Walking through Puddles

By Robin G. Jordan

One of my favorite Anglican writers is the seventeenth century English poet-priest George Herbert. Herbert was rector of the parish of Bemerton several miles outside of the cathedral town of Salisbury in Wiltshire. He wrote The Temple and A Priest to the Temple: A Country Parson, His Character, His Rule of Holy Life. He also collected proverbs—short pithy sayings that since ancient times have been used to pass on wisdom from one generation to another. His collection of 1000 old sayings and maxims were published under the title, Jacula Prudentium and Other Outlandish Proverbs, after his death.

Proverbs of all kinds were part of my upbringing. My mother, my older brother, and I lived with my mother’s parents. My grandparents, particularly my grandmother, were fond of adages and proverbial sayings. They had a proverb for almost every situation in life. I do not know from where they acquired them. Some may have been passed down from generation to generation in their own families. Adages and proverbial saying may have been popular when they were younger. I find myself drawing upon their proverbs for guidance in my own life. Most of them are packed with wisdom of the common sense variety.

This partially explains my attraction to Jacula Prudentium and Other Outlandish Proverbs. Among my favorite saying in Herbert’s collection of proverbs is, “Every path has a puddle.” It is so descriptive of life in general. Life is full of puddles whatever path we take. Every path has one or more out of sight around a bend in the path, hidden from view, waiting for us. We may have walked the path many times before and we did not meet with any puddles. But last night a thunderstorm poured down rain and the wind brought down a tree. The fallen tree kept our path from draining. A great big puddle now blocks our way.

On the roads and pathways of seventeenth century England Herbert must have encountered his share of puddles. Herbert played the viola. Once a week he walked to Salisbury where he joined a group of friends for a day of music. I can imagine him walking along an English country road on a spring day, enjoying the bird songs and wild flowers, only to come upon a wet, muddy patch complete with a large puddle with no choice but to walk through the puddle and to get his feet wet. Puddles may have been so common his day that he wore boots in anticipation of them. He may have chosen his path carefully to avoid those that did not drain well after a rain.

As a boy I met a lot of puddles. In England rain is something unavoidable like death and taxes. In the midst of sunny day the sky will grow cloudy and the heavens open, sending everyone scurrying for cover. One becomes philosophical about puddles. They are a part of life.

A puddle presents a range of choices. Do you try to pick your way around the puddle and risk becoming mired in the swampy ground surrounding it? Do you try to leap the puddle, underestimate its width, and land with a great splash in the water on its farther side? Do you take off our shoes and socks and get your feet wet? Or do you, like so many boys, play in the puddle and arrive at your destination with wet shoes and socks, wet feet, and wet clothes.

If you were lucky, you may have found some steppingstones by which you crossed the puddle and kept your feet dry. Someone may have laid a log or a plank across the puddle. If you balanced yourself carefully on this makeshift bridge, you crossed the puddle with dry feet. Your mother may have anticipated puddles in the path and you wore Wellington boots at her insistence.

More than likely you were not prepared for the puddle. You had no way of crossing it other than to take shoes and socks in hand, to step into the water, and depending upon the depth of the water, to splash or wade across the puddle. The only other options were to return the way you came and try another path in hopes that it had no puddles. Or to stand at the edge of the puddle, blubbering and unable to decide what you would do. Someone might come along, see you teary-eyed and forlorn at the puddle’s edge, pick you up, and carry you to the other side. That seldom if ever happened. It was up to you how you were going to deal with the puddle that nature had put in your way.

If it had rained, my grandmother would not let me go outside without my Wellies on. I could cheerfully splash through puddles with no second thoughts. But I came home plenty of times with muddy or wet shoes and socks. Even when I wore rubber boots, I often waded into too deeper water and my boots filled with water. I learned that turning back and taking a different path did necessarily mean that I would avoid a puddle. The different path might have a large puddle right near its ends, which I left me with no choice but cross it or pick my way around it. I learned to vault a large puddle or a flooded ditch with a long pole. This method also has its drawbacks. The pole may not be long enough or it may sink into mud. The water may prove too deep.

The saying, “Every path has a puddle,” definitely has a nugget of truth. As we walk life’s paths, we are going to meet life’s puddles. We cannot escape having to negotiate them.

The recent developments in the Church of England are one of life’s puddles. They might be more accurately described as a flood. A great storm has swept across the British Isles, toppling trees and inundating the land. Conservative churchmen must find their way through all the water to high ground and to safety. The Roman Catholic Church has sent out an amphibious vehicle with a big sign, “We are here to rescue you.” But the Roman Catholics are interested in only certain people and the wash from their vehicle is making things more difficult for those wading through chest high and even neck high water, and in whom they have no interest.

The Anglican Diocese of Sydney, the Church of England in South Africa, and any other ecclesiastical organization sympathetic to the plight of conservative evangelicals in the Church of England need to extend to them a helping hand. The Heritage Anglican Network in North America (HANNA) offers them our moral support and prayers. Being an organization not even yet in its infancy we cannot give them more concrete help. If we could, we would. We are very mindful of what the apostle James wrote in his epistle: “If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, "Depart in peace, be warmed and filled," but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit?” (James 2:15-16 NKJV) It grieves our hearts that we can offer them only encouragement at the present time. God may in the future provide opportunities where we can give them more tangible assistance. We pray that he does.