Taizé is coming to Brussels for its annual youth New Year celebration – I’m excited 🙂 (see http://www.taize.fr/en_rubrique45.html)
From tantra to Taizé? Or rather, in my case, the other way round.
I attended the new year meetings in Prague in 1992 and Budapest in 1993. On both occasions there was an electrifying atmosphere – a combination of the still-new feelings of freedom after the Cold War, so much youthful energy, and so much love.
I would have been the last person to believe anyone could breathe new life in the 20th century into the moribund, authoritarian, patriarchal irrelevance that was and is the catholic church and other mainstream Christian denominations.
Yet without any particular knowledge or analysis of Brother Roger’s theology and pastoralism, it was clear to me, and immediately tangible, that here was an authentic spirituality.
I had the same experience, very much later, with Thich Nhat Hanh (http://www.plumvillage.org/).
Although the symbolic world of Taizé is entirely Christian, and of Plum Village entirely zen Buddhist, Taizé, Thich Nhat Hanh and Tantra all have a lot in common and all, ultimately, lead to the same place. This is because all liberate themselves from dogma and the ego in favor of encounter, love, awakening and transcendence.
My experiences in Prague and Budapest were an important stepping stone in my moving beyond the narrow evangelical fundamentalism in which my spirituality as a teenager had initially been expressed towards the beginning of a far more generous spirituality.
Cultivated within the neo-pentecostal tradition, and at the same time by disposition a rationalist and skeptic, ecumenism was for me an anathema – either there was only one, revealed truth or there was not, as I could conceive, any at all. Ecumenism was the thin end of the wedge of relativism and spiritual and moral disarray. And I do not have a lot of interest, still today, in baroque efforts to reconcile the irreconcilable and achieve doctrinal unity amongst Christian denominations. I simply couldn’t care less about the unity of the church or the church as an institution at all. I believe that even to persons within a Christian spiritual tradition, the church has become largely or totally irrelevant – it is the last place one would expect to find persons sharing your own sensitivities to the spiritual insights achieved by Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Merton or John of the Cross.
Yet I now see that whilst this may be an obsession or the source of painful heart searching for many within the Taizé movement, it is neither its point nor the source of its strength and the movement cannot be contained within it.
The beautiful songs of Taizé with their prodigious multilingualism and sense of community and of the possible energize the spiritual nature of those who witness and participate in them regardless of their denominational self-identification. I am sure they speak at a deeper level to persons having been brought up in a Christian tradition or at least in a post-Christian culture than to other persons who may find their language unfamiliar and difficult to relate to. Still also such people will recognize and identify with the love and energy they find.
There is a good reason why Taizé is a youth movement. It speaks to the deepest motivations of young people – to discover the real meaning hidden within the sterile forms of religious practice; to reach out to the other; to experience love and union.
Taizé, in other words, is driven by, and is a sacred celebration of, sexual energy.
By itself this is sufficiently evident merely in the rituals and in the music. It is, of course, much more evident in the interactions which surround such an event and primarily motivate the participants who, much as Jérôme in Gide’s La Porte Etroite or Renzo in i Promessi Sposi, naturally find their romantic and spiritual quests intertwined, indeed inseparable.
I remained standing next to her, whilst she continued kneeling. I was quite unable to express this new longing of my heart, but I pressed her head against my heart and against her forehead my lips, through which my soul slipped away. Drunk with love, with pity, with an uncertain mixture of enthusiasm, denial and virtue, I appealed to God with all my strength and made an offering of myself, unable to conceive of any other purpose to my life than to shelter this child from fear, from evil, from life. Finally I fall myself to my knees, full of prayer, I hold her against me…
My Lord, you know that I need him in order to love You. Give him to me, so that I may give unto You my heart. Forgive me this impardonable prayer, but I am unable to remove his name from my lips, nor to forget the suffering of my heart. Even were I not to formulate my prayer, would you be any less aware of the burning desire of my heart?
If these young pilgrims believe they can bring something of this passion back to their church communities, reinvigorate them and through them reach out to the world, they will be almost invariably disappointed. But if they allow the passion which they discover to change them from inside, to lead where it may lead, then there is hope for the world, for true religion must always lead to authenticity and love, and love knows no doctrine, dogma or bounds.