Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Today, we commemorate the Feast of one of my favorite Anglican pastoral theologians: Jeremy Taylor! Born in 1613, Taylor lived in a time of major social and cultural upheaval. A favorite of the much-disliked-by Puritans William Laud and chaplain to King Saint Charles I, Taylor was deprived of his living and imprisoned multiple times by the Puritans (once before and twice after the uneasy end of the English Civil War with the beheading of St Charles in 1649). Taylor, however, met the tumult of the times with an astonishing equanimity, receiving whatever befell him as a gift from God’s own hands and as an opportunity to praise God for the providential (though often inscrutable) outworking of God’s purposes.

With the restoration of the monarchy and the coronation of Charles II in 1660, Taylor’s fortunes improved considerably, but his faithful equanimity was unaffected by his changed circumstances—indeed, Taylor's the sort of person who would insist that what makes a circumstance good or ill is how it is received and the degree to which it can be used to deepen our relationship with God and inspire us to love our neighbor more fully. It’s little wonder, then, that the justly-famous passage from Ecclesiastes on there being a time to every purpose is appointed as the Hebrew Testament reading for the Eucharistic celebration of his feast today.

Taylor is best known for his two books of pastoral theology, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living and The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying. And I thought, given our saint's brilliance not only as a pastor but as a prose stylist (!), that you might enjoy, Dear Friend, a passage from Holy Living, found in the section “On Contentedness”, which so beautifully gives a picture of the nature of Taylor’s soul and faith...and represents a way of living in this changeable and uncertain world while keeping close to the turning world’s Still Point:

“I am fallen into the hands of Publicans and Sequestrators, and they have taken all from me: What now? Let me look about me. They have left me the Sun and Moon, Fire and Water, a loving Wife, and many Friends to pity me, and some to relieve me, and I can still discourse; and, unless I list, they have not taken away my merry countenance, and my cheerful spirit, and a good conscience: they still have left me the providence of God, and all the promises of the Gospel, and my Religion, and my hopes of Heaven, and my charity to them too: and still I sleep and digest, I eat and drink, I read and meditate, I can walk in my neighbor’s pleasant fields, and see the varieties of natural beauties, and delight in all that in which God delights, that is, in virtue and wisdom, in the whole creation, and in God himself. And he that hath so many causes of joy, and so great, is very much in love with sorrow and peevishness, who loses all these pleasures, and chooses to sit down upon his little handful of thorns.”

Beloved, this is no injunction to go looking on the bright side; this is deeper than that. Friend, we’re not called to be rooted on this side or that, whether apparently bright or no, but in the loving goodness of an eternal and unchangeable God, and to live out of that rootedness a life of virtue, of justice, of mercy, of righteousness, of humility, and of surpassing great love.

Happy Feast of Saint Jeremy Taylor!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+