Taize: A Prologue

It all started with a rude man behind the counter. I had been eyeing him when I was queueing, wishing that when my number was called, I would get his counter, because he looked like Nigel Barker. The stars lined up and it did happen that he was the one to serve me. "I want to get a two-way ticket to Taize, going there Thursday evening and coming back on Sunday evening, please," I said. He searched for such ticket for me and it turned out that if I want to be in Taize Thursday night, I had to leave around 3 pm. With work finishing around 5.30 pm, leaving at that time wouldn't be possible. After all, I had asked for a Friday off which was given generously by my supervisor. Asking for a half day on Thursday would be a little pushing it. So, I asked for the train that leaves on Friday morning. At that point, Nigel Barker got a little irritated, somehow. After finding the times that I wanted, he gave me 4 tickets, two for each way. He told me all the timings, and circled my seat number in a bullet speed style such that I had to chuckle, "Hold on there, let me check what you just said." I found that the ticket he gave me was for Thursday morning, not Friday as I asked. He said sorry, but his eyes did not mean it. We looked again for the times that would be good for me. The problem was there were several connections, I wanted to be sure that I did not have to wait long in each station, but at the same time had enough time to catch the next train. At one point he threw an attitude, "You asked me for one thing, and then after I found it, you asked if there was a different time." I was taken aback, but I knew my rights as a customer. I forced a smile and said, "Wow, I'm guessing you have had a long day today, huh." After a little more unpleasant exchanges, we finally settled it and I got my tickets to Taize. I left Nigel Barker, promising to myself, unless he looked a whole lot like Will Smith, I won't ever wish on being served by such people again.

A couple of days before I went to Taize and after getting the tickets, I bought a book in Amazon: A Community Called Taize: A Story of Prayer, Worship, and Reconciliation. I have heard of Taize songs before. Sometimes the churches that I went to have Taize meetings, but I never came. I thought that it would be boring. Earlier in the year, I realized from the website that Taize was more than the songs, a whole lot more. In essence, Taize songs were not even the point. They are the beautiful roses along the road, not the road itself. The book gave a great introduction for me of what the Taize community was and what to expect when I was there. The author visited Taize for the first time in 2005. The first night he was there, Brother Roger, the brother who founded Taize was stabbed in the heart by a mentally ill young woman during the night prayer. He died a little right after. His life was dedicated to serve the poor, the underprivileged, the weary and outcast of the society. His life was ended by the same people whom he had served for years. For me, this is in short what exactly Brother Roger and Taize wanted to teach us: to work without caring about paybacks, to forgive the seemingly unforgiven, to trust those we did not know, to live simply for Him.

A question that kept coming up throughout the book was: why do so many young people come to Taize? And why do they keep coming back? In this world where the young are very much attracted by the rich and famous, where ambition for career and success meets with the oblivion for others, where Facebook becomes a best friend and twitter the tool to confirm existence, what is it about Taize that successfully compete with all those things? I am young, right... and I am definitely not bulletproof towards all these modernization and drive to pursue success. So I asked myself, why am I sparing a weekend to go there? Part of it is curiosity, part of it me wanted to have a calm weekend, but for the most part, I myself can't explain it. I just wanted to. Taize in my head was an exciting place in a different way than what excitement usually meant. I just wanted to. It was a reason strong enough to be confronted with any reasoning.

The journey to Taize was a little complicated. It was 2 hours of driving from Geneva, but without a car, it became 5 hours with two station stops. My first stop was in Lyon, a city in France famous for its gastronomy. From there it was another train to a city called Macon-ville. There I had a 2 hours waiting time. Macon-ville station was small. On the same train station there was also the bus station. Since there was literally nothing to do in the station other than sit, I decided to pay a visit to the town center. I assumed that the town was a small one, judging by the size of the train station, and I was right. It was about 11 am when I got to the city center, which like any other old town in I had seen so far, had car-free cobble-stone paths with store and restaurants on your left and right. Above the shops are residences with double pane windows from woods painted colorfully; sometimes totally not matching with the wall color but that's what made it even cuter. It was a little strange for me because most of the shops were closed. Only one or two were open and those were the ones selling antiques. Not many people were walking around, those who were there looked like they came out straight from Tin Tin comic books: older man and woman with hats holding a walking stick in one hand although they looked strong enough to walk without it. Later in the weekend I was told that it was labor day in France, which was why everything was closed.

I went back to the station about 20 minutes before my bus. As I approached a bench to sit, I saw a wallet. A beat up folded leather wallet on the same bench. I thought that somebody had left it there, but a moment after, a boy came and picked it up. He went off with two of his friends, rowdy and all. A little after that came a girl asking me: Did you see a wallet somewhere here? I said, yes, some boys just took it! It's yours?? She gasped, oh my god, I saw the boys and I asked them. Turned out that the girl named Sarah asked them again but they did not fess up. To make it somehow worse, they gave her 1.50 Euro for her bus ride. Sarah had been in Taize for a week and she went out for the weekend to meet her friend. She just withdrew 100 Euro a day before and there it went, to the hands of those rowdy boys. She decided to take the bus that went to Taize later to wait for the ticketing office to open and report them.

I went on my bus. I expected it to be like a half an hour ride. We went through hills and winding road and I suddenly realized that Brother Roger was not kidding when he planned to find a rural poor village. The journey ended up being an hour and by the time we arrived I truly felt like I was in the middle of nowhere. I simply didn't know where I was on the map. I had arrived in one of the places many said to be heaven on earth. Realizing at the same time what a privilege that was, because not far from there were boys who would steal your wallet, and Nigel Barker look alike who would be rude to you. But in Taize you would believe that they were good people. There is no bad people, like there is no stupid kids. There's only broken people with broken attitudes.