Life & Wisdom Quote by James Green Somerville

Somerville opens with the kind of candor that quietly detonates the usual myth of religious certainty. A minister is supposed to project steadiness, the human equivalent of a lit candle: dependable, unshaken, available on demand. Instead, he gives us the backstage truth - not disbelief exactly, but the grinding pressure of being asked to translate the infinite into twenty minutes of language without sounding like a fraud.

The phrase "less than glad" is doing sly work. It refuses melodrama and, in that restraint, feels more believable than a grand crisis-of-faith confession. He frames ministry as a vocation that can bruise you, not just ennoble you. Then he narrows the lens to "some Sundays still", which turns dread into a recurring appointment. It's not a one-time slump; it's a rhythm built into the job.

"Tremble under the weight" is both physical and moral: the body registering what the mind already knows, that speaking "for God" is an audacious claim. The subtext is ethical humility. Somerville isn't only worried about his own performance; he's worried about the consequences of getting it wrong - comforting when he should challenge, condemning when he should console, packaging personal bias as divine instruction.

Contextually, this lands as a writerly reframing of clerical authority in a modern key: credibility earned through vulnerability rather than pronouncement. The line doesn't demystify faith so much as demystify the messenger, insisting that spiritual leadership is not the absence of fear but the decision to show up anyway, trembling and all.