Life at a monastary.

I wanted to share with you a little taste of Taizé in the video below. It was an amazing experience, prayer three times a day with 10 minutes of silence at each service, simple meals that you eat sitting on benches talking to people from all over the world, bible study in the morning and work in the afternoon.

But as one of my friends at Taizé said, it is not real for those of us who visit for a week. There are a lot of people there who come back year after year to get that spiritual high and renewal, but then lose it when they go back home. That's how my church camp experiences in high school were. But the key is to make that kind of life real at home. To live with simplsity and prayer and silence everyday.

One night I walked down to the church in the village of Taizé with the same friend. The 1000 visitors to Taizé were all back in their beds so the silence there was complete. We walked into the church and I could feel the silence pushing against my skin. We had been in mid-conversation when he opened the door to the church, but we both stopped talking, sat down, and listened to the deafening silence.

I was very sad to leave the peaceful place after only a few days, but like I said, it was not really "real" so it was time to come back to real life.