Feeding on Heavenly Food

A Look at Edward Taylor’s 8th Preparatory Meditation

"I am the living bread that came down out of heaven;
if anyone eats of this bread, he shall live forever;
and the bread also which I shall give for the life of the world is My flesh."
John 6:51

During Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan Commonwealth and while Edward Taylor was yet a youth, protestant scholastic Richard Baxter wrote in his practical treatise, The Reformed Pastor,

"If we did but study half as much to affect and amend our hearts, as we do our hearers, it would not be with us as it is…Too many do somewhat for other men’s souls, while they seem to forget that they have any of their own to regard…It is a sad thing that so many of us preach our hearers asleep; but it is sadder still if we have studied and preached ourselves asleep."

Edward Taylor, a puritan poet and pastor, was born in England in 1642. His ministerial life and writings proves he did much to avoid the culpability which Baxter mentions. Of his writings, those that were particularly introspective in this regard were assembled under the title, Preparatory Meditations before my Approach to the Lords Supper. It is in these poetic contemplations that I glimpse the inner soul of a called man. And yet, are we not called to likewise feel both our need for vigor against worldly declension in this life and our need to hope in the glory of the next?

Preparatory Meditations is a contemplation of John 6:51, titled "I am the Living Bread" and you can read it here. An analysis of this meditation presents Edward Taylor as a man readying his heart for worship, by recognizing his frail condition and taking pleasure in God’s divine provision, through Christ, for those who spiritually hunger after living bread.

This man of God is not interested in merely reminding himself of biblical truths that were perhaps recently under his scrutiny, but rather has set himself to praising the glorious mystery within those doctrines. How often do I approach communion in similar fashion? Discovery. Meditation. Exclamation! Taylor sees the distance between his earthly “Threshold” and God’s “bright Throne” and spies “A Golden Path” which connects his immanent reality with the existence of a transcendent God. This is a path he is unable to trace or entirely comprehend; it puzzles him. The writer’s starting point for reflection is a look into the means by which a heavenly God would communicate the superior glory of Himself in order to condescend spiritual blessing upon the doorstep of a fallen humanity.

Finding “the Bread of Life in’t at my doore,” the poet begins to examine the sad condition of humankind after the Fall when it “lost its golden dayes.” Before paradise was lost, the author describes his inner man as a “Bird of Paradise put in/This Wicker Cage (my Corps) to tweedle praise.” The spiritual self is figured as a bird imprisoned by its finite nature. This figure comments on Taylor’s belief in the inferiority of the carnal existence even before the sin of his first parents dealt the deathblow to the rest of humanity. Although the modern reader of the meditation may view this picture of the encaged bird as derogatory, the Puritans would view such human limitation as casting due glory upon God’s infinitude. This image of the soul as constrained by the material allowed Taylor to take greater pleasure in a boundless Creator distinct from His creation. It also enabled him to look forward to a fuller, consummate humanity in which God dwells with His people.

At this point in the poet’s verse, it seems that Taylor is calling his attention to the beginning of man’s misery:

“Had peckt the Fruit forbade: and so did fling
Away its Food; and lost its golden dayes;
It fell into Celestial Famine sore”

The soul that having “peckt” the forbidden fruit not out of hunger but out of greed and the boastful pride of life has lost its true source of life. Here, in the Garden of Eden, is where man “did fling away its food” leaving humanity unable to find nourishment through communion with God! The unity of guilt felt in the Fall would mean a perpetual pain: the “sore” of continual hunger after a higher pleasure while never again feeling satiated with the fullness of God. Taylor believed that through Adam’s sin, the human race in its fallen state, was denied ever again tasting even a “morsel” of the goodness of God. Sin has separated.

The meditation narrows in asking how our starving soul or “Poore Bird” will be fed, or “what wilt thou doe?” The condition Taylor finds himself in, along with the rest of humankind, is one of acute hunger for an intangible “soul bread.” Other “Creatures” are unable to formulate or cultivate that which can satisfy the starving. Although the field of this world may supply for physical want, it is insufficient in yielding true spiritual provision. The Epistle to the Hebrews talks about the pre-eminence of God’s Living Bread over and against celestial powers and Old Testament shadows. Taylor is negating the ability of these things to secure salvation so that “God’s White Loaf” mentioned in the latter part of the work will be affirmed as “having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs” (Hebrews 1:4). God spoke and intervened for His people in the Exodus by providing daily food in the wilderness in order to show typologically manna's subordination to “these last days” in which “he has spoken to us by His Son” (Hebrews 1:2). Oh to savor the sweetness found in the Bread of Life, a nourishment both eternal and efficacious!

So what is this living bread that will “end all strife” and reconcile mankind’s starving and “sad state”? Taylor sees God’s outpouring “streams of grace” as His provision through “his deare-dear Son” of a righteousness that leads to salvation. It is this perfect and undefiled righteous Jesus figured as “the Purest Wheate in Heaven” that is necessary to produce “Soul Bread.” “Which Bread of Life from Heaven down came,” indicates Taylor’s orthodox belief that the incarnate Christ was in actuality the self-manifestation of God on earth who purchased the way by which paradise could be regained. Specifically, for a Calvinist minister such as Edward Taylor, the “Golden Path” of salvation reflects not the radiance of mankind, but the activity of a Deity who displays his singular glory through bestowing his mercy toward the elect.

