The whole world singing: A journey to Iona and Taize

Christian Century, March 22, 2000 by Belden C. Lane

I have two dominant impressions from my own recent visit to these communities. One is an astounding sense that the adoration of God is still very much alive at the dawn of the 21st century. The other is a sense of the breadth and diversity of the immense company engaged in this work of adoration.

THE WIND howled as I sat alone one afternoon in the great silence of the South Isle Chapel of the Abbey Church on Iona. My wife and I had made our way by two ferries and a bus from the distant harbor town of Oban. The wind beat on the wooden door nearby, rattling its iron latch, demanding entrance. From high above the nave a finger of wind located a cracked window and whistled through it from time to time in a high soft scream. The wind was soon singing in multiple registers, like the voices of Tibetan monks chanting. I was aware of something going on in that place wholly apart from me--something I can only call praise.

Then two blackbirds entered the church, seeking shelter from the coming storm, and their songs echoed from the wooden ceiling and stone walls like a descant to the urgent melody of the wind. Suddenly, one of the birds walked up to me, only three feet away, then turned to enter one of the choir stalls--as if to attend more properly to its singing. All this seemed natural in that place, as if nothing were more ordinary than a choir of blackbirds managing the psalms with exquisite beauty at the afternoon office.

Dare we imagine that the company of praise does not include all the rest of creation? I asked that question again as I sat beside the small, open window of the abbey library and looked out across the sound toward the Isle of Mull. Sitting there is like being aboard a ship. The curved wood ceiling, shuttered wooden windows and rough planked floors lend it a seaworthy air. My wife and I watched the sun rise from that window early one morning and listened to waves lapping on black rocks along the shore. The scene, framed by oak and foregrounded by walls of books, suggested John Scotus Erigena's notion of the two sandals of Christ--scripture and nature.

From within, we looked out with eyes formed by the word--Gaelic Bibles, works on Celtic spirituality, histories of the church in Scotland. We gazed out at a "thin place," as MacLeod described it, a natural world as stark and simple as it is beautiful, hinting perhaps of other worlds beyond. In that one fragile moment at dawn we took our parts in a single community of praise--green grass lit by the rising sun, a gull's cry coming from across the water, two humans looking on with awe.

The journey to Taize brought other experiences. From Geneva, my wife and I made our way by train and bus to the welcome center at the Taize Community, and then to the little room assigned us in an old farmhouse. Sitting later that evening on the hard concrete floor of the Church of Reconciliation, I chanted songs alongside hundreds of others, and watched candles flicker against the bright red-orange hangings stretched above the altar. Built on a hill beside the village of Taize, this church is an unassuming building that can expand to shelter thousands of young people who come speaking dozens of languages. One would imagine the chasm between these individuals to be impossible to bridge.