In March, Om Spiritual Center will be featuring our Taize Services.  We invite you to come be a part of our program as we meditate,  chant and pray together for personal, as well as, world reconciliation of our differences.  To give you more history of Taize I offer the following.

Taizé began with one man, Brother Roger. In 1940 he came to what was then a semi-abandoned village in Burgundy, his mother's native region. He was twenty-five years old, and he had come there to offer a welcome to Jews fleeing the Nazi persecution and to work out a call to follow Christ in community, a community that would attempt to live out the Gospel call to reconciliation day by day. A few years later he was joined by his first brothers, and in 1949, seven young men committed themselves for life to celibacy and to material and spiritual sharing. Taizé thus took its place as part of the great monastic family.

This is the context in which the "songs of Taizé" have been developed. When the number of visitors to Taizé began to increase, and more and more young people started arriving, the brothers felt the need to find a way for everyone to join in the prayer and not simply be observers. At the same time, they felt it was essential to maintain the meditative quality of the prayer, to let it be an authentic encounter with the mystery of God. Finally, it was found that chants made up of a few words repeated over and over again made possible a prayer that was both meditative and yet accessible to all.

But it is important to emphasize that for the community, the music has never been an end in itself. It is a means to facilitate the worship of God. That is why the brothers, although they respect and strive for technical competence, place the accent not on performance but on participation. They were happy to develop a form of sung music that can be used just as well by a small group of students who meet weekly in a dorm to pray as in a celebration that fills the cathedral of a large city. The "songs of Taizé" thus make it possible for hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world to be linked in common praise of God.

Many Blessings,