It works something like this: some small change (like the flapping of a butterfly wing) can have a huge effect somewhere else (like causing a storm in hong-kong).

Anyway, everyone except for me has probably seen the movie, etc.

…

I was thinking about life today. Shocking as it sounds.

I often think about how I should go about being what I want to be. Gandhi famously said “be the change you want to see in the world.” These words haunts me.

When I look back in the last few years, I see that:
Most of all, it is the beliefs and values I carry, the attitudes I cultivate, the opinions I choose to hold, that are what shape my future, that are what I become.

Dear God.
Let me watch carefully within, let me take care to love and nurture the garden of my heart and mind. I will endeavour to recklessly cultivate that which is good within me, that which loves and accepts others and this world you have given me. I will weed carefully around those that bring fruit and squash those small thoughts and attitudes that will grow to evil. Help me Lord, to remember as I tend this patch of fertile soil, that the wild and unexpected can bring the greatest fruit.

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.

I want to write about, in no particular order:

• Cheesemaking
• Listening
• Community
• Rejection
• Faith

Anyway not what I was writing about. I got on the last train to go home. I picked a seat and got out my book, as you do (it’s a 40min train ride to Pukerua Bay).

I was just settling into Dickens, when two people sat down in the seat directly in front of me. Before I so much as took in their appearance, I was aware of them for a completely different reason. The Smell. They smelt dreadful. Like something died. They were oldish, unkept, and nothing else about them was obvious from my vantage point except the smell, that absolutely invaded my comfortable little world.

Now I’m normally the kind to grin and bare that kind of thing. But I spent the next few minutes desperately wondering if there was polite way I could find a different seat without their discerning the cause for my action. Failing that I wondered if there was a natural looking way of reading my book that included breathing through the sleeve of my jacket, or perhaps if there was a way to accidentally get my train ticket stuck securely in both nostrils.

I was in this situation, feverishly reading the pages hoping that my nasal senses shutdown as soon as possible, when the train started to move. Having gotten himself and his wife comfortable and seeming about to fall asleep, the man turned around to talk to me. Oh God…

In this situation I realised that this conversation was going to be at least as difficult as ignoring the stench. He was missing at least four front teeth. He spoke with a ..lisp that made almost everything he said incomprehensible.

“Wher’ are ya go’n to?”
“Pukerua Bay, how about you?”
“Porirua” [oh thank God],
“Do ya think ya coud put a hand on m’ sholder here when we get to porirua, and wake me up, my wife and I are very tired..”
“Of course, I’ll wake you when we’re near Porirua”
“Do you have three dollars..?”

He then showed no particular interest in going to sleep. As we roared through the dark tunnels, he told me all about how little sleep he had the night before. Then he started to talk to me about music, I think. I did my best to follow along without asking him to repeat every word. I was getting over the initial shock that I might have to have a conversation, and managed to decipher from his story that he was at some kind of mental health institution in Porirua, but he wanted to buy a house and start a new life. And liked Led Zeppelin. I tried hard to keep up my end of a conversation where I wasn’t really understanding most of the words. But I could confirm that I had no girlfriend, had heard of Led Zeppelin, an probably hadn’t heard of any of the other bands he mentioned (or at least hadn’t caught what he had said). We talked about Peter Jacksons new 39 million dollar jet, an area where I felt I was on more solid decryptive ground. Then as we rolled gently out of Tawa we started talking about v8 racing, another area I know nothing about, but at least I could ask him what he liked about it.

They got off at Porirua. In the clearing air, I looked around the carriage. Every second seat was filled with clones of myself. Youngish, clean, people, making their way home late at night, alone. Each absorbed in her own world, gazing into the darkness, brooding in isolation on whatever lay deep in their souls. No one spoke, there was no eye contact.

I missed my new friends. It had taken me 20 minutes, from Wellington to Porirua to learn to begin to love someone that had taken me out of my comfortable isolation.

Why did it take someone, who’s social skills were not all there, to force me to open my heart to the person beside me on the train.

Why don’t we talk in the street, or on the train? Why do we not talk in the elevator? What is wrong with us. We’re so concerned with being safe and polite to our neighbor, that we dare not disturb them, most of us have nothing to say anyway.

If only I had to confidence to dare to be seen as something other then normal… to dare to start a conversation with someone I don’t know.

