Taizé and the Covenant Circles

I want to share with you something that I have participated in for the last five weeks and thoroughly enjoyed. Throughout the season of Lent, First Presbyterian Annapolis offered special programming on Wednesday evenings. We had our last Covenant Circle gathering last night and it was a great experience. Associate Pastor Heather Shortlidge organized this opportunity for members of our congregation to gather within small groups of parishioners around several different topics.

• Senior Pastor Bill Hathaway led a DVD discussion series featuring Walter Brueggemann.
• Debbie Mitchell led a book discussion on Sue Monk Kidd's The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
• Music Director Marc Boensel led a Masterwork Chorale
• Elizabeth Hancock led a group called Sanctuary Creations
• Marion Schilder led a group through Guided Meditation
• Yours truly led a Taizé group.

The main down side was not being able to join one of the other circles. I would have loved to have participated in any of these groups.
Taizé (pronounced teh -zay) is a style of worship that is named after a location in France where an ecumenical community of brothers live and worship. I was first introduced to Taizé several years ago by my good friend LeAnn Hodges who is the former Associate Pastor of our church. Taizé worship is very contemplative with periods of silence and repetitive singing/chanting. Before this year I had participated in three separate series of Taizé services, but this was my first time leading them on my own.

The weekend before our first Covenant Circle gathering, I was extremely fortunate to get to participate in an event that was held in Baltimore in late February. A brother from Taizé came to Baltimore and led a two day event of prayer, small group discussions and fellowship.

Those who took part in the Baltimore weekend were a very diverse group. “Only a Taizé gathering could bring together such a variety of people,” remarked one participant. All the age-groups were represented, from children to the elderly, including many students and young adults, from different denominations, races and backgrounds. Most of the participants came from the greater Baltimore area, but some traveled from Pennsylvania, Washington, New York, Virginia, New Jersey and even Chicago. A number of Polish people came, recent immigrants to the United States who had often been to Taizé and taken part in European meetings. One does not often find such a diversified group praying together and reflecting on important questions, in a land where tolerance often simply means that each individual is free to “do their own thing” independently of the others.

This excerpt is from the article A Pilgrimage of Trust in Baltimore on the Taizé web site. It was a fantastic experience and gave me lots of ideas to draw upon for the five services that I led. There are some great pictures here (yes those are familiar dreads in the second picture)

The picture above is the space that we used for our Wednesday night services. I converted the Middle School room each week into a make shift sanctuary. It was the perfect size for our group which had between eight and twelve people from week to week.

I would love to visit the community in France and participate in one of their week long pilgrimages. To experience the singing, prayer, and scripture read in many different languages along with thousands of other pilgrims from all over the world would be amazing.

You can listen to some of the songs and a few minutes of their prayer services here.