laudable Practice

The loss of religion makes real loss difficult to bear; hence people begin to flee from loss, to make light of it with Disneyfying ornaments ... - Sir Roger Scruton, ' The Work of Mourning '. If there is one word that cannot be reconciled with the Prayer Book's The Burial of the Dead , it is 'kitsch'.  There is no room for kitsch in a Prayer Book funeral.  The seriousness of death and the reality of resurrection are sharply set before us: sentimentality, which attempts to obscure the first and ignore the second, is banished.  In the very midst of death, The Burial of the Dead proclaims a robustly Christocentric vision.  Here "Disneyfying ornaments" have no place for they are exposed as trite and insubstantial. Here hope is firmly rooted in the truth and substance of Christ. O merciful God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the resurrection and the life; in whom whosoever believeth shall live, though he die; and whosoever liveth, and believeth in...

In The Great Exemplar (1649), as Taylor reflects on the Lord's Passion and Death, he provides a discourse entitled 'Of Death, and the due Manner of Preparation to it'. It is appropriate reading for this month of the departed, not least for its reminder that we are always called to be prepared for our death:  And indeed, since all our life we are dying and this minute in which I now write, death divides with me, and hath got the surer part and more certain possession, it is but reasonable that we should always be doing the offices of preparation. Alongside this exhortation to holy living - the "one way of preparing to death" - Taylor also addresses the circumstances of "those days of our last visitation", what the Litany terms "the hour of death". Here he points to the three ministries "at the point of departure", appointed by the Prayer Book : prayer and spiritual counsel, absolution, and reception of the holy Sacrament. While the pr...

In his sermon ' The Middle State of Happiness or Misery ', Bishop Bull addressed the Lord's promise to the penitent thief: "Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise". Of particular significance is Bull's obvious reverence for the Jewish context in which the words were spoken and heard, and his quite beautiful description of Jewish piety regarding the relationship between the paradise of the post-mortem state and "the blessed garden". Paradise, that blessed garden: here is the abode of the souls of the righteous after death and before the general resurrection on the last day. That, in Saint Luke's account of the Passion, Our Lord took up the words of Jewish belief and piety regarding the abode of the righteous after death, establishes - as Bull declares - Christian doctrine on the post-mortem state, affirmed also in the Creed's declaration of the Lord's ascension into heaven at the end of the forty days: let us consi...

When Judges were instead of Kings, and Hophni and Phinehas were among the Priests, every man did what was right in his own eyes, but few did what was pleasing in the eyes of the Lord ...  And so Jeremy Taylor begins the Preface of his A Collection of Offices . Published in 1657, when any notion of a restoration of the monarch and episcopacy was not seriously entertained, Taylor was providing liturgical texts to be used in the place of the prohibited Book of Common Prayer: But because things are otherwise in this affair then we had hop'd, and that in very many Churches in stead of the Common Prayer which they use not, every man uses what he pleases, and all men doe not choose well, and where there are so many choosers there is nothing regular ... how much better the Curates of souls may help themselves with these or the like offices, then with their own extempore. In addition to divine service, Curates of souls, of course, also administered the occasional offices. This being so, A ...

From Bishop Bull's sermon ' The Middle State of Happiness or Misery ', an extract illustrating how Wisdom 3:1 was understood as summarising the Scriptural hope for the post-mortem state, over and against the teaching of purgatory: even in the Old Testament, we have a full testimony given to this truth, that the soul subsists after the death of the body, by Solomon, where, describing man's death and dissolution, he saith, "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it."  Whereas man consists of two parts, body and soul, the condition of these two, when a man dies, will be very different: for the body being at first taken out of the dust of the earth, and so of a corruptible constitution, shall go back into the earth again, and moulder into dust; but the soul, as it is of another and more excellent original, (as being at first inspired immediately by God Himself into the body,) shall not perish with the body,...

From Bishop Bull's sermon ' The Middle State of Happiness or Misery ', an extract rejecting both the doctrine of purgatory and speculative theories about the post-mortem state, resting instead in a conventionally Reformed understanding of "the plain doctrine of the Holy Scriptures", with no need to go beyond the "modesty of the apostolic Doctors". Bull here echoes how the Prayer Book Burial of Dead - a graveside prayer of which is quoted in this extract - rests in the promises of Scripture and eschews fanciful speculations: I have shewn you, that the Apostolic writers were wont to express the different place and state of good and bad men presently after death, by this and the like phrases, that they went to their "own proper, due," or "appointed places": that is, to places agreeable to their respective qualities, the good to a place of happiness, the wicked to a place and state of misery ... I have now said all that I can think necess...

November is the month of the departed. The month begins with All Saints' Day, particularly commemorating those "blessed Saints" whom we have known, and then moves into the solemn national and communal recollections of Remembrancetide. The last of the falling leaves, the darkness of the last days of Autumn, and the approach of the year's end evoke a sense of our mortality. It is a month made for walks in old churchyards and mulling over the Burial service. Each week during this month on laudable Practice , there will be a post meditating on the month of the departed through words from Jeremy Taylor, We being with Taylor's 1650 sermon at the funeral of Frances Vaughan, Countess of Carbery, in which he describes how we share with the faithful departed in the Communion of Saints: But then we should do well also to remember, that in this world we are something besides flesh and bloud; that we may not without violent necessities run into new relations, but preserve the...

Today we bring our extracts from Jelf's 1844 Bampton Lectures -  An inquiry into the means of grace, their mutual connection, and combined use, with especial reference to the Church of England  -  to a close (the  first extract  was posted in late June 2022). At the end of the final lecture, Jelf portrays how the varied means of grace in Anglicanism shape and sustain a life of faith, hope, and love. In this extract he describes the means of grace at the hour of our death: And so, at length, the day is far spent, and "the night cometh, in which no man can work." The hand of sickness and death is upon God's weary servant. Still, even then he is mindful that the means of grace are not yet exhausted; his spiritual friend and guide is once more at hand to warn, to support, to pray with him and for him; to receive, if he desire it, his last confession, and, by Christ's authority committed unto him, to "absolve" him "from all" his "sins, in the n...

Mindful of the traditional Advent themes of the Four Last Things, it was appropriate that Timothy Stanley's recent interview with Rowan Williams addressed the matter of our deathbed.  In the course of the interview Stanley said, "I would want the Last Rites when I’m dying, and if the hospital sent for the local Anglican cleric, I might not get it, because not every Anglican does it". And, Stanley quite rightly protests, "on my death bed, I would want to know what I’m going to get".   Stanley's critique is not entirely unfair.  There are Anglican clergy - let's call them the neo-Puritans - who think that extemporary prayer and a Bible reading of their choice will suffice at the deathbed. That, however, is weak, pale stuff.  And certainly not the Real Thing. For that we turn to the Book of Common Prayer : Here shall the sick person be moved to make a special confession of his sins, if he feel his conscience troubled with any weighty matter. After which co...