Reflections on Taize

It occurred to us recently that much of our daily experience takes place within a rigid framework of what we might call “clock time.” We speak of “taking time for this” or “making time for that,” rather than thinking about “giving time” to things we enjoy or people we care about. One of the truly marvellous gifts of Taizé style prayer, music, and meditation, is that it encourages a lift out of clock time into a time where sound is savoured and silence is cultivated.

While an actual pilgrimage to Taizé is the best way to experience this element of seeming timelessness, Taizé style prayer (which has become easily accessible and practiced), offers us a taste of that experience. Whether in its home setting in the community in France or in quiet worship in our own church environment, Taizé prayer provides an experience that at once draws us outside our daily routine and also allows us to enter into our usual activities with a greater thoughtfulness and care. It may be described as the experience of finding, dwelling in, and living from our spiritual centre.

In this style of song and prayer, the listener is invited to hear, feel, and gently digest what he/she and the community are singing. In this invitational manner, the music penetrates beneath the surface and evokes a deeper response–a sense of being fully present. This is not only a being fully present to ourselves, but also to others and even through others in the shared community.

This experience may lead us gently into our own centre,  as a sacred place where your worth is affirmed,  and where we are connected with others and with the silent Mystery.

Day 2. Friday
What a restless night – so much of an evening’s experience to live and relive, so much singing to try to hear again. Curiously, not tired today despite lack of sleep; so much here to revive the spirit.

Despite the fact that the day seems not too full on paper – it moves at a constant pace. Prayer at 8:30 – with communion. Sat along the side once again, but this morning, though emotional, I felt more a part of the process – I moved into the experience rather than simply being moved by the experience Bible study and a meagre breakfast took us to lunch time.

Noon prayer – Rose and I at the same time had a sense of needing to move to the main floor. Here we sat right on the floor. We arrive a few minutes before the service – a chance to prepare our hearts and minds for worship. Now I feel what that truly is. We sat next to the row of brothers and both of us felt we heard our voices amid the others at this service. We were helping to create the experience and yet still the experience was greater than either of us.

Lunch at 1 p.m. was experienced in total silence – a way to create community through other means than words. Though silent, we were able to listen to Mozart and Barber’s Adagio for Strings. What an experience to sit in the beautiful sunshine and look out on lush fields of French countryside. It was extremely emotional and made the actual eating difficult at times. After lunch we made purchases at the store – beautiful pottery made on the premises by some of the brothers but stamped only with Taizé and not the potter’s name – clearly the community is more important than the individual.

We were able to enjoy some free time for meditation and reflection – some beautiful walking paths and places to simply sit.

At supper we sat with an English fellow and are beginning to find some people that speak English – very few here this week. Had a sort of choir practice as well today to familiarize us with some of the more difficult chants for the next few days.

The service this evening was longer as it offered (for those who wished to) an opportunity to kneel around the cross. It is interesting that no instructions are given – none are needed. The community simply responds as community and new people simply follow what is expressed without words. Both of us took part but it was completely an individual exercise done entirely on our own time. The singing continues throughout. As the crowd thins, this is becoming our favourite time as there still is no sense of rushing but we move closer back to silence – the silence not of emptiness but of quiet fulness. Tonight around the cross it became evident that the feelings we have – joy, sorrow, are universal. No words were spoken but the burdens were the same – you could see it in the faces of the community and feel it in the spirit among us.  No words were spoken but everyone in the community could be heard.

Day 3. Saturday.
Today I write from the most beautiful and serene wooded place. No picture could reflect the peace and solitude here. Pictures only capture what the eye can see, not what the heart feels. The spirit of the universe is surely pulsing here.

The silence is becoming silent today – less cluttered with moments of complete tranquillity and then moments of complete clear thoughts – not the disarray of earlier silences. We welcome the silence as a gift and simply move with it or not – allowing it and self to simply be. Today the silence and self feels as one.

At the same time as one becomes more aware of the self, one also feels more a part of the community – a seeming contradiction but here the brothers speak of the church, the worship, as a place of teaching. How little is said here – how much is taught.  And yet, even here the brothers speak of this community as a community of imperfection. If it were perfect, where would Christ fit and how would his example be necessary to our lives. It is the desire to be less imperfect that keeps the community alive, for Christ may fit in the spaces where the puzzle pieces do not yet fit. The “way” of Taizé may not be one of teaching or learning so much as by following. The way is not by imitation but by identification. Once identified, it may be shared by example.

In Taizé there were no answers – but for a time even the questions fell silent.

NORM'S THOUGHTS ...
    from his first visit to Taize in  June, 2004

Day 1. Monday
When you get here, you have a sense that you are no longer travelling. There is a stillness. To the extent that we are willing and able to move deeper rather than flee to or remain on the surface, we come to a point of stillness, a point deeper than and beyond the questions and the question that we are to a place where the questions fall silent. This is the place to which stories, images, rituals, all point, but to which we may not wish to go. What you find here over and over again is compassion. In some ways, Taize encompasses realities. It starts with tradition that provides a vehicle that leads you to the the experience. ... The key is to recognize the community ...

Day 2. Tuesday
We began to speak of the sense that there is a “something more” within our experience, that we notice when we converse in a “something more,” except through a tradition, except through the words or teachings of a tradition, or even of Jesus or Buddha? Rahner has an approach to this question. He speaks of the inner and outer word. There are two approaches. You get in touch, especially through relationship with the core of who you are, that centre place, and you try to experience it, express it, articulate it, and convey it. There is also a kind of fear for a variety of reasons. You might be able to find some ideas, images, words to do so. But you might also then come across people who have tried to live, and feel, and think deeply, and found images and stories to express it. Then you can take them in a different way. You take them not so much as stories out there, but more as inner geography.

