What new, wondrous place is this?

Watching the young people scamper into L’Eglise (the church), past the signs displaying “Silence” with all of the respect and excitement of students lining up for worship at camp; except without the raging hormones and with the addition of many cigarettes—this is Europe, after all.

My engines are at all-stop this week at the Taizé monastic community in France. My laptop, passport, cards and cash are all tucked away for safekeeping in the office, ostensibly because our dormitory doors are always unlocked, but, for me, because these things always keep my engines moving, and sometimes, in order to take inventory of our selves, we just have to shut down for a week, and get rid of anything that keeps us moving.

We’ve a marvelous sense of freedom, from the simple lentils-and-meat with yogurt and fruit accoutrements and a bowl for water, to the simple floors and wooden benches, the silence of worship and the four-part, repetitive chants that become more and more real to the heart with each multilingual repetition, some of the deepest history of Christianity in these old, Scriptural hymns. There are 700 of us here, mostly young people, and mostly Germans, as this is their Spring Break.

Peter, the only Briton, Soo Tien, a Malaysian studying philosophy in London, Elane, the former-philosophy-professor-turned-United-Methodist-minister-turned-United-Church-of-Christ-minister, these are the people I meet at the train station and then my closest friends. Ramona, a German who though I spoke to her earlier and that I spoke Polish, but I wasn’t and didn’t, and nonetheless, she beckons me to join her in sitting Native American style in worship on the floor and now we are friends too.

I have come hereto wrestle. I’m in at BU. I’m in at Duke. If I’m going to be honest about the decision I’ve got to go all-stop. I’ve got to find the tension where my realities and dreams meet, where my passions can best meet the world’s deep hunger, the radical, hard-to-define place where God wants me to be.