Taizé refound, 40 years on…..

Here's a guest post from Rev Hilary Oakley, Associate Priest, St Mary’s Hitchin:

I first visited Taizé in 1970. I was 16, and the Taizé community was just about to enter its heyday, when tens of thousands of young people came to witness this place of reconciliation and share in its life. I was deeply touched by the worship, in the large concrete Church of the Reconciliation, constructed in 1962. It was not so much the spirituality as the participation of people of different traditions, saying the Lord's Prayer next to me in French, Spanish, German or Dutch, and discovering that I too could use their words to praise God in the multi-lingual chants of the Taizé liturgy. My eyes were open to traditions, people and languages beyond my own, and I began to understand the importance of ecumenism, as well as my responsibilities as a European citizen.

In the second week of Easter, I visited Taizé again, after 40 years. The 1960s concrete church was still the same, but larger, with three waves of wooden extension at the west end. Beyond 60 or so adults, there were around 2,000 young people, many German, whose energy and exuberance brought Taizé alive, as it had done 40 years before. The numbers were smaller than I remembered, but the languages were more extensive, and now included Polish, Bulgarian, Swahili, Chinese, reflecting a wider Europe, greater mobility, and our engagement with a bigger world. It was challenging in a number of sometimes contradictory ways. The perspective was wider, the different traditions less important, the variety greater, the numbers smaller.

I came away wondering just how far as a Christian community we can continue to afford the luxury of division, divergence or mutual suspicion, as we struggle to afford to maintain separate buildings and church infrastructures in parallel. Taizé has nudged me to find a renewed enthusiasm for ecumenism, an energy to enable us to address and overcome those challenges that so constrained the previous generation of ecumenists, and lost us the last 40 years. As Taizé founder, Brother Roger, so simply put it: “Make the unity of the Body of Christ your passionate concern.”

Our country is also hugely divided as politicians struggle to find the Holy Grail of a Brexit that suits everybody. Yet on this biggest of all issues facing our national life, we the church have so little to say. Perhaps we just don't want to rock the boat, a stance so alien to the way of Christ. Perhaps we need to refind our commonality of faith and liturgy with our European friends and neighbours. Perhaps while the politicians argue, we should be building bridges across the Channel, a new European Christianity, an integration, a reconciliation. Perhaps we can find a vision of a future where we can speak together, and speak out, about the issues that concern us all.

I think this is a good time for us to refind Taizé and share its vision with our young people, tomorrow’s church and tomorrow’s world, those in whom we need to be investing now. If you would like to take a group pf young people to Taizé this summer, you can make contact directly with Brother Paolo at brpaolo@taize.fr., or else drop me a note at hilaryoakley@hotmail.com, and I will make the contact for you.

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Taizé - Stay With Me.