Perspectives on Taizé“Here we see the Church”
Accompanied by his family and several of his co-workers, he began his visit on Thursday, August 6th, by attending the midday prayer. Upon his arrival, he reminded the brothers that he came to Taizé when he was young and told them that Taizé had always played a very important role in his life. According to him, Taizé is a place where we see the Church: “What often we see most of is the Church in its institutional form and not enough of the Church in its worshipping, communal form. What is realised in a place like this is the Church in its most central reality. I have often spoken of some of those experiences where a Christian can say, ‘I have seen the Church for the first time.’ A person may have spent many years going to church, reading the Bible, saying prayers and yet never quite have seen the Church—the Church which is the new creation, the Church which is the New Jerusalem, the Church which is the hope of humanity. And so for that I want to thank you all for your continuing witness. Continue with that life.”
On the evening of Thursday August 6th, at the end of the 8:30pm prayer, he spoke to the thousands of young people from many countries present at Taizé. It was the Feast of the Transfiguration. He pointed out to young people that the same apostles who were present at the transfiguration of Jesus (Peter, James and John) were also with him in the garden of Gethsemane. Thus these three apostles were witnesses of Christ who both reached the depths of human suffering and revealed that human nature is far more than we can imagine. And we too are called to be witnesses to the suffering and the glory of Christ. Having seen the glory of his transfiguration, we are affected not less but more by loneliness and human suffering. The Archbishop said that August 6th was not just the Feast of the Transfiguration but also the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Often horrible events like Hiroshima give people a shock and allow them to rediscover the dignity of human beings. But we Christians should get used to contemplating each day both the suffering and the glory on the face of Christ, so that we do not need such horrors to remind us of that dignity. Looking at the face of Christ every day, both disfigured by suffering and also transfigured, we learn hope and compassion.
During his visit, the Archbishop prayed at the tomb of Brother Roger and had talks with Brother Alois, the prior of Taizé, and with the brothers of the community. He also met with the young people from Britain who were present, with volunteers who spend time in Taizé, and with the sisters who help with the welcome.
Friday August 7th at noon, he presided over a celebration of the Anglican Eucharist. In the evening, the bishop of Autun, Benoît Rivière, came to greet him. Both of them then took part in the prayer around the cross, held every Friday evening in Taizé. Saturday August 8th at 8:30pm, he attended the life-commitment of a new Taizé brother, Brother Simon, from Senegal, whose family, notably his mother, came from Africa for the celebration.
Sunday morning August 9th, the archbishop was present at the celebration of the Catholic Mass and delivered the homily. He spoke about the Old Testament reading that told how Elijah was visited by an angel and received from him food and drink so he could go out to the wilderness: “The prophet is running away; yes, he is still despairing and confused. But he has been given strength; and he has remembered that the desert is where God first spoke his Name to Moses. His steps lead him to the holy mountain, where once again, like Moses and the people of Israel in their long desert journeys, he will hear God’s name. He will meet God in a moment of silence haunted by the whisper of a voice. And he starts on another journey, back to the city, back to the risk and the conflict. He can once again find a prophetic voice.” The archbishop compared Elijah’s food and drink to those we receive in the Eucharist to accompany us on our road. And he continued: “The story of Elijah reminds us of other kinds of journey—the kind that millions of people in our world today are taking, the journeys of displaced people who have left behind all that they have ever achieved and have no clear sense of where they are going. And God feeds them for their journey into a freedom and hope they can only guess at. We, who as baptized believers share this meal, are taking food for our own journey with God in the company of all these countless travelers and refugees. The God of the Eucharist is leading us all to that place of honesty and silence, where, like Elijah, we can admit our despair, we can speak out our pain and protest at the inhumanity of the world, and we can stand at the entrance to the cave and wait for the tiny stirring of wind in the stillness that tells us we are never alone and never unloved.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury left for London on the afternoon of Sunday, August 9th.
At the same time as him, several other Anglican bishops were in Taizé, including the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, who has been coming to Taizé for many years.
Before becoming Archbishop, Rowan Williams was already known as a theologian and man of great spiritual depth. As head of the Anglican Church, he is now a man of reconciliation, always looking for unity and consensus.
By coming to Taizé he revived an old tradition. He is the fourth archbishop of Canterbury to make such a visit: Michael Ramsey visited the community in 1973, and later on George Carey brought with him a thousand Anglicans for a week in 1992.
Rowan Williams himself had received Brother Alois in London in 2006 and that day he attended a prayer led by the Taizé brothers in Westminster Abbey.
Upon the death of Brother Roger in 2005, he had expressed his admiration for the founder of Taizé in particularly warm terms: “Very few people in a generation manage to change the whole climate of a religious culture, but Brother Roger did just this. He changed the image of Christianity for countless young people.”