Augustine of Hippo

sermon preached at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler

The Feast of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, August 28, 2014

St. Augustine of Hippo: image from Wikipedia

Today is the Feast of St. Augustine of Hippo, the 4^th century Christian who is one of the best-known theologians ever. Anyone who has studied Christian theology has something to say about Augustine, not all of it nice. When they’re not angry with him for coming up with the concept of original sin, people complain about his sexual hang-ups. Meanwhile, in other Christian circles, his theology is almost considered a part of the Gospel itself. Despite all this, the more I learn about Augustine, the more I like him. He is one of our more human saints.

Augustine was born in 354 in what is now Algeria. Ethnically, he was a Berber: that is, one of the indigenous peoples of North Africa west of the Nile Valley. Augustine’s father was a pagan, and his mother, Monica, was a Christian, but the teenage Augustine decided to become a Manichaean. This Persian Gnostic faith was one of the largest religions in the world at the time. It taught a cosmic, dualistic worldview in which the forces of good and evil, symbolically represented by the spirit and the body, were battling it out, and nobody really knew which side would win.

Augustine threw himself into a life of hedonism. He joined a gang that encouraged its members to brag about their sexual encounters with women, and absent any encounters, to make something up in order to avoid ridicule. Pretty soon, though, Augustine settled into a stable relationship with a young Carthaginian woman. They were together, unmarried, for thirteen years, and they had a son.

The gifted young Augustine became a teacher of grammar and rhetoric, but he was always frustrated by the apathy of his students. As he aged, he began to grow out of Manichaeism. His mother, Monica, kept pressuring him toward Christianity, and when Augustine moved to Milan, Monica followed him there and arranged a marriage for him. What a persistent mom!

But the arranged marriage meant that Augustine had to abandon his concubine of 13 years. Meanwhile, his arranged bride was only 11 years old, and he wasn’t allowed to marry her until she was 12. During the interim, he had an affair with another concubine, and this anguished him so much that he broke off his engagement. Single and heartbroken, Augustine uttered the prayer, “God grant me chastity and continence … but not yet!”

Augustine got to know Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, and it was through Ambrose’s influence that Augustine had a conversion experience. In the summer that he was 31 years old, Augustine read an account of the life of St. Anthony of the Desert, a Church Father from the previous generation. Inspired to tears, Augustine lay down under a fig tree and wept openly. He felt that God was angry with him for his many sins. As he wept and prayed, he heard a voice from a neighboring house, the voice of a child at play. The child was chanting and singing, “Tolle, lege, tolle, lege,” which means, “Take up and read.”

Augustine thought this an odd thing for a child to sing, so he went inside, took up his Bible, and read the first thing he laid eyes on. It was from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans:

Let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

That was enough for Augustine. He entered the catechumenal process of Christian initiation—the process that we at St. Paul’s observe as Journey—and was baptized by Bishop Ambrose, along with his son, at the Easter Vigil the next spring. The following year, he returned to Africa, where he was ordained a priest and later the Bishop of Hippo.

Hundreds of Augustine’s writings survive to this day. His theology continues as a primary influence in nearly every Christian sect. But here are a few tidbits you may not know about Augustine. For one thing, he was an early developer of educational theory and the study of different learning styles. He also wrote a lot about the nature of human will, and his innovative writings influenced both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

You may be surprised to learn that, without any inkling about evolution, Augustine spoke out against literal creationism. He did believe that the universe was only a few thousand years old, because he had no reason not to believe this. But he maintained that God had created everything in the blink of an eye—perhaps the first Big Bang Theory? Augustine had no trouble understanding that the Genesis accounts of creation are holy poetry meant to provide us with a logical structure and a deeper understanding of God. In general, he treated Holy Scripture as metaphorical, insisting that if our reason shows us a contradiction between Scripture and the natural world, we should trust our God-given reason.

Augustine also taught that there is a distinction between “the church visible” and “the church invisible.” We should be careful, he wrote, not to assume that those who are members of the Church are more in God’s favor than those who are not. The Church is a crucial sign and a symbol, but we must not confuse it with the City of God itself. Consequently, he taught that the sacraments conveyed by priests do not lose their efficacy if the priest is a sinful person.

