'Never but in heaven was there more joy and ecstasy': Jeremy Taylor, the Visitation, and heaven

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Our  Advent series of Marian reflections from Jeremy Taylor's The Great Exemplar today comes to the Visitation. Taylor offers a beautiful, rich meditation, rejoicing in the meeting of "two mothers of two great princes":

It is not easy to imagine what a collision of joys was at this blessed meeting: two mothers of two great princes, the one 'the greatest that was born of woman' and the other was his Lord, and these made mothers by two miracles, met together with joy and mysteriousness; where the mother of our Lord went to visit the mother of his servant, and the Holy Ghost made the meeting festival, and descended upon Elizabeth, and she prophesied.

Never but in heaven was there more joy and ecstasy. The persons who were women, whose fancies and affections were not only hallowed, but made pregnant and big with religion, meeting together to compare and unite their joys and their eucharist, and then made prophetical and inspired, must needs have discoursed like seraphims and the most ecstasied order of intelligences; for all the faculties of nature were turned into grace, and expressed in their way the excellent solemnity. For 'it came to pass, when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost'.

What is immediately obvious Taylor's description of the Visitation is how he captures the profound joy of this encounter: "collision of joys ... made the meeting festival ... joy and ecstasy ... their joys and their eucharist ... most ecstasied". It is a powerful reminder that when we think of the Mother of the Lord, she who Saint Elizabeth hailed, joy is to be our first and most significant response. Debates between Christians over Marian doctrine and practices must take second place to a Marian joy: to a realisation, with Saint Elizabeth, that she of whom we talk is "the mother of my Lord".

Also evident in Taylor's meditation is a deep reverence for the Forerunner and his mother. The phrase "two great princes" is rather striking, clearly indicating the place of Saint John the Baptist in salvation history. It is a term which not only points to the Visitation; it also conveys something of the significance of John in the Gospel accounts, "the friend of the bridegroom". Related to this is how Taylor places Saint Elizabeth alongside the Blessed Virgin as "like seraphims", both "prophetical and inspired". Mindful of how the Gospel of Saint Luke opens with Zechariah and Elizabeth - "of the daughters of Aaron" - Taylor's reverence for the mother of the Forerunner leads us to behold afresh the place of Saint John the Baptist in the proclamation of the four Evangelists.

Finally, there is Taylor's declaration that "Never but in heaven was there more joy and ecstasy". The comparison to heaven could be made because the Blessed Virgin is "the mother of our Lord", bearing Him to Saint Elizabeth and the Forerunner. Mary, in words Taylor used just prior to today's excerpt, "was now full of God, bearing God in her virgin womb". And so, with Saint Elizabeth, we recognise, in the words of Donne, "Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb". 

"Never but in heaven was there more joy and ecstasy": here is the glorious reason for a piety which rejoices in and honours the Blessed Virgin Mary.

(The stained glass depiction of the Visitation is from the Church of Sainte-Radegonde in Poitiers, c. 1270-75.)

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