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Trust – Theme at Taizé 2012

Posted on August 16th, 2012

Brother Alois, the prior of Taizé, wrote his letter for 2012 under the title, ‘Towards a New Solidarity’ (http://www.taize.fr/IMG/pdf/120enletter.pdf) and the theme for the Bible study and discussion groups was trust.  While the 17-24 year old groups spent a lot of the week playing trust games, the 25-35 year old groups cracked on with some fairly hefty conversations!

When I arrived in Taizé on the Sunday it was after a long journey.  I’d been travelling for 19 hours and hadn’t slept, so I wasn’t in the best frame of mind for the inevitable queueing that constitutes the arrival at any place like Taizé!  So, in tiredness I looked around at the big groups of happy, laughing people and felt very out of the loop.  I suppose I felt quite insecure and out of place, as did many people.  In fact, Brother Paolo, the British contact brother, welcomed us on the coach with ‘don’t worry about Sunday, it’s chaotic – tomorrow will feel better!’ and several other people said that they just wanted to get back on the bus and go home the same evening we arrived!  Not ideal.

So when we had our first Bible introduction with Brother Matthew on the Monday morning, I had to laugh at the theme of the week – trust!  I found myself thinking that the beginning of the week had demanded that I trust the community, trust the welcome teams, trust myself (especially with my tent erecting skills!) and trust God that all would be well.  And it was so worth it!!!

My discussion group was a really diverse group of people, made up of one Polish, one Swedish, one Dutch, one other English, three German and one Spanish.  As you can imagine we were all coming from different backgrounds and our discussions reflected this.  I’ll write some reflections on these discussions over the next few blogs, but I thought I would start with an overview before getting started.

For now, have one of the chants we sang every day over the week.  Truly beautiful!  It means: ‘All life long, for the Lord I will sing; while I live, I will praise my God.  My joy is in God.’

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Why do we sing?

Posted on April 19th, 2012

This evening I went to the first rehearsal for the Salisbury Diocesan Choral Festival.  I’ve never taken part before, but I’m excited about joining together with (potentially) 300 people to sing in Salisbury Cathedral, Sherborne Abbey and All Saints in Westbury!

I love singing and always have, and I am well aware that the majority of people I meet would agree that they at least like it.  But WHY?  What is it about singing which makes us enjoy it?  There is enough biblical evidence to say that it’s a good way to praise God and I could do on for hours about why it’s used in worship, but it doesn’t answer the question.

To help with this musing here is a quote from Josie Long about music in the Orthodox Church (which is usually chanting and quite dissimilar from other church music):

In his work, Byzantine Sacred Music, Constantine Cavarnos states: “The aim of this music is not to display the fine voices of the chanters, or to entertain the congregation, or to evoke aesthetic experience…The aim of Byzantine sacred music is spiritual. This music is, in the first place, a means of worship and veneration; and in the second place, a means of self-perfection, of eliciting and cultivating man’s higher thoughts and feelings of opposing and eliminating his lower, undesirable ones.

“Its use as a means of worship consists in employing it to glorify God, and to express feelings of supplication, hope, and gratitude, and love to Him. Its use as a means of veneration consists in employing it to honour the Holy Virgin and the rest of the Saints. Its use as a means of cultivating higher thoughts and feelings and opposing the lower ones is inseparable from these. There is not one kind of music employed as a means of worshipping God and honoring the saints, and another kind employed for transforming our inner life, but the same music, while having as its direct aim the former, incidentally leads also to the fulfillment of the latter.”

I like the focus on God here, and I wonder if that’s what we enjoy about music?  Not only does it make a beautiful sound that is pleasing to the ear, but it also allows us to really BE with something that is beyond our worries and concerns, our distractions and our thoughts.  We can engage with singing (or with music in general) in such a way as we just exist for a little while.  We become what we are – human beings – rather than what we often seem to be – human doings!  Here is another beautiful quote which really struck me on this, this time from the Catholic Church:

“To sing with the universe means, then, to follow the track of the Logos and to come close to Him. All true human art is an assimilation to the artist, to Christ, to the mind of the Creator.” – Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

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