Augustine is most famous for developing the concept of original sin. He believed that Adam and Eve sinned first in their pride and then in their disobedience. This self-centeredness was thus woven into human nature and can only be overcome by divine grace. Clearly, Augustine the Christian continued to be influenced by his years in Manichaeism—the dualism of soul versus body speaks loudly. Much of the problem, Augustine argued, has to do with sex. Human sexuality is fallen, he argued, and can only be healed a little bit at a time through the sacrament of Christian marriage.

I find it interesting to compare a person’s beliefs and life experience. This is a situation we all find ourselves in. My experiences lead me to believe something strongly. No matter how many logical proofs you may offer me to the contrary, only a much stronger experience is likely to change my views and help me gain a new perspective. (I especially try to remember this when I catch myself dispensing sage advice to teenagers. It usually turns out to be little more than guilty nostalgia!) In Augustine’s case, his early sexual experiences led him to believe he was sinful and fallen, and he found his way out of the dark through celibacy rather than marriage, in conjunction with ordination.

I do think it a shame, though, that Augustine’s 13-year stable relationship with his concubine could not be blessed by the Church. I assume that Augustine couldn’t or didn’t marry her because of her social class. He referred to this woman in his writings as “the One” … it sounds like they had something very special. This makes me think about our present-day situation in America, in which many couples never get married, and many others are not allowed to, as much as they would like to. Meanwhile, a staggering number of “legitimate” marriages fall apart. It seems that in every age we have set up structures that choose to bless or curse a relationship with little or no inside knowledge of it.

Modern historian Thomas Cahill has called Augustine “the first medieval man and the last classical man.” But Augustine was, first and foremost, fully human. Perhaps he never fully understood that God, the one who was incarnated and became a human himself, blessed and loved Augustine’s body as well as his soul. But through his intelligence, wisdom, and failures, Augustine can help us connect with the bright spark of divinity in ourselves. Amen.

Five Women and One Man

sermon preached at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler

The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 16A, August 24, 2014

If you’re like me, you’ve been watching the news over the past few weeks with an increasing sense of gloom and helplessness. Just when we think the laundry list of tragedy and injustice in the world couldn’t get any worse, along comes a shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, that rips the scab off the deep wound of our country’s history of racism. We wonder what we can do. Maybe some of you have dumped buckets of ice over your heads this week—a noble act, as long as it also came with a donation to the ALS Association. Yet maybe you still wonder: “Am I doing enough? What can I do about Ferguson, Gaza, ISIS, Central America, Liberia, Nigeria?”


Our readings today present us with a variety of characters, mostly humble folks, who all have to make decisions at moments of crisis. Our story from the book of Exodus revolves around five women in trying circumstances, while our gospel reading zeroes in on one particular fisherman and his stunning proclamation.

First we hear about Shiphrah and Puah, who are midwives in Egypt. They're not exactly household names, are they? At least, I've never seen them in any children's Bible, which is a real shame. We don’t know whether they are Egyptians who are sympathetic to their Hebrew charges, or Hebrews in the pay of Pharaoh. Regardless, when they receive the order to kill all the Hebrew boys born on their watch, they exercise what may be the first act of civil disobedience in recorded history. And they do it by using Pharaoh’s own prejudices against him. They tell him, “Oh, Hebrew women are built for childbearing—not like Egyptian women. They give birth so quickly and easily, we midwives aren’t even needed!” The midwives cleverly avoid responsibility for killing newborn Hebrew boys by affirming Pharaoh’s prejudice that Hebrews are very different from Egyptians. In their creative disobedience, Shiphrah and Puah do their part to work against an impending genocide.

