Sometimes we’re called to go, and sometimes we’re called to stay.
Although I’d been planning a trip to the Taizé Pilgrimage of Trust in St. Louis this Memorial Day weekend, the day before the trip an unexpected change of plans prevented us from traveling.
Secretly, I was upset because this meant I had more time on my hands. I’d have to decide how to spend the long weekend. I’d have to be responsible and actually prepare for the presentations I had this week. Although jumping in a car and driving 7 hours to St. Louis for the entire weekend was a huge time commitment, it relieved the pressure of my decision-making- everything else would just have to wait.
When I found out we wouldn’t be making the pilgrimage, I took a walk down to the river and rested awhile on a bench, letting the rippling of water wash over me. At this point, I was less than four hours out from a violin recital and a choir concert concert that I’d be playing piano and singing in. I couldn’t bring myself to warm up, though- there was something yet I had to receive from this space.
As drops of water from the City Park fountain fell on me on my walk back to campus, so did a thought. Why not do Taizé here? Maybe we couldn’t go to St. Louis this weekend, but we could bring Taizé to campus. If the other students who had initially been planning to travel to St. Louis were too stressed and booked this weekend to make the pilgrimage, maybe what we really needed was a weekend of Taizé prayers all around campus. A time for trust and respite right here.
The next morning, I mysteriously woke up around 5:45 in an excited daze. Time to plan. Around 6:10, on the way to the campus center, I found myself on a detour into the amphitheater by the art center. This is where the pilgrimage in place would start. I chanted a few Taizé chants into the resonant space, “Meine Hoffnung,” “Kristus din Ande,” and “Confitemini Domino.”
In a couple hours, I had created and posted flyers around campus, invited people to a Facebook event, and was getting ready for the first prayer of the weekend.
10am Saturday morning, Memorial Hill
Nestled into the grass atop the hill, I was witness to sun and shadow, coolness and rising heat. Without any clock or phone in site, I was an observer to all around me: cars and pedestrians passing by below, leaves tickled by the wind, bugs moving in interwoven flight patterns all around me. In silence, I remembered all who had shared their burdens with me, or whose burdens went unspoken in the harsh grind of daily life. I moved on a plane between chanting and watching and waiting, the words of a psalm sometimes on my lips, and other times a preoccupation with the pollen lifting off a tree. It was a peace, a peace of just sitting there, that I can’t say I’ve quite felt since my summer trip.
2:15pm Saturday afternoon, City Park
The park was alive with people and sound. A group of families gathered by the fountain to celebrate and take pictures. The buzz of a metal band, from the music festival on campus, rang through the air. Fr. Jim and Missy, from the local Episcopal church that hosts the Taizé services connected with campus, joined me in a sunny spot on the grass. We sang some new songs and some of our old favorites, from “In the Lord, I’ll be ever thankful” to “O Lord, Hear My Prayer.” After a reading from the Book of Wisdom, we spent some time not quite in silence, but immersed in the sounds of life around us. Death metal and birdsong. Sometimes a little bit of holy laughter is appropriate. To the comforting response “Adoramus Te Domine,” we lifted prayer after prayer for healing in our community and our world. We were joined by Christina and the lovely harmonies she added, and trailed off from song into a conversation about how to voice disagreement without disrespect.
7:30pm Saturday evening, Conservatory Room 254
We sang for over an hour into the dying of the light. Deme came and joined me at the piano, then Evelyn, and when the room had turned too dark to see the music we merely added a flashlight to the music rack. We read the Beatitudes from Matthew’s Gospel, and Isaiah’s beckoning that all who are thirsty come to the water. We chanted many of the interior, minor mode chants, especially in Spanish and French. Tears were shed, hugs were given, and we prayed for love, and trust, and healing.
2:15pm Sunday afternoon, All Saints Prayer Garden/Sanctuary
It’s amazing how much more I learned about the people who joined me this weekend and the community we share just by taking some time to sit quietly together. For example, I never knew just how many hymns the carillon at a local church plays around 2:20 in the afternoon! Our songs, silences(?) and prayers were accompanied by quite the line-up! At this resurrection-themed service, we heard of Jesus meeting his disciples at sea after the resurrection, and feeding them though they’d been able to catch nothing before he showed up. Fr. Jim, Charlie (equipped with a green recorder!), Brett and Deme showed up to the prayer garden before we decided, in light of our carillon-Taizé mash-up happening, to move into the sanctuary for a few chants. We sang songs of resurrection, from the powerful minor mode “Christus Resurrexit” to “In Resurrectione Tua Christe.”
