TAIZÉ | PART 1 — free as the sky

For the next four weeks, I will be reflecting on my visit to Taizé in 2016. Even five years later, my heart remains warm and tender, and I still treasure the lessons learned from Taizé. I decided to capture it in writing. Below is part 1 of 4.

One of my spiritual disciplines is walking. I walk to listen. I listen to music, podcasts, poems, Scriptures, birds, myself, God, etc. I walk to see. I see what I can see with my bare eyes, and I see what I cannot see with my bare eyes. While walking, I realize it is hard to lift my eyes up to see the sky, which serves as an appropriate reminder to “lift up” my eyes to see beyond what is right in front of me.

Occasionally as I listen to music on my Spotify, a Taizé song or two would pop up, as I have a large selection of Taizé worship songs. Recently, I noticed that my heart was being more tenderly drawn to Taizé music, thus prompting me to reflect on the time my wife and I visited the Taizé community in France. I have verbally shared my experience in Taizé with multiple audiences in the past, but I realize that I have not written about it. I now take the opportunity in my blog to reminisce and reflect.

It was in the fall of 2016, right around the election that made Trump the US president. I was given a precious one month-long sabbatical right in the middle of my leadership responsibilities. The board of the organization I was serving graciously dug into their own pockets to essentially cover all our sabbatical expenses. By then, I was running on fumes and knew that I was burned out. However, I had fooled myself by telling myself and others that I was "close to being burned out." In most cases, I can surmise near-burn out almost always signals full-blown burnout. I was no exception.

I knew how I wanted to spend my sabbatical: visit the Taizé community in Burgundy province, France. I had heard and read about Taizé and wanted to experience the community firsthand. We also were introduced to a bed and breakfast in Brittany, France, run by a Methodist missionary couple. The couple converted a 450-year-old farmhouse to a beautiful bed and breakfast. I had also long wished to explore and soak in the museums in Paris with my bride, not to mention all the croissants, baguettes, pain aux raisins escargot, Éclairs, etc. that I could eat to my heart’s content! So we had a plan.

The Taizé community was founded by Brother Roger, a reformed Protestant minister in Switzerland, who asked God to send him to the neediest place right in the middle of World War II. Brother Roger yearned to see a different expression of the Christian tradition and wanted to do something about it. Having discerned that a podunk village called Taizé was the place, as Taizé had become a place of haven for refugees fleeing the war, Brother Roger settled down. By 1949, along with a few who came with Brother Roger, the Taizé community comprised of 7 brothers from both Protestant and Catholic traditions. By the 1960s, young people (mainly from Europe), hearing about the community, began flocking to the small provincial town. It did not take long for Brother Roger to demolish the four walls of the sanctuary to accommodate the young people that were growing in number.

At present, they have about 100 brothers representing some 30 countries. Today, the Taizé community has become one of the major Christian pilgrimage sites in the world, drawing more than 100,000 each year, the vast majority of them being young people in their late teens and 20s. During the summer months, there is a fresh batch of pilgrims of 7,000 each week (from Sunday to Sunday) who camp outdoors. Unless you stay for an additional week of silence retreat or you serve as a volunteer, no one can stay beyond one week. Additionally, I knew from history that there were many Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and self-proclaimed atheists who spent time in Taizé. Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a friend of Taizé. One random piece of trivia would be that I was told that Taizé has the 2nd largest kitchen facility in France, next to a French army base.

We arrived in the middle of November for a 3 nights and 4 days stay after circling around for seemingly a million roundabouts from Paris in a manual shift mini-Citroën SUV. Although I was grumbling through almost every single roundabout, by the time we arrived in Taizé, I had become somewhat of an expert. (Later, back in US, I grumbled about why US does not have roundabouts. I suppose France converted me.) Roundabouts are all about what Koreans refer to as “nunchi" (literally translated as eye power but essentially an embodied skill set of relating to others and navigating life in high context cultures.) I thought to myself, being a Korean has practical benefits of driving in France! Stopping by the picturesque Abbey of Fontenay, a monastery founded by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux in 1118, perhaps prepared our hearts for what was to come in Taizé. Young people flocked to join the reform-minded Cistercian Order founded by Saint Bernard in the Middle Ages. (The French-born Thomas Merton, who had become a mentor of mine in writing, was also a Cistercian monk.) Now we were about to witness why young people were flocking to Taizé centuries later. I could not ignore the parallels. . .

My faithful mini-Citroën and the Abbey of Fontenay