Moses in His Mother's Arms
(Simeon Solomon, 1840-1905)

One of the babies they save is born to a woman to whom centuries of tradition have given the name Yocheved. The way the story is typically told, we might think that Yocheved is trying to save her baby boy by putting him in a basket in the river. But how realistic is this as a permanent solution? Is it the Old Testament equivalent of leaving the baby on the doorstep with a note? I want to suggest instead, along with 12^th-century Jewish scholar Moses ibn Ezra, that Yocheved has given up. She knows that Pharaoh’s soldiers will come for Moses to drown him in the Nile. She cannot bear to let them do this—so, when all her other options have been spent, she makes the agonizing decision to do the job for them. If her son will not be allowed to live his life, she will at least send him to his death with dignity. So she and Miriam set little Moses adrift in a lovingly prepared basket. At least for a time, he will be cradled by the river, not violently thrown into it.

Yocheved walks away from the river bank, distraught, not wanting her daughter to see her break down completely. Her daughter is not named in today’s story, but Miriam’s role is crucial. I picture Miriam as being about nine years old: old enough to understand the danger her brother is in, but not old enough to have become crippled with either overconfidence or self-doubt. You know the time Jesus said, “You must become like a little child to enter God’s Kingdom”? Maybe he was thinking of Miriam.

from the 1998 film The Prince of Egypt

So Miriam stays with Moses, “to see what would happen to him.” Is the basket watertight enough to float? For how long? What if her brother starts to cry? Or maybe Miriam has big ideas about rescuing her brother herself, hiding him away even against her mother’s knowledge. Maybe she plans to stay right here at the riverbank and care for him forever—she doesn’t know how. But she waits with him, because he's a baby, and he mustn’t be left alone.

And now I have a very important question for you: Who was the world’s first stock broker? Pharaoh’s daughter. Do you know why? She drew a little prophet from the rushes on the banks.

from www.thebricktestament.com

All kidding aside, God sometimes works through the most surprising people. I don’t know of any tradition that gives a name to Pharaoh’s daughter. The lowly midwives are named right in the Bible, but not the princess who goes down to the river at just this moment for a bath. I can imagine Miriam peeking through the reeds, trying not to be seen. The princess—and I’m guessing she’s about 12 or 13—finds the baby. She knows the rules, but she is just old enough to have gained a rebellious streak: “I think I’ll keep this Hebrew baby as a pet!” Of course, being a spoiled young princess, she has no skills for taking care of him.

And that’s when Miriam plucks up her courage and makes her move. She emerges from the reeds: “Oh, I know someone who can take care of him for you!” It may not even have occurred to Miriam that her mother will get paid for raising her own child, the ultimate irony and slap to Pharaoh’s face. Miriam only ensures that her brother will live, and the princess only ensures that she will have a cute baby to coo over from time to time. Of course, the princess will grow up too, and as she does, she will come to love the child and take him into her own home for good. And so, Shiphrah, Puah, Yocheved, Miriam, and the princess of Egypt all conspire unwittingly to save the life of the most important prophet in Hebrew history.

Having heard from these five women, let’s skip forward about 1500 years to Peter’s proclamation that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus blesses him for saying it. But in the very next moment, which we will hear next Sunday, Jesus will predict his own death, Peter will object vehemently, and Jesus will curse Peter for it. Much later, at the time of Jesus’ arrest, Peter will skulk in the shadows, and when confronted, he will deny Jesus three times. After the resurrection, Jesus will ask Peter three times, “Do you love me?” And Peter will answer, in essence, “Yes, Lord, I like you an awful lot.” Despite Peter’s alternating boldness and cowardice, his bumbling nature, his chronic foot-in-mouth disease, Jesus calls him “Rocky” and proclaims that the church will be built on this rock. I don’t know whether to feel more unnerved or reassured by that. Both, I think.

Garrison Keillor, in his 1989 performance piece “The Young Lutheran’s Guide to the Orchestra,” concludes humorously that the percussion section of the orchestra is the perfect place for a Christian. He says that percussion is “the most Christian instrument there is. Percussionists are endlessly patient because they hardly ever get to play. Pages and pages of music go by when the violins are sawing away and the winds are tooting and the brass are blasting, and the percussionist sits there and counts the bars like a hunter in the blind waiting for a grouse to appear. A percussionist may have to wait for twenty minutes just to play a few beats, but those beats have to be exact, and they have to be passionate, climactic. All that the Epistles of Paul say a Christian should be—faithful, waiting, trusting, filled with fervor—are the qualities of the good percussionist.”

from http://www.bostonmagazine.com/2012/06/
boston-symphony-orchestra-audition/

I want to echo Garrison Keillor’s observation. As players in the great human orchestra, we go through our lives, doing the best we can with what we’ve been given, trying to make beautiful music out of this life. And some of us may become soloists, acting in very explicit ways to try to change the world, while others tend to stay in, say, the viola section. But a life faithful to God does not come down to how much or how little we have done in God’s name. It has more to do with whether we did something heartfelt and creative at just the right time while following the conductor's lead.

