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After all, Taizé was created as a response to another global crisis, some 80 years ago. When the French president announced a second lockdown, the brothers quickly sprang into action, inviting students studying online to spend the coming months living at Taizé instead of at home, an effort to stem what many were calling an “epidemic of loneliness” among the young. They bought chickens to raise for fresh eggs. So they began to sell their pottery in nearby markets. Yet the lack of visitors had other consequences, as the brothers had no one to buy the goods they craft and sell in their shop-the monks take a vow of simplicity and live from the work of their own labor. With no visitors allowed, they broadcast their prayers online to Christians isolated around the world. During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, when France locked down, the brothers separated into pods, living and praying in small groups so as not to put the older brothers at risk. Some communities are obscured by crisis others illuminated. (Where there is charity and love, God is there.) A Response to Crisis
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Morning, midday and night-a living source at the heart of the community, voices filtering into the green spaces outside, the verses repeating in my head until they become a subtext to everything else, a fiber holding the story together. Now, during a rainy week in July, in the midst of a pandemic, I have traveled to Taizé to sit with brothers across three generations and discuss subjects as wide-ranging as the legacy of Brother Roger, how the community has adapted to Covid-19, the tragedy of abuse in the French church and what today’s young people feel are the most pressing issues of their generation.īut first, this singing. Thousands of other Christians around the world who have never visited the monastery still recognize the sentiment behind it from the Taizé chants-songs like “Bless the Lord” and “Nada te Turbe” that pilgrims have carried with them from the monastery to parishes around the globe. Today, in any given year, Taizé attracts tens of thousands of young people from around the world, who travel as pilgrims to this hilltop in France to meet one another, to sing and pray and to discuss what they feel are the most urgent issues of their time, from the climate emergency to refugees. That is what a parable does, after all-it points to a meaning larger than itself. Brother Roger believed in the radical idea that little acts, like young people singing together in a church, really matter in history. This is Taizé, the ecumenical monastic community founded by Brother Roger Schütz in the 1940s as a parable of communion, a hope that if Christians from different countries and backgrounds could gather on a hill in rural France and pray together, then this might serve as a sign that reconciliation is possible among churches and in the world.
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The air takes on a hum, and in the midst of a terrible year-2021, the one we thought would be an improvement-something in the music, repeated over and over again, begins to break through layers of exhaustion and resistance. Around them, hundreds of young people, also masked and sitting on white X’s on the ground to keep their distance, join in, chanting, until I feel almost clothed in their vowels and consonants. They sing softly, their masked voices drifting from German to French to Polish to English. Some 70 religious brothers from all over the world are kneeling in long rows at the heart of the Church of Reconciliation, their white robes touching the ground. “Sólo la sed nos alumbra”(Only our thirst leads us onwards) “ Toi, tu nous aimes, source de vie” (You love us, source of life) “Iedere nacht verlang ik naar u, o God” (My spirit yearns for you in the night, O God)