"If It Were MY Memorial Service..." Jeremy Taylor has left us.

www.JeremyTaylor.com

Some memorial services are remarkable.
As a hospice chaplain, I attend and create many memorial services—this one was inspired. On Sunday, many fellow Interfaith ministers, UU ministers and CHI graduates gathered to honor a great man who has left us.  

Jeremy Taylor was a pioneer in mining the wisdom of dreams and taught many to see them as The Divine continuing to speak to us.  His work embodied the notion that God (insert whatever holy name you want here..Spirit, Goddess, Lord, Light, Love) is alive and talking to us. Revelation did not stop with holy books...It is continuous ... We are the one's who have a reticence to listening.  Jeremy and other greats have urged us to listen better:

            " Everyone is God talking.  Let's be polite and listen to him."  –Hafiz (as translated by Ladinsky)

Dreams are the continuous source of revelation...
 I met him in a single class I took at CHI for my Interfaith training...but I claim him and his wisdom as kindred.

Here are some of the things that were said about this great and humble man:

• He was the Minister of Dreams
• He was a Bard of the Divine
• He was big and steady enough to hold our vulnerability and shame up— so we could see it.
• He made the Divine accessible.
• He fanned the mystic fire...

Someone quoted him saying, "Curiosity was another name for compassion."

I think the mark of the truly great is that they leave so, so many gifts behind within us for being wiser, and more awake to what is ours to do,  in the time we have left.

One of my professors read a poem by Jeremy Taylor, :

             Love Prayer
             (with a tip of the hat to Coleman Barks)

             Oh, God(dess)
             Grant me Love!

             Please, make it simply
             Difficult.
             Make it crack and melt the hard places
             Where I am so sure of myself.

             Make it stiffen and enliven the weak places
             Where I am uncertain, ignorant,
             and secretly afraid.

             And please make it horribly "inappropriate"
             So I must really know you in myself,
             Myself in you,
             Forced
             To give up everything that is not love
             ​(Because it is so hard to do it willingly. . .)

             I pray this
             Knowing it will ruin me.

             ​Let me be ruined by love,
             So that I may come back to you
             Without pride, or stupidity, 
             - Or pretense, or opinions -

             or any sense of separation -

             Stripped
             Like a lover,
             Hungry and ecstatically full
             All at the same time!

                          ​-Jeremy Taylor, United States twentieth century  Sacred Poems and Prayers of Love, 1998

His life was a gift to us. Thank you Jeremy Taylor for all you did ...and are still doing in your many books, and the many seeds which you have planted within us. 

They said you died in your sleep...dreaming... and again in the arms of your beloved.

Amen.

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