Jeremy Taylor and Living a Full Life

Rev. Molly F. James, PhD

DFMS Noonday Prayer via Zoom

Jeremy Taylor, August 13, 2020

May God’s Word be spoken. May God’s Word be heard. May that point us to the living Word who is Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

As some of you know, Jeremy Taylor, is one of the theologians I wrote about in my dissertation, so today is another day where I feel like I get to visit with an old friend. And like any good friendship, Jeremy is someone from whom I have high regard, deep respect, and with whom I do not always agree. 

I have great sympathy for him. He had 10 children, but only three of them outlived him. He was a prisoner during the English Civil War, and he had a lot of challenges in his diocese. He was not someone who wrote about suffering as a theoretical matter. One of the things I admire most about him is that his experience informs his theology. 

This is evident in a 1665 letter Taylor wrote to his friend John Evelyn. He wrote: “It hath please God to send the small poxe and fevers among my children; and I have, since I received your last, buried two sweet, and hopeful boyes; and have now but one sonne left whom I intend, if it please God, to bring up to London before Easter; and then I hope to wait upon you, and by your sweet conversation and other divertisements, if not to alleviate my sorrows, yet at least to entertain myself and keep me from too intense and actual thinkings of my troubles . . . But for myself, I bless God I have observed and felt so much mercy in this angry dispensation of God, that I am almost transported, I am sure highly pleased with thinking how infinitely sweet His mercies are when His judgments are so gracious.” One could focus in on Taylor’s statement about God “sending” the small pox to his children. There is a long and possibly problematic history in the Christian tradition of blaming God for all one’s suffering or as seeing it as always a form of punishment. 

I don’t believe Taylor was being punished, and a harsh view of God as angry and spiteful does not actually fit with the whole of Taylor’s theology. In fact Taylor, believed that God is present with us in the midst of suffering. God is where our hope is to be found.  In Holy Living, Holy Dying he wrote: “To rejoice in the midst of a misfortune or seeming sadness, knowing that this may work for good. . . This is a direct act of hope, to look through the cloud, and look for a beam of the light from God.” Taylor knew from personal experience that we need to seek out the hope and the joy - the blessing of friends to keep our perspective wide. 

It might seem ironic or counter-intuitive, but for Taylor, the way forward, the path to thriving in the midst of suffering is to have an awareness of death. As he wrote in a funeral sermon: “Go home and think to die, and what you would choose to be doing when you die, that do daily.” Taylor’s admonition invites us to live with purpose, with intention. It invites us to remember that life is fragile and precious. He knew full well that there are no guarantees how long any of us has. As our Gospel reading today reminds us, we do not know the day or the hour. The question is not about quantity; it is about quality. Taylor lamented that if we “spend in waste what God hath given us in plenty, when we sacrifice our youth to folly, our manhood to lust and rage, our old age to covetousness and irreligion, not beginning to live till we are to die . . . then we make our lives short.”

Ultimately Taylor is offering us a holy invitation. It is an invitation to focus our priorities, to ensure that we do not waste the precious gift of time that God has given us. In this time when our world has been turned upside down, and we are having to reimagine how we do all sorts of things in our professional and personal lives, it is a good opportunity to pause, to reflect. To ask ourselves what really matters? What is essential? Are we able to invest sufficient time in the relationships and the activities that give our life meaning? Or as Taylor might frame it, if we die tomorrow what are we going to wish we had done? How about we start doing that now? 

This is a time where it could be easy to give into fear. Taylor does not do that. He confronted the reality of mortality and took it as an invitation to live more fully. May each of us feel empowered to do the same. AMEN. 

Footnoted version here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_4HJH8oUjGhZKqGLTsQr0knGuV3bfwnxvctDJTlkj0U/edit?usp=sharing