Niece blogging…

Some cute pics of my niece Lilia.

A taste of Taizé

I’ve been sort of curious about Taizé lately–I guess because I kept seeing the word pop-up in different places and I didn’t know what it was. When I saw that Unitas has a Taizé service on alternate Fridays, I figured I should really check out what this was all about. So I checked around on the web about Taizé and was intrigued by what I saw. So a week ago Friday, I went to the Taizé-style service there at Unitas.

It was a small group of maybe ten or twelve people–with one in one corner with a guitar. In another corner was a flat, broad cross–with a very two-dimensional, icon-like Jesus painted on it. A number of candles were lit and set before the cross.

The service started with a short introduction in French–sort of just a thought to keep in mind during the service–then the guitar started and we started into our first song. I don’t really know if song is the right word–the ’songs’ were only one or two lines long, and we didn’t just sing them once. With each song, we would loop around five or six times. I wouldn’t call them chants though either–which is what many have described a Taizé service as involving.

The act of loop around and singing each song various times I really liked. It seemed like we would go through the song enough times for each of us to get comfortable with it–both in practical sense and in a sort of non-verbal relational sense. Then about when you were about to get bored with the song we moved on to the next one. The songs were also in a mix of languages–a number in Latin, but also in English, French and Polish. The Taizé songbook that we were using nicely had a translation of the song words in the footnotes of each song.

After two or three songs, one of the people around the circle read a short passage from on of the gospels. This was then followed by a couple of more songs. After that a person dimmed the lights, and there was the period of silence. We sat in candlelit silence for about seven minutes. I closed my eyes and tried to calmly clear my mind of any thoughts and rest there in the darkness. The silence was finally broken by the guitarist who quietly started playing and gently brought us out of our meditation.

There were a few more songs. Apparently next was usually the adoration of the cross, but since it was just after Easter, we each came forward with a candle and lit it from the main candle. Then sitting there each with our candles, we had the chance to voice our prayer intentions if we wanted. It was a very nice, calming time just sitting around looking at everyone’s candles. When someone felt like it they would say their prayer out loud to the group–some were more official sounding prayers while others might be just a general wish or a thought that was on the person’s mind. We sang a song or two more, and then the man who had started it made some concluding remarks.

Overall I really enjoyed the service. It left me with a nice feeling that I had touched a little bit of something that is outside of myself and that I had done it in a more sublime, tactile way than just the intellectual thought or narrative of a sermon. I also liked it because it was participatory–besides the introduction and the gospel readings you were always involved whether in the singing or in the weight and contemplation of the silence. Too often today I think church services are based on a model of having the congregation site quietly in their seats. During a time when most people were on their feet and working with their hands all day, this chance to rest and experience the calm of something beyond themselves must have felt very meaningful. But today when most of us spend most of our day sitting down passively, it’s nice to have an experience that while calming is both spiritual and participatory–creating together the service that takes us out of our own egos and tries to help us touch something beyond them.

Two links on Montreal

Apparently at the Complexe Desjardins there was an exhibit of the underway and proposed big architecture projects in Montreal. Well, some architecture fans posted some photos of the exhibits. Some standard stuff, but a couple are sort of interesting–like the development around the Radio-Canada building.

MadeinMTL — lots of Flash, but sort of neat site about stuff to do in Montreal.