PDAs

Are you a hugger? I am. A hugger and a joyful weeper and a frequent user of terms of endearment. But when it comes to worship, my personal style is much more reserved. I don’t raise my hands up in the air. I don’t clap or sway. I think this is one of the reasons the music of Taize appeals to me so much; the deep well of devotion rises up through song but it is the spirit within you that moves. Not your hips or your hands.

On Friday night, at the end of the traditional worship time, several of the monks brought the large cross-shaped icon of Christ down into the center of the sanctuary and lay in flat on the ground resting on several small bricks. Instantly, young people began to jump over the hedges that separated the monks from the visitors to line up near the cross. Several Permanents gently redirected them to the end of the line which had quickly grown to 500+ people, easily. Nothing in me moved. I wasn’t even tempted. I wondered if that was my own spiritual temperament, or sloth, or a lack of devotion. Maybe it was just a matter of living in L.A. where we spend enough time in lines, in traffic. I watched as the young people — and some older ones as well — moved forward in the queue. Four people were allowed to kneel before the cross, to pray privately there. Many lay their chests on the wood, almost all ending their time by kissing the surface. I waited to feel compelled to rise, to join them, but felt nothing.

We hear all the time that God is dead in Europe but this didn’t appear to be the case. The love of Christ was clearly alive and well and profoundly felt by hundreds who traveled here each week to join in the Friday night Prayers around the Cross: they had started, as most things do, spontaneously, but had quickly become a cherished tradition in Taize. The writer in me knew that the only real ending to this story could be me being so moved by the Spirit that I rose, seemingly beyond my own will, and took my place patiently, eagerly, longingly in the crowded mass for my turn to kiss the icon of Christ. But this is not that kind of story.

There was only one time I had done something so overt in a public setting. I was in Chimayo, a sacred site in New Mexico which is said to be a place of miracles. A little church had been built around a hole in the ground filled with purportedly salvific dirt, and pilgrims came from around the world to pray there. I know— crazy, right? But as I was leading worship services at The Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, and as this was New Mexico, where the desert gives birth daily to the mystical, and as I was a devotee of Hosea 2:14 “The desert will lead you to your heart where I will speak,” I got caught up. Or tried to. I sat on the ground in the cramped, dirt-floored room and actually sang a song from Taize, “Oh Lord hear my Prayer,” and wept. I could sense people coming to the doorway to the tiny space and walking away so as not to intrude. I even scooped up a bit of the miraculous earth and brought it home in a baggie I’d brought with me from the cafeteria. As for miracles, I’m not sure what I’d been expecting.

It was now well past 10:00 p.m. in Taize. I continued to sit on the side and sing and watch the adoration at the Cross. I continued to wait for some shift in inclination. What came was simply a sense of closure. My prayers for the night were complete, and no public display of affection would make them more so. And with that I headed back to the room in peace.