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"To become like God": Jeremy Taylor on the Comforter and the ministry of comfort

And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever ... I will not leave you comfortless - John 14:16,18, from the Gospel appointed for Whitsunday.

I find it one of the most joyful aspects of Whitsuntide, the fulfillment of the dominical promise of "another Comforter". It overflows in the Prayer Book collects and readings for this time. The collect of the Sunday after Ascension Day and the week following petitions "We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us", echoing the opening words of the Gospel reading, "When the Comforter is come". The Gospel of Whitsunday is reflected in the collect praying that we may "evermore ... rejoice in his holy comfort". 

Whitsun is the feast of the Comforter.

In a beautiful passage, Jeremy Taylor draws us to see how this presence and indwelling of the Comforter animates the ministry of comfort in the life of the Christian and the church:

the third person of the holy Trinity is known to us by the name and dignity of the "Holy Ghost, the Comforter;" and God glories in the appellative that He is "the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort;" and therefore to minister in the office is to become like God, and to imitate the charities of heaven. And God hath fitted mankind for it: he most needs it, and he feels his brother's wants by his own experience; and God hath given us speech, and the endearments of society, and pleasantness of conversation, and powers of seasonable discourse, arguments to allay the sorrow by abating our apprehensions and taking out the sting or telling the periods of comfort, or exciting hope, or urging a precept, and reconciling our affections, and reciting promises, or telling stories of the divine mercy, or changing it into duty, or making the burden less by comparing it with greater, or by proving it to be less than we deserve, and that it is so intended, and may become the instrument of virtue. And certain it is that as nothing can better do it, so there is nothing greater for which God made our tongues, next to reciting His praises, than to minister comfort to a weary soul. And what greater measure can we have than that we should bring joy to our brother, who with his dreary eyes looks to heaven and round about, and cannot find so much rest as to lay his eyelids close together: than that thy tongue should be tuned with heavenly accents, and make the weary soul to listen for light and ease, and when he perceives that there is such a thing in the world and in the order of things as comfort and joy, to begin to break out from the prison of his sorrows at the door of sighs and tears, and by little and little melt into showers and refreshment?

'The Duties of the Tongue' in The Whole Works of Jeremy Taylor, Volume IV.

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