I returned last week from a fabulous couple of weeks in France! As our big seminar, the six YAGM Americans in Slovakia spent three days in Paris followed by an incredible week at the monastery in Taize. For those who don’t know what Taize is, it is an ecumenical community of about 100 brothers which is known especially for the beautiful songs they use for prayer, as well as the emphasis on the importance of silence. This community has become sort of a site of pilgrimage for (particularly) youth all around the world. There is a program all week long for those staying all week which includes prayer three times daily, Bible studies, work, and conversation. The busiest weeks accommodate as many as 5000 youth (15-30) from around the world! My job for the week was to work in the bar/café/shop selling hot drinks, which allowed me to connect with a lot of different people from around the world. I volunteered to be a contact person, which means I helped lead a small discussion group. (Truth be told, I found my Curriculum 2 and Gustavus religion department experiences to be quite helpful in this – I was making connections and pushing people with further questions left and right! My group noticed, and many thanked me for it.) The prayer services were so lovely, so fulfilling, so wonderful. It is amazing to feel such a sense of community, to be able to sit in absolute silence with 1500 people for 10 minutes. And I loved that, even though English popped up only now and then (they try to include everyone’s language in at least one service, since it is an international community), it was wonderful to have such a sense of understanding for one of the first times in eight months.
The sense of community was accented for me in two particular ways. First, almost all of the discussions were conducted in English (often with a French translation as well) because that is the common language everyone learns. Although I teach English in Slovakia and thus help this idea of a common world language, it was so cool to see the results in action. I loved hearing two people talking, one with a Korean accent, one with an Italian accent. It somehow made world peace seem more possible. The other accent of community was in the ecumenism. It occurred to me sometime mid-week that I didn’t even know the religious backgrounds of many of my new friends, and more to the point, it made no difference to me. If it came up in conversation, it was like, “Oh you’re Catholic? Huh. Anyway…†or it became of way to learn from each other, but in no way was it a way or reason to judge each other. We were ultimately there for the same purpose: to pray to God and grow in faith.
This experience yet increased my excitement for the ecumenical situation in which I will find myself at Yale Divinity School this fall. Although this blog is hardly about my experience in Slovakia, it was an important time to reflect and appreciate that experience. I was able to look at my time in Slovakia from a few countries away, to put some of the lessons I have learned this year to use in a new situation, and to compare my experiences to others’ for mutual learning. And when I returned to Vrbovce last week, I was delighted to discover that I was truly missed by the people in Vrbovce. I was greeted with exclamations of, “Where have you been?â€, “How was France?â€, and best of all, from my host mom, “Our daughter is home!â€