THE EXPERIENCE OF TAIZE

...It tested your capacity for .survival, as a human being, in conditions of gross poverty and deprivation...

...This year by Easter Sunday, there must have been upwards of ten thousand people in the vicinity swamping the community and the local inhabitants with a vivid conglomeration of rucksacks, tents, beards and guitars...

...For if the most obvious impression of Taize" was that of a refugee camp, one did not have to probe far below the surface to find also that it was a community of love...

...For my money, it was too massive to be involving, too multitudinous to be moving...

...But it isn't itself rich, especially as far as Easter visitors are concerned...

...The poverty, the deprivation of domestic comfort, the loss of privacy, the sheer physical strain: instead of being merely terrifying and repulsive, they had become purposeful, a deliberately calculated piece of educational therapy, even a symbolic political gesture...

...by the readiness to welcome the stranger into one's tent in the middle of night...

...For example, by the sharing-out of blankets in the cold spring nights...

...In the church-as in most other churches-there was plenty of talk about love...

...On the other hand, the sheer physical conditions of the camp: the endless waiting for something to happen, the almost total absence outside the church of any hope of a quiet moment to oneself, the continual press of warm, unwashed bodies on every side, the thousands upon thousands of identical portions of food doled out to the waiting multitudes, the long searches for a square patch of earth on which to squat and consume them, the squalid crudity of the sanitation, the acres of army-surplus tents-all these inescapable facts combined to form a profound and eloquent reminder of the essentials of the Christian experience...

...For the average Britisher's conception of a monastery is likely to be that of an ancient moss-covered stone church with cloisters and outbuildings to match, surrounded by green swards and picturesque landscape, with quiet farms and lowing cattle in the background...

...By this sort of test, Taiz6 must be rated an outstanding success...

...But it also tested your capacity for transcend-big this bask condition, and becoming not merely human but even superhuman...

...Details from Stan Windass, The Alternative Society, 9 Morton Avenue, Kidlington, Oxford...

...It will be organized on the cheapest possible basis to enable anyone to attend, however short of cash, and promises to be an intriguing venture in learning and living together...

...BRIAN WICKER (Brian Wicker is Commonweal's regular correspondent in Great Britain...

...For me, it was this sense of being suddenly pitched into the situation of a refugee that was the most profound experience of Taize at Easter...

...What was different about Taize" was that outside the church, that talk had to be translated into action...

...Perhaps I might mention here, for the benefit of any Commonweal readers who might be in England in the summer, that an organization called "The Alternative Society" is running a short summer-school, or "mini-university," in Swindon, Gloucestershire, August 2-14, to study alternatives in health, housing and energy provision...

...by the assumption that everyone else was a friend who wanted to communicate rather than a stranger you wanted to exclude...

...The liturgy in the church (enormously expanded, to accommodate the crowds, by the addition of an immense circus-tent at the back) was impressive, but by the very nature of the case, impersonal and passive...

...For now one could understand, perhaps in a way not obtainable anywhere else, how the other half of the world lives...

...Taize\ it might be said, is an example of an "alternative society" in action: a society based on a radically different set of principles from those governing "the world...

...But further than this, how at the same time, given love, it might live...

...The fear, the disappointment, the disgust even that the newcomer must experience on his first sight of Taize, at least if he conies from a middle-class background in a relatively rich society (as I guess the vast majority did) certainly changed (I can only speak for myself) by the time the bus arrived to take our group home on Easter Monday...

...Despite the fact that many monasteries are urban rather than rural communities, the image of Hopkins's nun taking the veil is still powerful: I have asked to be Where no storms come, Where the green swell is in the heavens dumb And out of the swing of the sea...

...For though the physical conditions were the same, the meaning inherent in them had been transformed...

...Not surprisingly on getting there the new arrival from England sustains a pretty powerful culture shock...

...What grass there once was on the top of Taize hill has long been reduced to mud and gravel by the boots and sneakers of the milling crowds, the ground sheets of the tented encampments and the wooden shacks that give what little feeling of permanence there is in this eloquent embodiment of the transitoriness of life...

...There are now about seventy brothers there, representing half a dozen languages, various theological and denominational traditions, and several continents, but bound together by the traditional vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and a special form of communal liturgy...

...and perhaps a few white-habited men dotted around the locality telling their beads or minding their own business, in a gentle timeless atmosphere of calm and peace...

...At Easter time, a huge crowd of Taiz£ followers descends upon the little village on the top of the bill...

...But Taize" at Easter time is neither city nor country: rather it takes on the character of a shanty town...

...Quite simply, Taize threw you back on your own resources...

...It is like one of those modern phenomena that mushrooms after a political or volcanic upheaval: I mean a refugee camp...

...Not only were they now familiar, and even beginning to be taken for granted as the normal background to one's life: they had a significance that was not to be grasped at first...

...by the patient waiting in queues for food, in the rain or the sun...

...The community was founded after the war by Roger Schutz, a French Protestant, with the explicit idea of reviving the monastic idea but in an ecumenical setting and as a means of reconciling the warring interests not only of different Christian traditions but also of nations...

...Only the huge concrete church, like one of the hangars at the new National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, stands out, rigidly fixed, amidst the seething mass of humanity in transit from the cradle to the grave, or (more often) in transit from the queue that waits for food to the queue that waits to use the primitive French-style lavatories...