Solitude to Communal Celebration

My Easter celebration has been absolutely incredible this year, and I am truly grateful for the ways and the people in which God manifested God's own self this past week. I spent Holy Week with a couple of brother seminarians from the NAC on a pilgrimage through France that took us from the solitude of a hermitage in Southern France to the town of Chartreuse which is just at the foot of one of the oldest Christian monasteries in the world to the bustling city of Lyon to Cluny to an ecumenical community of contemplative brothers in a town called Taize. Throughout this pilgrimage we met literally thousands of people who witnessed through their joy, their simplicity, their love, their beauty, their hospitality, their love for the Lord, their faith... their lives. Here are a few:

1. The community of sisters and the priests of the Community of St. John who greeted us with warm and jovial hospitality and invited us to join them, though for a brief time, in their lives of solitude and simplicity. The lives that these saints live are incredibly simple and yet radically profound. They are hermits. They live in small huts, like the one above, on the side of a mountain in Southern France. They gather daily for Mass and then continue the celebration through their daily work of survival and praising God in the wilderness in silence. They have literally next to nothing and forego plumbing, electricity for some, warm water. Each hermitage is heated by a cylindrical wood-burner and the only available running water comes from a small spicket outside of the hermitage. These hermits truly live in the wilderness, and yet they find, follow, and embrace the Living God without ceasing. One of the priests of the Community of St. John described his vocation as "being a friend of Jesus." And for him, being a friend of Jesus has taken him to Rwanda in the 90's... the same time as the Rwandan Genocide, and to Romania where he devoted himself to building bridges and trust between the Roman Catholic Church and the Easter Orthodox Churches.

2. Silence. Very few things are able to capture the mysteries of Holy Week as adequately, poetically, and harmoniously as silence. And fittingly, silence was a major element and refrain for our pilgrimage. We found silence in the chapels of the hermitages, in the mountains and streams of the wilderness, and in the exclamatory pauses between chants and prayers shared by over 5,000 people at Taize. The communities that we encountered were contemplative, and so they live their lives more or less in silence. Their liturgies are slow, peace-filled, simple, and incredible. I was especially impressed by the silence embraced by the young people at Taize, who paused for 10-15 minute periods of silence at communal prayer (Morning, Mid-Day, and Evening). A church filled with over 5,000 people, the vast majority of whom were under the age of 30, entered into silence intentionally, communally, and unanimously. This silence was incredibly refreshing and incredibly profound. It fit our celebration of Holy Week well-- allowing us to enter into the mystery that is God, inviting us to stand without words at the foot of the Cross, beckoning our participation in the silence of the reality of Holy Saturday, and then finally over-filling us with peace as we sang the universal triumphant word of the Church which far transcends our own thoughts and words. Alleluia.

3. Other pilgrims from all over the world. In Taize we encountered and got to know Christian pilgrims from all over the world. These people came on pilgrimage to seek God in a profound way, and many of them did so amidst profound decisions in their lives. I met a Slovakian couple who have been living in London for several years now. The girl is a nurse in London, but is discerning whether or not God is calling her to return home to Slovakia. The uncertainty of this decision and of its effects were tangible as her and her boyfriend shared their discernment with others and brought who they are to a community of Christians who were previously strangers; to chants of Latin, German, Italian, Slovakian, English; to God in prayer; to the Cross; and to the triumphantly loud singing of praise at Mass on Easter Sunday. I also met a group of pilgrims from Lafia who spent more time on their voyage to Taize than they spent actually in Taize. Over three days they drove across Poland and Germany, over the Alpes, going through quite the adventure as their headlights and brakes went out while they were coming down from the Alpes. And yet, although they had gone through a great deal of stress and sacrifice to make it to Taize, said, "This place (Taize) is paradise."

Pilgrims come to Taize from all over the world. And they, like the brothers of Taize, embraced simplicity and contemplation. They took prayer seriously and invested themselves to God through prayer... prayer that lasted anywhere from 1 to 5 hours at a time. They chose to sit on a hard floor for hours in prayer that included spiritual conversations, the Sacrament of Reconciliation, ancient and contemporary chants, and silence.

4. Relationality. Just as the priest of the CSJ confessed, "My vocation is to be a friend of Jesus," so too, each one of us shares in that very same vocation. And as we deepen our friendship with Jesus we also, at the same time, deepen our friendships with the friends of Jesus... every human being. I experienced this through prayer this Holy Week, especially as I venerated the Cross on Good Friday.

At Taize they venerate the Cross every Friday. They first carry the Cross through the congregation in a solemn procession. Then they lay the Cross down on the ground and the brothers venerate the Cross, mostly by placing their foreheads to the wood of the cross. They then invite the congregation, about 5,000 strong, to venerate the Cross in similar fashion. As pilgrims file into line to venerate the Cross they kneel or sit in the center aisle and slowly move forward as the line progresses towards the Cross. For the two hours that I knelt in line I honestly had no idea what I was going to do when it was my turn to venerate the Cross. I didn't know the words to say or the gesture to make or the thought to share or the image to embrace.

But as I gently rested my forehead on the Cross someone came to mind. She is a homeless heroine addict that I met during my first parish assignment, at St. Gregory the Great in Baltimore City. And I felt, probably because it was the reality, that I was bringing this woman, a woman who I remember in prayer often, to the Cross of Jesus, her friend who is there with her in her own struggle. Then a close friend of mine who is struggling with a similar addiction emerged, and I brought him to the Cross, to Jesus who is with him and with his wife, son, and daughter. And then tons of people, from my family, from the seminary, from parish assignments, brother Baltimore seminarians approaching ordination, from school, from work, from all facets of my life processed, one by one, in prayer to the Cross where they were and are united with Christ.

This reality of holding one another in prayer and how it relates to our faith was made accutely apparent during the intercessions as we prayed for the victims of the recent earthquakes in Japan and then, immediately after prayed as a community of 5,000 the chant, "Nothing can ever come between us and the love of God." I find this to be such a mystery and such a challenge at times, but saw somehow that even in times of great suffering we are so incredibly united with God. And in that same reality, I gained some insight into what it means to be a seminarian and a priest-- as one who lives for others-- in deed, in word, and in prayer-- just basically loving people and trying to serve as a bridge in any way possible between others and God.

5. My brothers. Seeing the sisters and the priests of the CSJ at the hermitage and then seeing the brothers at Taize was truly inspiring and to be honest attractive. Their sense of community and of apostolic zeal was impressive and it was apparent that they, in both communities, live the Gospel. Their intentionality of community and their sharing of prayer and service together for others was impressive to say the least. That being said, my experience of these communities would have been less if it had not been for my brothers with whom I shared this pilgrimage. The laughs, sharing of graces, prayer, and everything else brought so much to the experience. Just another example of how awesome it is to be pursuing a vocation to the priesthood.

For the record, this was my first Holy Week away from Baltimore-- away from St. Stephen's and away from my brother Baltimore seminarians, and away from serving at the Cathedral. But I definitely did not feel as though I was celebrating these great mysteries without those communities and honestly very much felt connected with them and with the whole Church in prayer and in great celebration. And I look forward in great hope and expectation to the unfolding of this Easter as the Octave continues.