast that I usually make between with and for you know, I, I stayed in the bedroom. I didn’t go and make him a cup of tea which probably didn’t want, he wanted company, he wanted companionship and he wanted to pray. But he, you know, couldn’t do it on his own. But there’s another contrast, so that’s with and for, but there’s another contrast between with and in. And I guess the simplest way to describe that is when you see someone struggling in the water, you can join it and struggle with them. If you’re not very good swimmer like I’m not a very good swimmer, you can stay on the bank and you know, throw them a stick. You know, be with them in it. Or you can run away and try and get help, which is actually a way of not being able to face seeing them struggle. This is a very important issue in understanding Jesus. Which of those roles does he take up in relation to us? And I think a lot of people who use the word kenosis based on the the hymn and Philippians two often stress the sense that he jumped into the water, as it were. He became in our suffering. I don’t think I ever pretended I was in David’s suffering. All that I would be doing him any favors by pretending I was or trying to be so. I had a role of being with him that wasn’t being for him, which would probably be going to get help somewhere. And it wasn’t being in, which is jumping into the water. It was a particular role of being with. So I feel similarly about crying about somebody else’s pain. I’m very reluctant to do that because you think, well, that’s what sympathy is supposed to be, literally. But actually, you don’t want to take the experience away from them. Being with them is allowing them to shed tears or anger or, you know, express anger. And not running away from it, sticking with it. So I felt that’s been my role with David. He’s much stronger now. He’s certainly not better, but he’s much, much stronger now. But I’ve never felt the best way to be a friend to him was, if you like to, the phrase about weep with those who weep. I’m not sure about that. I think be with those who weep and don’t run away or try to pretend it’s fine or make a joke or whatever. But I’ve tried to be with those who weep, not necessarily to weep because that’s those are their tears. And I don’t want to take that away from them.

Kate: I’m a huge crier, Sam. I was struggling not to cry in that response.

Sam: I’ve always felt in getting to know you, Kate, My particular gift was to make you cry.

Kate: I’ve learned that my affect on her is devastation.

Sam: Everytime I make you cry, I sort of feel I’m releasing something important in you and it feels like a win.

Kate: We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back.

Kate: You said to me and so many others in terrible times that when we face suffering, you had a response I like so much because, you know, I study the health and wellness industries and they have a tremendous obsession with happiness that actually the response to everything that we’ve been talking about tonight, the response to suffering, is, is a sense of of inexhaustible improvement and progress. And upon suffering, we can just slowly climb our way out with this self-care ladder. But you said if you can’t make it happy, make it beautiful. And I wondered, what is one area in which you see an opportunity for us to make things beautiful in our church or in our world today?

Sam: I was in Alabama about 18 months ago talking to Episcopal clergy, and there were lots of jokes there about the division between Democrat and Republican. I got you know, I had a couple of evenings having drinks with other clergy and just went round the room, you know, half a dozen people each evening saying you what percentage of your congregations are Democrat and what Republican? You know, one said 80/20. One said it’s more like 50/50. But it was very much don’t bring the subject up. Now, my experience of America in the last seven years is this is the conversation behind every conversation, whether you bring it up or not. It’s not an elephant, it’s a kind of asteroid in the room. So changing the subject wasn’t going to fool anybody. However, what I challenge those clergy to to think about is the fact that rather than feel incredibly awkward about this terrible secret that they had Republicans and Democrats in their congregations, they should start to see it in a slightly different way. They should say our diocese has an incredible gift, which is that despite all the differences that people make out to be the most profound differences the world has ever seen, we kneel at the altar rail side by side and receive the host together. And that is not going to make things happy, but it could make things beautiful.

Kate: Sam, you always find a way to make us hope for more than we have. And to be with us even when we don’t always want to be with ourselves. Can we thank Sam for this gorgeous conversation?

Kate: Being a friend to someone who is really going through something is hard. Like no one teaches you how to do it well. So we learn it from watching others. We learn it from being loved well, and we learn it from the times we missed it and promised ourselves we would do better next time. I loved Sam’s three categories for being a friend through hard times. There is being for someone. That’s all the actiony stuff that we can think of when someone is struggling. That’s the boy, oh boy are they helpful. Dropping off a meal, organizing a fundraiser, driving them to and from an appointment, just the like checking it, doing it in the mix. Then there’s the being in with someone. That’s practicing empathy of seeing and understanding someone’s painful realities, of not making them feel other. Like there’s this Plexiglas wall between you. And then there’s being with them. Now, this is the toughie. Being with means staying present without any words to say, any tangible comfort to offer, or any ability to fix their circumstance. Being a friend involves one or all of those three. Being for, in, and with. And being with is certainly the hardest for me and also the one I’ve appreciated the most from my friends who really know how to practice this kind of proximity. We would love to hear from you about that. If there is someone you know who is really good at the art of being with, I’d love if you told us about them. Write me a note on social media. I’m at @katecbowler or leave us a voicemail at (919) 322-8731. Okay, and before we go, let’s do a blessing. Bless us, God, in the face of suffering, ours and other peoples, in our own confusion, in our own rage and apathy. Bless us as we reach for your promises, for your presence, and when we don’t. Bless our helplessness. Give us clear eyes and sharp minds and courageous hearts to know what little we might offer. To ease the pain where we’re able. To bear witness to what demands to be seen. May we be the kind of people who walk toward the storm. Bless our trembling courage and our shuddering faith. God, it’s incomplete. But hey, bless it all.

Kate: A big thank you to our friends at the Duke Endowment, Dr. Dennis Campbell, Rob Webb, Ken Spencer for making this live episode possible. Everything Happens is made possible by Lilly Endowment, the Duke Endowment, and Duke Divinity School, as well as the work of my incredible team. Jessica Ritchie, Harriet Putnam, Keith Weston, Baiz Hoen, Gwen Heginbotham, Brenda Thompson, Iris Greene, Hailey Durrett, Anne Herring, Hope Anderson, Kristen Balzer, Eli Azanio, and Katherine Smith. I’ll talk to you next week my loves, and if you’re still listening, first of all, hello, thank you, hi. And second, would you mind popping over to leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify? It just makes a weirdly big difference in how people find and are able then to share the show. So thank you. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.