Time & Perspective Quote by Johannes Tauler

Tauler is doing something quietly radical: he loosens the monopoly that time, place, and clerical schedule can hold over desire. The line pivots on a pastoral dilemma common to medieval lay life and religious orders alike - people who ache for communion but can’t physically reach the altar because of illness, travel, enclosure, or circumstance. Instead of treating that absence as mere deprivation, Tauler reframes it as a different mode of access, one that turns the hunger itself into a conduit.

The intent is consolation, but it’s also instruction in an interior spirituality that Rhineland mystics prized: the heart as a site of real encounter, not a sentimental backup plan. “Pure in heart” isn’t a Hallmark flourish; it’s a gatekeeping phrase that keeps the claim from collapsing into “think holy thoughts whenever.” Spiritual communion, for Tauler, isn’t self-serve sacramentality. It presumes discipline, repentance, and a trained attention that can actually hold what it asks for.

The subtext carries a gentle critique of ritual minimalism. Medieval Christians were often encouraged to receive the Eucharist infrequently; Tauler answers by giving the faithful a way to live eucharistically without waiting for the calendar. “Even a hundred times a day” is deliberate hyperbole: not an arithmetic promise, but a rhetorical shove toward frequency of longing, repetition of consent, a life organized around return.

Context matters. Tauler wrote in an era of plague, instability, and intense devotional movements. His theology meets those realities with a daring proposal: grace is not only dispensed; it can also be received through desire itself - “immeasurable” because it refuses to be counted.