A week in Taizé starts on a Sunday with the huge morning service (Catholic eucharistic with a Taizé twist) and the week ends with the same service the following week. But the last real day of the week is the Saturday and that is the day that prepares people to go home. The final Bible explanation and the final discussion groups are in the morning and the last evening service starts at eight thirty. This service often goes on until very late in the night - as long as there is even just one singer left, some monks will always stay behind to accompany them.Whilst the Saturday evening services are like all the rest of the evening services in content (songs & silence) they culminate in the lighting of candles, a gesture that has is roots in the lighting of the Paschal candle on Easter Sunday.
For most people who come to spend a week in Taizé, Saturday evening is the last time they will be with their newly found friends, people they have spent a week with, people they have shared their beliefs with and people they come to know and trust. This service is the real end to their week, a parting of the ways - but it is also a new beginning.
At the end of the service the candles of the people at the edge of the central “garden” area are lit and then the light fans out into the whole church as everyone with a lit candle lights
the candle of their neighbour thus passing the light on until everyone in the whole church is holding a flickering candle. Whilst as I said, this ceremony has its origins in Easter (the risen Christ as the light of the world) I believe that the act of passing the light on to your neighbour is more about passing the message on, passing the light, that your week has given you, on to your home community when you return to “reality”. For many it is a very moving and emotional end to a week’s stay in Taizé.It must be said though that the thought of 6 thousand candles burning in such a tightly packed environment put me off attending that service for a long time, what would happen if……….? My factory, engineering and safety background sent chills down my spine at the very thought and when I did pluck up the courage to go to the service, I made sure I was close to an emergency exit. But as ever, the amazing organisation up on top of the hill has come up with a solution - candles that self extinguish. The candles are in fact quite thin (about 6 mm), they are non-drip but more cleverly they can only burn for 6.5 minutes, leaving about 14cm of un-burnt candle, then they go out and they cannot be re-lit. There is enough time for all the candles in the church to be lit and to have a very stilling and stunning effect, but it is not long enough for people to start walking around with lit candles, possibly tripping up or causing some other accident.
I did once discuss the safety aspects with one of the brothers and he said that in all the years they have been doing this, there has never been an incident, yet another testimony to the sense of responsibility of the young people that attend.In any case, it is a very special service to attend, certainly in the darker months when there is no additional light from outside and the church just glows with candle light.
Two of the pictures are from the Taizé website. Copyright © Ateliers et Presses de Taizé, 71250 Taizé, France and the other one is an old postcard also from the Taizé Presse.
Our website describes the accommodation we offer near Taizé. La Tuilerie Website
I just spotted this Taizé songbook which might be of interest to people trying to organise their own Taizé service.
Just before we left, a chicken and her chicks had arrived in the stall along with a dog, but as predicted Jesus was not there yet. We zipped up the hill yesterday to check out what had been going on and he had arrived and, all wrapped in swaddling clothes, there he lay in the manger. Some more angels had also made it and were hanging from the rafters. The shepherds had not got to the Nativity Scene yet and the wise men are also on their way, so there is still more to look forward to.
many as although the village is a very religious one - at least 5 churches and almost everyone goes to one of them – most of them are staunch Calvinists and Taizé’s open and ecumenical approach to Christianity might be a step too far for them. I always used to think that they were a bit like the Amish with their black clothes and black hats on Sundays, blanking anyone not dressed like them. They don’t have television and they refuse to have their children vaccinated, they follow Calvin’s words literally when he said that God has predestined their fate and have sadly been touched by the polio outbreaks in 1956, 1978 and 1992.
We popped up on Sunday morning and we saw that an angel had arrived and the shepherds had turned and were walking towards Bethlehem. There was even a real donkey in a pen outside the church which everyone enjoyed petting, but I think he was just there for the day
The stable fits neatly under the roof but when I saw it, I was rather disappointed to see the stable empty. Quite unusual for a Nativity Scene - no nativity…. I stood looking for a few minutes and then I spotted them, Joseph with staff in hand leading a donkey with a very pregnant Mary on top. Logical really, Jesus isn’t due for a few weeks yet. I have never found it odd that the baby Jesus was in the stable for the whole of advent, but obviously the builders of this Nativity Scene had found it odd and had put some thought into their rendition of a Nativity Scene.
The liturgy also underlines this time of waiting.. ” and this novel approach to what is usually seen as just a bit of extra festive “tinsel”, makes us think about the whole story and about the waiting. The quotation from Luke 2 on the wall reads “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. And everyone went to his own town to register.” Reading that and seeing Mary on her donkey did get me thinking.
But we are talking about desert here and we are talking about an old man who is leading a donkey with his heavily pregnant wife on it. We should also not forget that to get to Bethlehem, they would have had to travel across Samaria which was hostile bandit country in those days. Some people even suggest that they would not have taken the shortest route but a longer safer route via modern day Jordan. So whilst the bible gives no figures (as far as I can see) it would have been a very long journey more than a couple of weeks, which might explain why they arrived so late in Bethlehem and missed out on all the available rooms.
culminating with a Catholic Eucharist at four thirty. Four thirty must be the time they allocate to visiting groups as it was mid one Thursday afternoon last summer when the Archbishop of Canterbury was visiting that the Anglicans were allowed to hold their Eucharist.
When Frère Roger first came to Taizé he worshipped alone in a room that he had dedicated for that purpose. When there were other Christians present they would join him in prayer, but as many of the people he was helping were in fact Jewish, he felt that it was totally inappropriate to make the prayer times communal. When he returned with some friends (later the first brothers) after the war with the purpose of setting up a community, they worshipped together in the original room but as the numbers of brothers and Christian visitors increased so did their need for a larger space. What is more logical than to use the small Romanesque church in Taizé, a holy place that had not been used for services for many years. But the Catholic church had other ideas about that. Despite not actually owning the building (all churches were seized during the Revolution and are now state owned) the Catholic church objected to having Protestants worshiping in their, albeit unused, church. An initial local agreement was swiftly rescinded and the request to use the church then went up through the bishop of Autun all the way to Paris where it ended up with Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli who was at that time the papal nuncio. He was a forward thinking man, he had also helped many Jews and other refugees during the war and maybe it was that common ground that helped convince him or maybe not, but he was the man who gave permission in 1948 for the brothers to have permanent non-rescindable use of the church for their daily prayers.
Allowing Protestants to use the church was one thing, but allowing Catholics to join them was another. Despite securing an audience with Pope Pius XII, Frère Roger did not manage to get agreement for ecumenical worship out of him. A big step for a pope to take of course. Ten years passed and the pope died and a new one, Pope John XXIII, was elected. This new pope turned out to be none other than the Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli who had granted permission to use the church in Taizé and despite being old in years, he was still very young and forward thinking in his ways and it was he who supported the community of Taizé and led the way forward for allowing Catholics to take part in ecumenical worship. Maybe it was their common experiences during the war that drew these two men together, who knows, but whatever it was, he paved the way for the close links between the Vatican and the brotherhood that still exist today and it led to real reconciliation between differing Christian groups.