Psalm 23 by Bobby McFerrin and In a Moment of Green Meadows - 1/10/2016

A Taize Sunday reflection

Today we are in a moment of green meadows, a moment of still waters.   This taize style of worship is created to draw us all together as one community.  It is designed to accommodate one no matter their needs or their walk in life. It has an intentional design of communal solitude.  I know that is an oxymoron but its true. We come together as a community to quiet our spirits and seek our solitary connection to the spirit to the other.   We are trying to reconnect to the outer or the inner depending how each one experiences the spirit.

There is no wrong way here.  This is a time to trust your heart and let your mind rest, rest and trust in the movement of the music, the stillness of the silence and let it lead you where you may go. The Lord is my shepherd and I have all I need. At this time here and now there is or there should be no other concerns.  Whatever needs to get done can wait till until it is time to leave.

This is a time and a moment of restoration.  She restores my soul and rights my wrongs; she leads me in a path of good things.  This is a time of good things; a time of meditative music, of peaceful quiet, of soft candle light.  Here, in this time, whatever wrong, whatever incomplete we may have, can be let go.

She leads me in a path and fills my heart with song.  The simple repetitive songs of taize are intent on allowing us to let go.  These songs are simple so we do not need to concentrate on them but can allow our spirits to move.  Brother Roger, the founder of the taize community, was very popular. Part of his appeal may have been his dislike of formal preaching, while encouraging a spiritual quest as a common endeavor. During a Taizé gathering in Paris in 1995, he spoke to more than 100,000 young people who were sitting or lying on the floor of an exhibition hall, amid backpacks and a sea of candles. "We have come here to search," he said, "or to go on searching through silence and prayer, to get in touch with our inner life. Christ always said, Do not worry, give yourself."

So as we give ourselves in prayer and song here today we may find ourselves challenged by the silence.  We may be challenged by the repetitive song.  We may be challenged by the fact we have never had a service like this before. But all of this challenge is the point.  Let go of what challenges you, what frustrates you, what is making you crazy and give in, let go and let it be.

Take the time to allow this connection with Christ, with the spirit, with the other to grow.  Allow this to be a time of re-connection or even better a time of merging the spiritual and the physical into one.

Fr. Richard Rohr reminds us in one of his reflections this week that; “We have created a terrible kind of dualism between the spiritual and the so-called non-spiritual. This dualism is precisely what Jesus came to reveal as a lie. The principle of incarnation proclaims that matter and spirit have never been separate. Jesus came to tell us that these two seemingly different worlds are and always have been one. We just couldn't see it until God put them together in his one body (see Ephesians 2:11-20). "In [Christ Jesus] you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit" (Ephesians2:22). [1]”

Brother Roger understood this and his concept of taize was to bring the two together.  To create a space where one could break away from the daily and allow oneself to become whole again. As the Psalm said she won’t forsake me but alas we often forget and now is a time to recall and remember we are in her hand.  She sets a table before us, she anoints our heads with oil and our cups overflow.

We are all so blessed some in our abundance and some in our lack of abundance and others in our just rightness.  Because the blessings the psalmist is referring to has nothing to do with the physical.  If we just reconnect our spiritual and integrate it into our daily our lives, our eyes would be full of wonder at the abundance of God’s blessings that surround us each and every day.

Now I am no better than anyone here there are times,  lord many times, I myself forget and get caught up ion the material, in the physical in the day to day struggle.  I have to force myself to stop and pay attention to the blessings that surround me.  I look forward to times like this when, this is all I have to do, stop, breathe and pay attention to her spirit all around me.  I am reminded that surely goodness and kindness do follow me all the days of my life, and I will abide in her house forever and ever amen!