I like you.

You are meat in the sandwich of my life. I like it when we meet in cafés and cheap restaurants, or even better in lounge rooms. I especially like when we walk on beaches or climb mountains together, or watch the stars come out. I like that you are prepared to love me a little.

But what I love most about you is that your different from everyone else I’ve ever known. I like that your not always a nice person. I like that your not always easy to know.

If I could ask one thing of you. It would be that you were honest with me. The more I get to know you, the more I want to know who you actually are. It’s ok that sometimes we wont agree. It’s ok that something you say or do might be hard for me to handle. It’s ok that sometimes it will be uncomfortable. I want to share this life with you.

The thing is, why I wrote you this letter, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, is this: When life is clean and easy, when I don’t have to bend and grow, when I don’t have to share a little and give a little to love each of you, I die. At that moment I am alone in all the world.

Each of you, crazy, strange, beautiful, bizarre brother or sister, make my life special.

To make up for it, I’ve decided to rearrange the categories a little bit. And post something better then this. Both these things will happen right after I finish making excuses.

I have included a picture of a bird, to add meaning and substance to this post.

I’ll try again soon.

I’ve also just said goodbye to too many people that I love in one go. Goodbyes for the boys who welcomed me when I arrived, goodbyes for the brothers I’ve talked to or worked with, goodbyes for the new boys in Tilleul, goodbyes for the many beautiful women who I’ve had the pleasure to live near, goodbyes for my special friends who have shared so much with me these past months, goodbye to the prayers, the northern stars and the French countryside.

It’s been a sad couple of days. But for all this emotion, I can’t help rejoicing because I feel just how much I have loved these people, this place, this life I’ve shared.

I was invited to lunch in the community on Thursday, lunch is the only meal that almost all of the brothers share together, so its an honor to be invited. It struck me while I was eating, just how special the situation was. I was sitting under a tent roof in the beautiful garden of a community of brothers famous around the world for their work, in the middle of the french countryside on a balmy summer day, seated close to a bishop from the Philippians and a bishop of the eastern orthodox church in Russia, both having made a pilgrimage to taize, also invited to lunch. And here I was, a simple guy from a simple little country, with no great works to speak of. I was overwhelmed with the opportunity, the honor, the surreality of the moment. I felt so clearly then, and still now, the weight of this experience, this precious <almost> three months. It has changed me absolutely, I can never be the same again.

All these beautiful people, all this love and welcome I’ve been given, all this fun, all this work, all these goodbyes, everything, I give thanks for.

I feel a little bit silly. But really I’m am choosing to do it this way because its what I want. The two main arguments are that I should either stay longer in taize, since I’m here and love it, or that I should look arround europe before rushing home. While both have there merits, the reason why I’ve made this choice is below:

Really traveling was never the aim. I wanted to come here to meet people, and to grow myself. I realised fairly soon that taize provided both those things in a way that I was unlikly to find on the road. Not only do I meet lots of people, but here I also share a life and a deeper connection with the people I live with. The way I grow here is also good. Its fed on a rich prayerlife and some of the most interesting and accepting teaching I’ve heard in my life.

So why not stay longer? Simply that I want to take what I have learnt and discovered about myself, and apply it to the world. Unless I’m going to stay in Taize my whole life, at some point I want to grasp the nettle and see what I do next. I feel that for now following Christ mean following him back into the next chaper. And its not so hard to come back if the road leads here again.

So there it is. I will see many of you in a little under a month.

Peace and love.

It was great. It was hard. It was restful and exhausting all at once.
I went on lots of long walks, I thought an prayed a lot, I learn some things about God and about myself. A good week.

For now I’m happy to be able to hang out with people again, and be able to rest from the extreme spiritual workout. And to see how to relate what I’ve learnt.

And to be able to think again about other questions like when I want to come home.

Today I’m going to cluny (the nearest town) for the first time since I arived, its going to feel a bit like a big city. Theres some prayer thing at the church which a lot of us are going to.

Well thats all, basically I said nothing.

Oh yeah, the ANZAC biscuits were great. We agreed they didn’t taste anything like ANZAC biscuits, but knowone else knew that. On the other hand no ANZAC buscuit will taste like that again either.

Love you all. Peace. I’ll say more later in the week.