Not for the first time, I might add. And have added.

My mother left piece of paper on my keyboard that contains the following quote:

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.

–W B Yeats

Which remind’s me of what, it seems, I discovered while I was away in France. Not the only thing I discovered, but perhaps the one I keep coming back to with the most clarity. That is the importance of listening: To be still and to hear and understand others.

I don’t really have anything profound to say about it, it’s such a mundane kind of thing. Except it holds within it exactly the reason silence is important in my faith. The church from which I came to Taizé didn’t put a great deal of emphasis on an inner silence or peace. I knew this was lacking in my faith, but felt guilty because I supposed it to be a thing of style. That I simply preferred a different kind of worship. Like I was an old grumpy person telling the youngsters to hush up.

But here lies the thing that I’ve realised. It’s more then style, its fundamental. It’s connected to my faith inseparably because of love. To understand someone you must love them. To love someone means you desire to understand them. Understanding another strange human-being involves, even between the most kindred of spirits, a desire to listern to the other. To devote my life to listening and understanding and so loving others I must seek a quietness, a stillness within. It is through this seeking I hope to lay aside myself and learn to live for others, learn to hear others above my own ego.

I come back to someone who says it better: The video is here: http://vimeo.com/13575193 which I recomend for the sake of beauty, but the subtitles are somewhat snappy in places, so I transcribed them here for those lazier people:

Brother Roger, the founder of Taizé speaks:

What do we wish most for those who come here?
We wish that they may be listened to, that they be heard.
Not that they come to receive advice, direction, none of that!
But that they may be heard and that something may be liberated in us, in every person, through that listening that understanding, which is love.
That we may discover little by little what we didn’t know.
What we didn’t know is that we are praying.
What we didn’t know is that even when our lips are shut, Christ prays in us.
What we didn’t know is that, although we have the tendency to be hard on ourselves, God never comes to weigh upon our being.
There are the words of St John: when our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our heart.
It’s a great discovery, that Gospel reality.
But these are words which were spoken, which were transmitted in the Scriptures, which came down to us.
It’s astonishing that those words of Christ came down to us.
When your heart condemns you, God is greater than your heart. And he knows everything.
Perhaps the first step we can take in a week here in Taizé is little by little to realize that there is a gift, a present, a kind of offering of God to us all, which is peace, inner peace, peace of heart.