Remembering Taize. Dreaming of Community.
Sometimes we need to be fearlessly open and love fearlessly.
It’s foolish to be closed, because if you’re closed, it hurts you. Just take your hand and make it into a fist. Squeeze it tighter and tighter-it hurts. Then let go and release.
Sometimes we try to protect ourselves by being closed, but this ends up hurting us even more. Often, the greatest way to protect ourselves is by being open, loving and trusting.
- Sogyal Rinpoche, Newcastle, Australia, 6 Jan 2015
This is a quotation from a Tibetan Buddhist monk, but my time at that French monastery, Taize, taught me the same thing.
The bothers of Taize have recently released a new CD, 'Music for Unity and Peace'. To promote it, they have released three 2 minute webisodes. If you can spare 6 minutes, I encourage you to watch these. They are beautiful clips. I just watched them and my heart still beats faster whenever my mind returns to that place, and the time I lived there.
On: A Place for Retreat
Click to viewOn: Meditative Songs
On: Ecumenical Community
I want to live in intentional community with other people. I imagine it would be Christian people, or at least people willing to discover together the teachings of Christianity. I don't mean in a comfortable, theoretical way, but in a lived way. In the way Bonhoeffer describes in 'Life Together'. The only way you can really learn the lessons with your heart.
As the reading from just this last Sunday went:
Acts 4:32-35
Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.
Psalm 133
How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!
I know I am not the only young person who wants this. The New Monasticism movement shows this, and the article I read in the Melbourne Anglican paper the other month tells me this, the other people I shared my time with at Taize tell me this. I am not the only one. My generation... so many of us are crying out for it. In this world there today there is such a strong culture of The Individual. But we need community to be truly ourselves. Our identity is "me". But in Taize my identity was so much bigger. It included the others. I enjoyed walks alone, or time sitting on my bed reading, or journalling in a quiet corner of the church, but this enjoyment of being myself was enhanced by the completion I felt being with the others. I still kept myself, but my sense of self was so much more encompassing, so much more profound. I think the lack of that in "normal" modern life is an inestimable loss, and for me a serious concern.
I don't know where I will end up living again in community such as I have experienced it, or when it will finally happen, or even how it will come about, but it has been put into my heart, and I have to trust that, if I listen to the promptings of my heart, I will find my way there. All I know is, right now, I am meant to be where I am, doing what I am doing.
It's a fine line between a dream I am passionate about manifesting, and a idol. I must watch and make sure I don't turn "community" into an imagined cure-all. Community is, after all, the means, not the end. The end, my friends, is love. Love so wide you can't see the limit, and you start to wonder if there even are any limits any more.
“The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Faith in Community