Now, I’m not saying that there’s one intractable plan, and that the universe is unfolding in a predetermined way over which we have no control. Not at all. Life presents us with opportunities, as it did for the women in Exodus, and the decisions we make can and do determine what will happen next. We can’t always predict the consequences. And even when we mean well, we may actually be at our worst. As a flaming extrovert, I can relate to Peter. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said exactly the wrong thing. But every once in a while, maybe twice in a while … I’ve said or done exactly the right thing when it counted, and God has blessed the results.

So it is good and right and proper for us to hold up Peter’s example today. Jesus commends his faith, the kind of bold faith that is able to step forward and announce, “Jesus is Lord.” And we must honor Pharaoh’s daughter, who showed compassion, even if her motives may have been a bit selfish. I hope you’ll remember the names Shiphrah and Puah, two ancient women whose ethics and cleverness stand as examples to us all.

Miriam's Song (Laura Bolter)
from wanderinghebrew.com

But I’ll be honest with you. My favorite character today is Miriam, a 9-year-old girl who might as well have been the inspiration for the famous John Milton quote: “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Like a percussionist in the orchestra, like a hunter in the blind, this little child crouching in the reeds is somehow given to know that she must stay right where she is and pay attention. And then, when she has consented to be right where God wants her to be, she finds herself saying exactly the right thing, the creative thing, the compassionate thing, to change the course of history.

What does that look like for us? Do we beat ourselves up for not being more bold? Do we run around like crazy trying to accomplish good things? It’s not about the amount of stuff we do. It’s about doing the right thing at the right time. So let us live a life of attentive prayer, trusting God to guide us in our actions. We don’t have to be as creative as these ancient Hebrew women. But may we always be as ethical as the midwives and as compassionate as Pharaoh’s daughter. And like Peter, let us continue to proclaim that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God—no matter where that takes us next. Amen.

Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux

homily preached at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler

The Feast of Bernard of Clairvaux, August 20, 2014

Today is the feast day of Bernard of Clairvaux, who died on this day in 1153. Bernard was a French monk and layperson who contributed greatly to the reform of monastic life in Western Europe.

In the 10^th century, monasticism shifted from encompassing a huge variety of local practices to being a Pope-approved system of institutions modeled after the example of the monastery in Cluny, France. Along with institutionalization came the establishment of celibacy as the norm for clergy, a tradition that continues to this day; a de-emphasis on physical labor as a spiritual practice for monks; and a focus on beautiful liturgy. While almsgiving remained a central feature of monasticism, the Cluniac monasteries also began to shore up wealth for themselves.

It wasn’t long before some saw the need for reform. Bernard and a group of friends founded a new monastic house at Clairvaux in 1115, and Bernard himself went on to found 162 other houses. He developed his own version of the Rule of St. Benedict, and the Pope did approve it. But it was a reformed rule that stressed more manual labor and less wealth. His houses tended to be more rural, away from the heavily traveled highways. And his houses also elected their own abbots, not relying on top-down oversight originating in Rome.

So we might say that Bernard was a conservative innovator. He saw himself as restoring the pure apostolic life, with an emphasis on doing things in common and holding possessions in common, as they did in the early church. Bernard was not a scholastic like other famous theologians of the time. His theology was more intuitive than logical. We know that he debated contentiously with Peter Abelard, whose systematic approach to the faith he disapproved of. Abelard used logic to make all sorts of theological assertions in a hypothetical sense, without the benefit of anybody’s first-hand experience. Bernard felt that Abelard was sacrificing the mysteries of God’s nature in order to have things all figured out. In the words of our reading from Ecclesiasticus, Bernard was “at home with the obscurities of parables.”

