TAIZÉWe are very happy to welcome you from so many countries this week in Taizé. You have come in great numbers especially from Sweden and Germany, but also from Portugal, Italy, France, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Czech Republic and different parts of Spain. We are also thankful for the presence of young people from Ukraine among us.
This week has been especially intense. I would like to speak about two special events have marked us during these days.
Firstly, on Tuesday evening, our brother Matthias made his life commitment as a brother in the community. What a joy that was for us and a joy also to welcome his family! After a period as a volunteer in Taizé, he began to work as a teacher, but asked to come back here as he felt a call to become a brother in our community.
We were speaking earlier this week and I told him that I wanted to say something this evening about the song “Herre visa mig vägen” that we sing in Swedish as there are so many of you here from Sweden. He smiled and said that this was one of the new songs in 2018 when he returned to Taizé and that it has accompanied him since then.
These words of St Bridget, a Swedish woman who lived in the 14th century are very beautiful and prepare us to commit our lives to Christ, to following him each day. She prays “Lord, show me the way and make me willing to walk on it, give me peace of heart.”
Bridget was a woman who loved the Church and who suffered because of the divisions in it at her time. She had a heart for unity and was a woman of pilgrimage who journeyed to Santiago de Compostela and also to Rome, which were huge journeys to undertake.
Could each one of us pray these words during the coming months? As we pray them, we will perhaps see more clearly what God is asking of us. We can become pilgrims of unity and peace like Bridget and the Holy Spirit will give us the boldness needed to take the risk of saying yes to Christ with the whole of our lives.
Each person has a calling. God needs people to witness to the love revealed in Jesus in every walk of life. There is no higher or lower calling. But will each one of us be ready to take time to seek or perhaps renew a commitment to Christ in our lives? That is something not just for a stay in Taizé but for each day of our life wherever God calls us to be.
Secondly, throughout this week, we have the opportunity to listen to believers from the Orthodox tradition. Journeying together with Christians of different backgrounds is an essential step on the path to unity of all who love Christ.
When I have travelled in Orthodox countries, I have often been struck by the beauty of the services where we sense something of the mystery of God and an unshakeable faith in the Resurrection of Christ.
This week we have among us a group from the Orthodox Church in Ukraine accompanied by Bishop Efrem from Kyiv. With me is Anastasiya, to whom I would like to ask: “What does it mean to live as Church during a time of war?”
Anastasiya: “Today, as the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, we are searching for a form of ministry during the war. One of the main issues within this search has been the rediscovery of the understanding of community as a union capable of not only sharing joy but also experiencing suffering together.
This means a constant exercise in listening to the other, despite the intensity of the voice of pain within. Violence seeks strife and muteness, but community as a form of service does not allow it ; it creates patience, love, and gives place to the Word.
For the Orthodox believers in Ukraine, the Taizé community is today a place where our first steps become more confident.”
Tomorrow evening, Metropolitan Demetrios of the Greek Orthodox Church will come from Paris to celebrate with us the Liturgy at the time when we normally have evening prayer here in the church of Reconciliation. He has visited Taizé several times and is a very humble, generous servant of God.
For many of you, it will be a new experience, not easy to understand perhaps, but listen to the age-old tradition of sung prayer and the mystery of the liturgy. It will also be a time of prayer for us with Christians in Orthodox countries where war is present or freedom is limited.
When our Orthodox sisters and brothers receive the communion, we brothers of Taizé will distribute blessed bread to everyone else in the assembly. Though we cannot share the same cup, Christ welcomes us like he fed the crowd in the wilderness, through this gesture. Our desire for unity is shown through our prayer together.
Before the Orthodox Liturgy, please join us already at 8pm in church to pray in silence, like we do every Friday evening, for peace in our world where there is so much conflict. We pray for the situation where war is present like in Ukraine and in Gaza, but also where there is great tension, like in Lebanon and in Bangladesh.
We have a fraternity in that Bangladesh since many years. This week after many demonstrations and deaths, the government is changing, but the situation is still unsure. It is often the ethnic and religious minorities that suffer most in such times.
Finally at the end of the year, we will gather in Tallinn, Estonia, for our annual European meeting. Natali would like to invite you there:
“My name is Natali and I am from Estonia. I was born and raised in Saaremaa, the largest of our 2000 islands. To invite you to Tallinn for the upcoming European Meeting I need to begin with my experience 2 years ago, when Taizé changed my life.
This was my first time in Taizé and I came here running away from both the chaos in the world and in my own life. I was tired and did not know how to continue.
In Taizé I found peace within myself, others and in community. I fell in love with this place full of compassion, hope and our shared trust in God. But Taizé is so much more than a physical location as it is made weekly by all of us.
So I invite you to journey together to this secular north-east European country with a population of just 1.3 million people. In these universally uncertain times we need you. We need your experience to build a faithful and open Europe. Let’s meet again in Tallinn this December.”
So, see you in Tallinn! Now we will continue our prayer with song like on every evening of the year.
