The whole world singing: A journey to Iona and Taize

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

I'm not suggesting that a simple "return to Rome" is the goal of Reformed and Roman Catholic dialogue. Actually, the longer I teach at a Roman Catholic university, the more fully reformed I become (and the more fully catholic as well). To envision in the new millennium a pilgrimage that takes us to an undivided church is not to declare winners and losers or to reach for simple solutions. The way forward to reconciliation is never simply back. Reformed and Roman Catholic Christians have to journey together, as Karl Rahner said, to "a home where none of us has ever been."

ON THE EVE of October 31, 1999, my wife and I attended a service in the old Roman Catholic church down in the village of Taize, celebrating the signing of the agreement between Roman Catholics and Lutherans on justification by faith the following day in Augsburg. In that small stone church where the community had originally begun, a Lutheran brother from Taize celebrated a special Eucharist for a group of German Christians to which we were joined. We sang the chants of Taize together and prayed for unity in the Church of Jesus Christ.

It was a foretaste of a community that John Calvin and Francis de Sales have already realized, a community that embraces Orthodox, Reformed and Roman Catholic Christians in celebrating the differences they bring to a common family identity. As Calvin and de Sales would remind us, it's a community that includes the rest of creation as well. "It is evident that all creatures," said Calvin, "from those in the heavens to those under the earth, are able to act as witnesses and messengers of God's glory."

That's what makes Iona and Taize so compelling. Open to all the sundry languages of the human and more-than-human world, they embrace all of creation in their praise. One of the petitions in the communion liturgy at Iona asks of God, "May we know that, in touching all bread, all matter, it is you that we touch." This liturgy exclaims in the end, "Therefore with the whole realm of nature around us, with earth, sea and sky, we sing to you." That's a song that all of us who are on pilgrimage can sing together.

Belden Lane is Hotfelder Professor in the Humanities at St. Louis University and the author of The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (Oxford University Press).