A Pilgrimage of Trust with Taizé
Nelson González
April 1, 1995
The last swaths of rich orange cloth had just been hung and a myriad of new candles flickered at the foot of hundreds of greenery-encircled icons. Then they began to enter by the thousands. In the end, 150,000 young people from across Europe (half from the former Soviet Bloc) poured in, dazed and exhausted, after what had been for some days of nonstop bus travel across the continent. They found the cold and gray halls of the Pare d'Expositions in southern Paris-halls more accustomed to trade shows than contemplative prayer-transformed into a welcoming sanctuary in the best of the Taiz矡esthetic. After nothing less than a logistic miracle involving thousands of volunteers, the 17th European Meeting of Young People-sponsored yearly by the international and ecumenical Christian monastic community in Taizçª France-finally began.
Most had shuffled in from the cold December air when the lights dimmed to mark the beginning of the first Common Prayer. The brothers of Taizçª clad in simple white cassocks, began to glide into neat rows where they knelt before the icons of the transfiguration and the resurrection, images that served as windows to prayer and worship. The gently bright voice of Brother Roger, the Swiss Protestant who as a young seminarian in the 1940s founded the community, rang through the now-filled halls:
"... why have we gathered together in these vast halls? And why have we come from all over Europe and even from abroad? We have come to begin to search, or to continue to search, in silence and in prayer, for a life of communion with God.... If we are here, it is because we desire to live by the Holy Spirit, to welcome Christ. And if we seek to welcome him, it is because we know, or at least we sense, that in following ...
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