It was 2006, during a youth gathering when I first encountered the song “Ubi Caritas” or “Sa Pagmamahal Naroroon ang Diyos” in Tagalog translation. I was so young then and just new in the youth ministry. Ten years after, who’d have thought that I will come to the place where it has began, the small village called Taize.
Coming in this community was so surreal. It is like a dream that I never thought of dreaming because of its apparent impossibility. Until now I still can’t believe that I’d been there. I can’t help but really feel good in my heart whenever I recall the moments I spent in that humble village, the calmest place on earth.
However, my first few days in Taize Community were not really easy. It made me feel strange and uncomfortable for it was my first time to be out of the country. So to meet a lot of foreign people up close was really new to me. I was so anxious about how I can get along well with them considering that we come from different cultural and social origins.
My patience was also challenged by getting the hang of the slow phase of life in the village. It has always been like that every winter time, they say, just a handful of pilgrims that we have to serve which brings to having just few things to do. In the Philippines, my day is so full and my mind is always occupied with works to fulfill. So it was like living a life away from my typical day.
These are just few things that were challenging at first but have taught me a beautiful message at the end.
One of my realizations is about the challenge of building relationship with people from that foreign place, especially with my fellow volunteers from other countries. I realized it was coming from my being too critical and superficial in dealing with them. I was too conscious about how should I convey myself to them, trying to avoid being misinterpreted. Then what I’d found out later on was that this kind of attitude is blocking me to open up myself more, hence hinders me to be happy. So I challenged myself to let go of this preconceptions about people and just be as authentic as a child. And it was so amazing how time had dissolved the difference of the color of our skin. That I no longer see them as foreign people but have seen them as just people.
It is also in Taize, during my week of silence, where I first understood how to just be.
The idea of being in a week of silence is having a good time to seek for answers, to rest, to talk to God and the likes. But what if I don’t have any questions to ask yet? What if I don’t have any major concerns to lift up to Him as of the moment? What if I am currently in state of being steady? How should then I spend those 7 days of silence without anything to say to God? Then Bro. Paolo, my spiritual director, told me “If there are no questions to ask, then you could simply sit with God, as with a friend where speaking is not always necessary. And maybe, of course, God will have something to say to you!” And that was what I tried to do. Then slowly, I was beginning to understand that God was trying to tell me something, and that is to be still. Back in my normal life out of Taize, I have perceived myself to have always been the producer, to have always been responding to a stimulus, the one who works so that others could have, and the one who comply with whatever the world will demand. My life has always been about “doing” that I forgot about “being”.
In Taize, I experienced to be on the receiving end and to just accept whatever circumstances had to throw at me and to be just open to God’s unexpected graces.
My three months in Taize was a fulfillment of a dream I never thought of dreaming. But God knows my heart very well. He knows my deepest desire more than I know myself and He has given it to me in the most unexpected moment of my life. I look forward for that day that I will once again sit and join the voices poles apart, singing songs of love in the calmest place on earth. (Ace Lazan– He is a Youth leader from San Antonio de Padua Parish, Inarawan Antipolo and part of Ministry for Youth Affars of the Diocese of Antipolo)