Day 3. Wednesday
... I am coming to feel that you cannot reach into and out of the experience of Taize. You have to encompass it, the try to speak truthfully, by sharing each others joys and sorrows. So, we talk, we feel the experience, and we try to be truthful. And we find that we are drawn into it. And in being true to each other we become new to each other, and the challenge is to move together. And the community is constantly evolving. And we cannot name it except to say that there is something sacred here. In the creation story, instead of speaking of a manufacturing agent, we can say that through each other we are able to see the other side of ourselves. And we come into a new way of being. So we are grateful, and so we live out the relationship with truth and compassion.

Day 4. Thursday
The core of what we learn here is staying with the experience, not bringing anything in from outside the experience, trying to honour the experience and struggling to find words to express it. When we speak and find that we become more intense yet more silent and more still, and that our words well up from a deeper place and seem to have more of a resonance of truth about them, we find that there is a silence that encompasses us and a depth that is deeper than us. We find that we are pushed or drawn to be truthful, really to be true, to each other, and to be caring and compassionate to each other, and, more than that, that the two, truth and caring, are inseparable. This discovery is made, this awareness emerges, in open, trusting conversation that spirals at once toward greater inwardness and toward the articulation of that inwardness. And within and behind that spiralling process is an immense longing, a longing uttered in words, whatever their content, whose context is a striving towards truth and caring. Yet as the dialogue unfolds, there is a subtle and gradual movement toward stillness, toward silence. There is not so much a stilling of the longing, but its realization, its fulfillment. It is like entering a common space together, where we know that we are truly loved and loving, and truth and caring are one, where our longing to love and be loved, giving and receiving are one, and there is no difference. These moments of silent oneness, perhaps sacramentalized in gentle tears, are of a oneness that is fulness that contains, holds together, reconciles, and transcends all-gift and call, gratitude and generosity, truth and compassion, inner and outer. ...  And this is PEACE.

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<>SHARED THOUGHTS ...

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Taize and the Search For Meaning in Life

Among the basic life questions mentioned by Sam Keen, author of Your Mythic Journey, Hymns to an Unknown God, and many others, are:
 * Why is there something rather than nothing?
 * With whom do I belong?
 * What are my duties, my obligations?
 * What is the purpose of my life? My vision?

These questions, among others, suggest the human search for meaning- the search to live from an inner life. It is not enough simply to ask the questions, for to ask is to discover that an essential characteristic of humanity is incompleteness. And if being human is to experience incompleteness, and it is characterized by a sense of a lack of something, then it is also characterized by desire– an energy to awaken a sense that there may be answers to our questions; or that it may simply be easier, as Rilke says,to live with the questions.

Taize is an experience of inwardness, of depth, of richness– a place that allows those who visit there to be in touch with, and live from, their own inwardness, depth, and richness to the extent that they are ready to do so, or are able to do so. Here is a safe place in which to feel whatever one needs to feel, or whatever may surface to be felt, and entrust it into the caring hands of others. Here one senses that emotions and feelings are universal and although we may not know others there on a personal level, we recognize that what is felt by one, may be, or have been ,felt by others - exists in others.

Here is a community where one may glimpse, at least for a time, a deeper meaning of life. In
Taize, young and old are invited to respond to and from their experiences in life-giving ways. In any case, it is impossible to remain indifferent to the place and to those who are gathered there. Contact with the community invites an atmosphere of peace and trust and a silence that is also an encounter with profound energy. It is a place that fills the body , mind ,and spirit with “ things other” than our clutter, our noise, and desires of daily life.

Brother Roger founded the Taize community as a way to move beyond natural divisions and conflicts within the human family. Influenced by the example of his grandmother who sheltered refugees in the north of France during WWI, Brother Roger nurtured the idea of a community where peace and reconciliation were possible every day. Today, as many as five to six thousand young people per week come to Taize in their search for peace, trust, and reconciliation in the world and in their own lives.

In the daily pattern of Taize, everyone gathers morning , noon and early evening to pray, sing, and be silent together. The songs of Taize are easily learned. They are made up of simple phrases repeated again and again in a mantra-like quality. These are sung easily and freely in many languages.These songs express a simple yet compelling reality that is easily grasped by the mind and gradually penetrates the whole person. When the music ceases, the community gently enters into silence. In this silence, there is a solitude that is not emptiness, but fullness.

In the silence of our own hearts, where no two people are alike, but where we are all the same, something waits- something is ready to spring to life, In these moments, we sense a greater mystery, a peace and depth to our existence- life even in the midst of the many deaths we encounter as human beings. Here we glimpse, for a time, what Victor Frankl referred to as beauty in the midst of inevitable suffering- a beauty that is felt as presence that is beneath, or deeper than, all else. Here there is an experience of something that is authentic- and when something is authentic, people come. Here ther is something to be discovered- an experience felt from within and yet open to something beyond the self- awakening to, as Creel says, the quest for what is ultimately real, true, and valuable.

The brothers of Taize simply offer us an invitational opportunity first to experience something worthwhile, to name the experience, and then to live from and into that experience. “ By night, we will go to the spring. Deep within us there sparkles living water where we can quench our thirsts. By night and by day, as we move forward from beginning to new beginning, a whole life is built up...” Brother Roger