laudable Practice

Each Friday of Lent, laudable Practice is presenting words from Jeremy Taylor reflecting on fundamental practices shared by the Christian traditions. Today's practice is meditation. I have previously shared extracts from Taylor's 'Discourse Of Meditation' on the feast of the Presentation , noting his insistence that "meditation is the duty of all". Today's extract continues this focus on Taylor 'democratising' the practice of meditation, particularly emphasising that it is not the pursuit of spiritual experiences but, rather, a regular, even prosaic, means of being sustained in the Christian life: "It is more healthful and nutritive to dig the earth and to eat of her fruits, than to stare upon the greatest glories of the heavens, and live upon the beams of the sun". (And what a wonderful illustration this is, almost certainly a deliberate echo of Psalm 1: see below.) This reflects a wider Reformation emphasis - shared with the Devotio Mo...

In The Great Exemplar , following his 'Considerations Upon the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple', Jeremy Taylor appropriately offers a discourse 'Of Meditation'. This reflects, of course, the faithful, prayerful waiting of Simeon and Anna, and also how the Gospel of the feast tells that the Blessed Virgin and Saint Joseph "marvelled at those things which were spoken" of the Christ Child.  Taylor says of this, "and treasured them in their hearts; and they became matter of devotion and mental prayer, or meditation". Likewise, Taylor's urging that "meditation is the duty of all", echoes his earlier description of Simeon and Anna: "of diverse sexes, and like piety, Simeon and Anna, the one who lived an active and secular, the other a retired and contemplative life".  Today's feast, therefore, is, for Taylor, an invitation to meditation, to a prayerful dwelling upon the life of Christ - in which "the greatest mysteries ...