Unfortunately from our perspective, Bernard was also heavily in favor of the Crusades. His expression of the faith was militant, and he preached passionately about the need for the Second Crusade in 1147. That crusade was a disaster for the Christians, and the Muslims under Saladin took Jerusalem. Bernard was widely criticized for having supported the crusade, and he died shortly afterwards.

But nobody could say that Bernard didn’t strive to abide in Jesus’ love. For over a decade, he went with very little sleep so that he could write as much as possible. Again, to quote our reading from Scripture, Bernard “set his heart to rise early to seek the Lord who made him, and to petition the Most High.” Truly, his memory has not disappeared, and his name has lived through many generations.

Bernard is a great example of a person who is remembered for acting on his convictions. He saw clearly what he believed to be wrong with the current system—a system that had stood in that form for a couple hundred years—and he set out to change it. But most importantly, he was always listening for what God was calling him to do.

So what might it mean for us to be, as it says in today’s prayer for Bernard, “kindled with the flame of God’s love?” To be “aflame with the spirit of love and discipline?” Love and discipline are words we don’t often pair with each other. But they do pair well. Disciplined love is love that doesn’t rely on mere feelings, but on conviction—we love because love is what we are about. Love is Jesus’ commandment to us, by which we show that we abide in Jesus’ love.

Disciplined love can begin with some of the qualities mentioned in Ecclesiasticus: seeking wisdom, dedicating ourselves to prayer, and traveling outside our comfort zone to learn what life is like for people who seem very different from ourselves. The wisdom we gain from these practices don’t make God love us more, because God already loves us infinitely. But it does help us become more useful. Life takes courage, and as Swiss theologian Karl Barth said, “Courage is fear that has said its prayers.” We are all theologians, seeking wisdom and learning to live in God’s love and to share the good news of it.

So let’s thank Bernard of Clairvaux today for his example: an imperfect person just like all of us, but a man who asked forgiveness for his sins, who sought wisdom, who lived a life of disciplined love, and who chose to abide in the love of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Jeremy Taylor

homily preached at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler

The Feast of Jeremy Taylor, August 13, 2014

I once heard a priest remark, “We should adopt as our church’s slogan, ‘Come die with us.’ It wouldn’t pack the pews, but it would be the gospel.” “Come die with us.” That wasn’t intended as a flippant commentary on the state of church attendance, but as a lens through which to see what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ.

Today we honor Jeremy Taylor, bishop in the Church of England, theologian, writer, and pastor. Taylor was born in 1613 and died in 1667. He served under William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, and was later appointed chaplain to King Charles I and the Royalist army. Those of you who are up on your British history will know that spelled trouble, for the Puritans overthrew the monarchy in 1649 and executed Charles I. Taylor was imprisoned and later kept under house arrest, where he wrote his most seminal works: Holy Living, and its companion, Holy Dying.

Above all, Taylor was concerned with how we spend our time. Life is short, he wrote, and we must live it intentionally to the glory of God. But let’s hear him in his own words:

We have a great work to do, many enemies to conquer, many evils to prevent, much danger to run through, many difficulties to be mastered, many necessities to serve, and much good to do, many children to provide for, or many friends to support, or many poor to relieve, or many diseases to cure, besides the needs of nature, and of relation, our private and our publick cares, and duties of the world, which necessity and the Providence of God hath adopted into the family of Religion.[1]

I think he might have been something of a workaholic!

But lest we think that Taylor, speaking as a church insider, could never understand the pressures ordinary people feel, consider that he also wrote this:

The life of every man may be so ordered (and indeed must,) that it may be a perpetual serving of God … For God provides the good things of the world to serve the needs of nature, by the labours of the Plowman, the skill and pains of the Artisan, and the dangers and traffick of the Merchant: These men are in their callings the Ministers of Divine providence, and the stewards of the creation, and servants of the great family of God, the World.[2]

So Taylor believed that we all have a God-given vocation. For him, holy living meant an awareness of God’s presence with us at every moment, and a perpetual honoring of that divine presence. From that awareness was born a necessity to be conscious of and to accept our limitations, as Taylor wrote in Holy Dying:

