This year marks the 350th anniversary of Thomas Traherne’s death (1637¬–1674) and the forthcoming fifteen volume annotated critical edition of his completed works published by Oxford University Press. As an Anglican priest, Traherne’s writing and meditative practices reveal a seventeenth-century Oxford divine and metaphysical poet that deserves attention from current scholars and practitioners of spiritual formation today. His contributions to the field are found within his emphasis on felicity and contemplation. It was this study of felicity that advanced him in thanksgiving and contentment. Throughout his meditations he recommends the beauty and glory of God as a way into a life of righteousness and true happiness. His mastery of the meditation genre is found through his ability to draw attention to the surrounding world while crafting sentences for those who look over his shoulder to sit up and notice this world redolent with glory; once noticed, Traherne’s spirituality requires response.
This paper explores Traherne’s devotional and meditative writing practices as a means to display foundational principles of biblical spirituality. His claim, made at the opening to his Christian Ethicks, serves as a general overview of the sentiment within all his works, “to carry and enhance virtue to its utmost height, to open the beauty of all the prospect, and to make the glory of God appear, in the blessedness of man, by setting forth its infinite excellency.” Traherne is pointing and responding, “Behold!” Or, as the subtitle to his Commentaries of Heaven emphasizes what could be said of most of his writings, “wherein the mystery of felicitie are opened and all things discovered to be objects of happiness.” His sights are ever set on heaven, even as he looks to the things of earth. His witness is an invitation to devotion and true happiness that can only be found in God and a right view of His creation. Through an exploration of his biblical spirituality of meditation, an experience of sustained worship through a habituated and disciplined craft of paying attention will be reviewed. The recommendation within this study is to consider Traherne’s encompassing vision which he states in one of his meditations, “You must remember that we are not proposing the means of knowledge, but acquaintance.”