7:30pm Sunday evening, Ormsby lawn
On the winter-skating-pond turned summer-lawn in front of a campus dorm, Brett and I met for conversation and song. We read Psalm 57, enjoyed the fading sun on the vibrant grass, and sang some chants into the evening air. It was wonderful to be able to tailor each Taizé meeting to whomever showed up, and after having shared classes and a major with Brett for quite some time, it was wonderful to get to know him better. One of the highlights for me was the French song “Jesus le Christ,” which lauds Christ as our light and asks that he not let our “fear or darkness speak to us.” Out of all the meetings, I was aware that our voices carrying into the evening air were most visible to the campus community this time. We got a few looks of curiosity and confusion, and all I hope is that our prayers ascending like incense brought some peace and compassion into such a tense time on campus.
8:30am Monday morning, Wriston Ampitheater/labyrinth walk
The Taizé pilgrimage in St. Louis was to feature a walk of trust around the city. While we didn’t make it all the way around Appleton, we got to the labyrinth at the local UCC church, and spent some time walking it and receiving what the Spirit had in store for us. Before this adventure, Fr. Jim, Missy and I began by singing a few chants in the amphitheater- ones we know well, such as “Bless the Lord” and “Confitemini Domino,” letting our voices ring into the round stone space and grace the surface of each wall (and every river bug in between!). Fr. Jim shared a meditation from Bishop Steven Charleston:
The moment I dreaded the most finally came and went, and was really not as bad as I expected. The thing I wanted most I finally got, but it wasn’t all that I thought it would be. One of the skills of living a spiritual life is managing expectations and outcomes. That doesn’t sound as interesting as achieving enlightenment, but it is core to making the sacred a part of everyday life. What we wish for is not what we always get. What we get is not always what we wish for. Hope takes its own shape. Joy comes in all sizes. The Spirit arrives unexpectedly, even when she comes right on time.
After this whole weekend, I can certainly say that hope comes in many shapes and sizes. Sometimes we plan one thing for months and that thing doesn’t work out at all, but the Spirit doesn’t fail in sustaining us and opening a window where she opens a door. As Bishop Charleston says, she arrives unexpectedly even when right on time.
In walking the labyrinth, I realized that my difficulty to make choices- to take care of, and listen to myself- isn’t something I have to carry around forever. Slowly, as I walk this path, this labyrinth, I can unwind the parts of me that panic when I have to make a choice. I can keep walking, keep choosing forward in slow and deliberate and imperfect yet holy ways. I was scared when the weekend started because now I would have to choose, but perhaps I forgot it was the spaces and the people and the chants we lifted up that would shape the weekend. I was a part of it, but it wasn’t up to me in the end.
I yelled into the wilderness of Lawrence, “come to Taizé this weekend!” And some who were thirsting for it showed up, and they were the blessing to me and to one another. My expectations were subverted, and yet hope took its own shape, everyone took their own course, paths that would not have converged did, indeed, meet. Some people met each other for the first or second time. Some who don’t usually spend much time together shared words of encouragement and embraces. Ideas and ways of prayer that usually stay in concretely different rooms and different sanctuaries met under the open sky.
Outside of the services, I found myself moved to give money to someone who approached me on the street- not because I necessarily believed his somewhat doubtful story word for word, but because he asked for help. When the library was closed and I ended up somewhere I hadn’t planned on at all, I also ended up in a deep talk with a person in a time of need. She let me walk alongside her. I came to taste the trust that permeated the pilgrimage between prayer times.
And to start it all was a friend who embraced me right before I went on the game-changing river walk. At that point I was feeling kind of miserable- not knowing what I’m doing next year exactly, plans changing for the weekend, my last choir concert at Lawrence about to breeze by- and I felt glued to this stone bench right outside the conservatory doors. I just couldn’t move, and I’m glad I couldn’t, because I needed to be found by her. “I don’t feel needed here,” I had said, in tears.
“I need you,” was the response I’ll never forget.
We need each other. Thanks, Appleton, for letting me celebrate that together-ness, that lifting of our individual burdens into the pool of mutual support and prayer, this weekend.
Five days later, the paper advertisement I left under some stones on a bench by Main Hall (pictured above) is still intact. It’s a little miracle, indeed, a reminder that we’re all needed to perform these little miracles of coming together and finding joy. It doesn’t take striving and expectation on our part, but showing up.
Sometimes we just have to show up to where we already are and embrace a little pilgrimage in place.
Sing a New Song 