Before a man comes to be wise, he is half dead with gouts and consumptions, with catarrhs and aches, with sore eyes and a worn-out body … He is not to be called a man without a wise and an adorned soul … but by that time his soul is thus furnished, his body is decayed; and then you can hardly reckon him to be alive, when his body is possessed by so many degrees of death.[3]

Jeremy Taylor understood holy living and holy dying to be the same thing. When we suffer, it helps us appreciate the value of life, and to see it as something that belongs only to God, something to which we cannot cling. Christianity begins with baptism, a metaphorical drowning and rising to new life. It is sustained in the Eucharist, in which Christ gives us his very body to take into our own. Our suffering, then, mirrors Christ’s suffering, and all of life and death is held lovingly in God’s hands.

After the Restoration and the crowning of Charles II, Jeremy Taylor was appointed Bishop of Down, Connor, and Dromore and the vice-chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin. During his last years, he worked to rebuild churches, to restore the use of the Book of Common Prayer, and to stand in opposition to Puritanism. He was involved in disputes with both Presbyterian and Roman Catholic clergy, thus taking his stand as a representative of the Via Media, the Middle Way that Anglicanism has always striven to encapsulate. He argued, debated and disputed, yes, but he also encouraged religious toleration and freedom of thought. Disagreement did not have to mean hostility.

Above all, Jeremy Taylor counseled people never to be idle, for ultimately, we must account to God for how we choose to spend every moment of our lives. Taylor’s quest for sanctification led him to write beautiful prayers, two of which I’d like to share with you today. The first speaks to the divisions the Reformation had brought upon Europe, especially as represented by the English Civil War.

O most gracious and eternal God and loving Father, who hast poured out thy bowels upon us, and sent the Son of thy love unto us to die for love, and to make us dwell in love, and the eternal comprehensions of thy Divine mercies, O be pleased to inflame my heart with a holy charity towards thee and all the world. Lord, I forgive all that ever have offended me, and beg that both they and I may enter into the possession of thy mercies, and feel a gracious pardon from the same fountain of grace: and do thou forgive me all the acts of scandal whereby I have provoked, or tempted, or lessened, or disturbed any person. Lord, let me never have my portion amongst those that divide the union, and disturb the peace, and break the charities of the church and Christian communion. And though I am fallen into evil times, in which Christendom is divided by the names of an evil division, yet I am in charity with all Christians, with all that love the Lord Jesus and long for his coming; and I would give my life to save the soul of any of my brethren; and I humbly beg of thee that the public calamity of the several societies of the church may not be imputed to my soul to any evil purposes.[4]

The second prayer is a rapturous outpouring of thanksgiving from a man as aware of the suffering of his impending death as he was aware of the joys of a God-given life:

Lord, preserve me in the unity of thy holy church, in the love of God and of my neighbours. Let thy grace enlarge my heart to remember, deeply to resent [feel], faithfully to use, wisely to improve, and humbly to give thanks to thee for all thy favours with which thou hast enriched my soul, and supported my estate, and preserved my person, and rescued me from danger, and invited me to goodness in all the days and periods of my life. Thou hast led me through it with an excellent conduct; and I have gone astray after the manner of men; but my heart is towards thee. O, do unto thy servant as thou usest to do unto those that love thy name; let thy truth comfort me; thy mercy deliver me; thy staff support me; thy grace sanctify my sorrow; and thy goodness pardon all my sins: thy angels guide me with safety in this shadow of death, and thy most Holy Spirit lead me into the land of righteousness, for thy name’s sake, which is so comfortable, and for Jesus Christ’s sake, our dearest Lord and most gracious Saviour. Amen.[5]

Jeremy Taylor knew deep in his soul what the Apostle Paul knew, that “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.” Amen.

---

[1] Jeremy Taylor, “Holy Living” (1650), in Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (compilers), Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 203.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Thomas K. Carroll, ed., Jeremy Taylor: Selected Works (New York; Paulist Press, 1990), 479.

[4] Carroll, 498.

[5] Carroll, 499.