Available Light

I didn't take any photos of worship at Taize. Cameras are not encouraged, and neither is talking. The community church isn't a spectacle or a show to be recorded and ticked off on one's inner checklist of must do experiences. It is not a place to meet and greet your chums. It is a place to be still enough to to lose your amnesia; to recall, no matter how dimly, the great truth we all keep forgetting: Emmanuel, God is with us. The church, like everything else at Taize is simple and functional. It is huge, a concrete building that reminds me of a school gymnasium. There are no seats, only a thin industrial felt covering glued to the gently sloping concrete floor. Benches and steps are provided around the edges for those unable to sit for too long on the floor, and there are a few low prayer stools. It sounds spartan, but it doesn't feel that way. The walls are sprayed with some sort of thick material to aid the acoustics and there is a display of cloth and candles at the ...

At Lyon our bodies began to protest at their treatment over the past few weeks. I developed a pain in my right shin. Clemency's feet began to swell. Strange how that works isn't it? When the pressure comes off, the body knows it can shut down and repair some of the damage. The trip to Taize through the Burgundy countryside is stunningly beautiful, and the village of Taize itself is chocolate box perfection; a group of large and immaculately kept old farmhouses gathered round a small, ancient church on a hillside overlooking rolling hills. White cattle, soft green woods, vineyards. You know, perfection. The trip was rendered slightly less wonderful by the growing pain in our lower limbs. On the day after our arrival my left ankle came out in sympathy by producing the worst case of gout I have ever had. I spent the first evening in a wheelchair.The atrocious Taize food didn't help of course, but in reality it was all the inner systems telling me 'time to stop, lad'. N...