As I mentioned earlier, Taylor is not merely interested in rehearsing in his mind soteriological details divested of praise. He is meditating on the mediatorial work of his Saviour in preparation to both feed his congregation with word and sacrament and to one day meet His God. The metaphor of life-giving bread was first claimed by Jesus himself in the Gospel of John and was not always interpreted to be referring to the Lord’s Supper. Taylor necessarily utilizes Christ’s expression in his contemplation of administering the Supper, where bread pictures the broken body of Christ “Discht on thy Table up by Angells Hands.” However, the eschatological picture of eternal satisfaction made possible by reconciliation with God the Father through Christ the Son, appears to be more the essence of this pastor's meditation. Howard Marshall, Professor of New Testament at the University of Aberdeen, writes in comment of John 6: “Jesus elucidates the meaning of faith in himself as the crucified source of life. The concept of ‘real’ bread is powerfully developed in a way that…is not limited to the Lord’s Supper."

The dual consequence of the metaphor is an important highlight when considering that this puritan poet was hostile to the liberal doctrine at the time that allowed all moral church-goers to take communion as a converting ordinance. Taylor’s doctrinal stance is evident in his figure of Christ as the “Bread in Heaven,” giving true spiritual supply to those who recognize their celestial hunger and seek restoration through his redemption. It was in resemblance of this conversion act, that the sacramental meal commanded in the New Testament commemorated and confirmed God’s commitment to His regenerate and redeemed people.

Taylor asks, “Did God mould up this Bread in Heaven, and bake,/Which from his Table came, and to shine goeth?” The description of Jesus as one molded in Heaven, as opposed to being created, appears to be drawn directly from the Nicene Creed. It testifies to, “the only begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made; who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven.”

The author poses another rhetorical question in which he paints God bidding his people to find their portion in Him, the “Soule Bread.” Within these lines are duplications of the words come, take, eat, and thy fill. Such repetitive usages in this part of the text betray Taylor’s conviction that a sinner who “never could attain a morsel” will and should act in hedonistic greed when it comes to “God’s White Loaf” that is His Son. There is a heightened intensity within the poem as Taylor describes the indispensable reception of Christ’s sacrificial mediation as analogous to indulging in the fine delicacy of “Heaven’s Sugar Cake.” The image of a banquet table set for those in famine conveys the idea of Christ saturating the soul in delightful abundance.

To fully apprehend and then appreciate this outpouring grace is the most striking motive behind Taylor’s meditations of praise. The response of David in the Psalms is, “Oh, how abundant is your goodness, which you have stored up for those who fear you and worked for those who take refuge in you” (Psalm 31:19). God displaying his grace through Christ is portrayed as the Master Baker, kneading what can never be fully comprehended by “Poore Birds.” The abundant goodness is a storehouse never depleted. “Heaven’s whelmed-down Chrystall meele Bowl,” is ever being filled “to the brim…yea and higher” with living bread. As the gift of grace is poured out on the earth to the hungry, God’s chosen and elected participants of His grace, we will open wide our mouths to receive his “Bread of Life” and all the accompanying spritual blessings. Taylor concludes his meditation with the assurance that those who feed their soul on heavenly food partake of Christ and very God and are confirmed again of the everlasting life, a soul that “shalt never dy.”

Edward Taylor spent his mortal life pondering the immortality of his soul before God. He saw man’s telos as living an earthly life singing God’s praises, so that the life experienced after death could be one of uninterrupted worship in light of God’s glory finally and fully revealed. Believing corrupted souls to be “petty things,” Taylor used his Preparatory Meditations as a means of detachment from the trivialities of this wooing world. Eternally minded, he knew the incorruptible pleasures and “golden dayes” prepared by his God were never to be found in the temporal or fallacious offers that “cannot yield thee here the smallest Crumb.” It is with these embedded notions, that this seventeenth century minister and poet, perhaps unknowingly, adhered to Richard Baxter’s practical exhortation to, “take some special pains with his heart, before he is to go to the congregation …go then specially to God for life…meditate on the weight of the subject of which you are going to speak and on the great necessity of your people’s souls, that you may go in the zeal of the Lord into his house."

The devotional interest upon the inward part and ultimate purpose of a person may seem too religious a topic for those who happen upon these early American writings. It may be asked if there is anything substantial to be gained from reading the poetical works of a man like Edward Taylor? Perhaps for some the answer is no and for those, Puritan thought will continue to fade into the past as crusty or irrelevant composition. But I hope not. My mother is the one who turned me on to the indespensible literary tradition of the Puritans. This man’s quietly written thought and meditative art summons us to read the narrative of his inner life. The power of his poetry is in the way he unconsciously provoked later generations (like us)to consider they have a soul of their own to regard. For as poet Mary Oliver declares, “Poems are not words after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed."