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From Taizé, June 2007

(I was in Taizé, France last summer. I wrote this back then after having gotten home. Somehow I never posted this though that was my intention, so here goes.)

During the time in Taizé, something was turned over within me. What happened has a rational dimension as well: on last Sunday, when leaving Taizé approached, I realized I had found a trust for God and people around me, and I was afraid of losing it, getting swept away by everyday worries as usual. So I wrote down the main points. However, right now the only thing I can remember anymore is: trusting Jesus is trusting Someone who also has a deep trust in me. This was derived from a quotation from Dostojevski's Idiot, which was in a book I bought in Taizé. Too bad I seem to have given it to someone and can't find its name anymore. It was: Never a Stranger, God's Otherness in the Light of the Gospel by brother Emile of Taizé (originally Nul n'est plus proche que l'autre. I read it in Finnish though: Lähempänä kuin kukaan - Jumalan toiseus evankeliumin valossa).

I've found new trust, or peace. Faith is no longer as much of an intellectual problem as it used to be. As faith is closer to my concrete life, theories and speculation get less relevant. It's easier to see now that God provides the purpose for my (and everyone's) life. The gospel of Taizé seemed to be this trust.

Still, just rationalizing it doesn't really cover what I believe God did to me. For years now, for example, I have found myself obliged to try to study apology in order to justify believing and still being a rational being. This was partly a social need, although of course I want to remain intellectually honest as well. At the end of the day, faith in Jesus isn't something that can or needs to be proven: God is a personality, not a phenomenon that would ever surrender to any human theory.

Anyway, as I felt faith wasn't really in my life, it seemed that I needed some kind of a justification for it. I still can't claim that my understanding of myself or the world around is completely coherent with all the things that the Bible says, but God seems to indeed have taken myself somewhere. Many times this week I've found myself humming the chants I learned in Taizé, and they do give a peace.

I think one of the things that got easier was that in Taizé, people seemed less eager to keep faith paradoxal. The Lutheran-evangelical environment where I grew up actually emphasized in some cases that some things can't be understood - and on a level, I agree. Ultimately, faith requires God to work in the one who believes. But this(?) easily becomes a barrier, too, making faith somehow a block of doctrine believers must adopt without questioning. This would be violent, and I don't see God being that.

The trip we made was also featured in spring 2008 in Kirkkosanomat (page 9 - PDF 2,35 MB, in Finnish), a local paper of the Lutheran church, circulated for free in all homes of Tampere.

January 21, 2008 14:43 in diary

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