Simple desire

Welcoming remarks to Advent Taizé service of contemplative chant and silence at St. John's, Petaluma on Friday, December 6, 2013.

This is a season during which people are doing everything they can to say that they have faith— faith that the world is a holy place, a place of beauty, and love, and joy, and generosity, and peace.  Sadly, it often seems that the only way we think we can say this is with things.  And I wonder if this is not because we are afraid, and if we do not say it with things because to say it in a more personal way would expose us to the fear in our hearts that is not true.

The practice that we are doing tonight, comes from Taizé, an ecumenical monastic community in France founded in the belief that Faith is something very simple.  It’s not that there are not profound and manifold treasures of wisdom and knowledge in traditions like the one we call The Church.  And it’s not that there is no value in the many cultural expressions of faith that we see in different popular customs, and religious celebrations.  But there is also the need for a very simple style of prayer, a way of being together in worship that expresses the simple desire to know the presence of God in our lives.  Tonight’s service is a way of worship that says that this desire is the essence of faith, and that it is in all of us, and that on this common ground we find that the world is a holy place.

There is a kind of paradox in this—that the simpler the practice, the more universal it is.  This is the paradox of contemplation—that the more receptive we become,  the deeper we go into the silence and solitude of our selves, the closer we come to the active compassion that connects us with others.   Now is a time of year when the natural world speaks to us of this paradox —the further we sink into the darkness of winter, the closer we come to the renewal of the light.  In the Christian tradition the great symbol of this paradox, of simplicity and universal love, of contemplation and revolutionary compassion is Mary, the Mother.  In the story of Mary we see one young woman who carries inside her, in the small dark space of her womb, the entire drama of God’s being with us in the world.  

Holy One,

Teach us to trust the simple light of our longing 

for You,

to let it guide us into the depths of your dazzling

darkness,

that we may become pregnant

with your presence in the world.

Amen.