Brother Tim

I know that it would make much more sense if I were to blog about Taize in sequential order, but I don’t feel like it. And isn’t it great to know that you don’t have to do something just cause you don’ t feel like it? If only more of life (thinking of a&p in particular here….) was like blogging.

Every morning at Taize we would have bible study, and then we would break off into international small groups to go more in-depth on the bible study. The bible study for the fifteen and sixteen year olds was led by a monk called Brother Tim, who was really, really nice.

This here is Brother Tim, explaining a bible story in the rain. You can’t see me even when the photo is big, but I was sitting next to the guy in the hat and the bright orange shirt. If you’ve ever seen the Andy Griffith show, you might remember that one episode where Andy and Barney keep describing people as “nice”? Well, Brother Tim was nice. Someone actually said that he “radiates niceness”, which he does. Once we were chattering away in our tent and one of the chaperones came in, and all she heard of the conversation was “Brother Tim”. She said, “hey, you guys aren’t being nasty about Brother Tim, are you? Cause he is so nice.” And everyone went, “No! We love  Brother Tim!!!”. Just to give you an idea of what a nice monk this guy was.

And now every time someone puts a  photo of brother Tim on facebook, the rest of us have to comment and go, “Ohhh, BROTHER TIM!” or “Brother Tim rocks” or other various supportive messages.

Here we have a variety of photos of Brother Tim:

Day one: he teaches us Taize-style dance moves: “Can you do the funky chicken??”

Day Two: He explains why it is in fact very fitting that we are learning dance moves at a monastery, because in Isaiah there is a story about followers of Jesus that do many popular dance moves, and “the brothers we try to emulate that in our own lives.”

 

Day Three: Umm, dancing? What’s dancing?

NOTE: ALL PHOTO CAPTIONS ARE LIES.

A Day at Taize

I had another post (that was probably better) ALL READY to go, and then FLICKR announced that they were having mysterious PROBLEMS with their SOFTWARE so you won’t get to see that one for a WHILE. 

But anyway, this is the post I’ve got.

At Taize we had:

•  three meals (bread and chocolate, lunch mush, and dinner mush)
• three worship services (before breakfast, before lunch and after dinner)
• two international small group bible studies
• one big bible study with all the other fifteen and sixteen-year-olds and Brother Tim (who I’m sure would be either flattered or completely freaked out if he had access to our Facebook albums, because every time someone posts a photo of him everyone else comments and says how great he was or how they miss him or how we should bribe him to move to NJ or just that he was so nice or whatever. He’s right up there with our bishop in the category of “Insane Commenting on Facebook”. What is it with these religious figures? Anyway, interesting side note to remember for tomorrow’s post. And fortunately I doubt that a common life of simplicity includes Facebook.)
• one meeting with our small groups from NJ (yay Cobalt)
• optional workshops
• FREE TIME!! My favorite!
• Tent Time, which is when we all were either incredibly tired or just needed a break during free time so we would hang around in our tent, watch the Italians play their sport-of-the-day, listen to the French sing “Oh Susanna”, eat Nutella by the gallon, and talk.
• OYAK!

DETAILS to come whenever Flickr fixes their PROBLEMS and gets COUNSELING.

Oyak

Every day after evening prayers, there is a party called Oyak.

Actually, Oyak is the name of a building outside Taize, where they sell useful items such as snacks and toothbrushes, and soda which is about 10 times better than ours plus it comes in more attractive bottles. No one knows why it’s called Oyak but it is, (actually OYAK is the abbreviation for the armed forces pension fund in Turkey but…) and it makes for great conversational material such as, “Will I see you at OYAK tonight?” or “Want to go to OYAK now?”. Around the building there are some tables and benches, and behind the building there’s a field where Europeans whip our tails at soccer. There’s also some tents back there, but open tents, not the kind you sleep in. And every night after worship was done everyone would gather and there was music and dancing and cheap food and every so often you would run into someone who was either drunk or stoned and giggling uncontrollably.

Then there were the people who got drunk and sang “La Marsillaise” until 4am, but we won’t go into that now. These European people like THE WORST of our music. (yeah, I know that the Marsilliaise is French, I’m just seguing…) As far as I could tell the guitar players knew about 16 songs and they just kept playing them over and over and over.

At any given moment during the evening if you went down to Oyak you would be sure to find:

• Clapping games. There were a ton of clapping games, and it’s a great way to bond, I suppose. The chants to them were in all different languages, but the basic clapping stuff was the same. I must have learned 6 different ones that week. And one of the things about Taize is, no one is a stranger. You can randomly introduce yourself to people and randomly join in games with people from Lithuania or Poland or wherever. The bishop is standing there watching you teach German people the Chicken Dance. It was great.
• Other games. By this I mean ZipZap (which I am really really pathetic at, by the way) or the game where you go, “Hyah!” and make a slicing motion with your arms, or the Italian version of Twister, which interestingly enough one girl had to play with a guy who was about to be ordained as a Jesuit priest. That got kind of awkward.
• People over in the corner smoking something that was not cigarettes.
• Four or five different groups of people doing various songs or chanting. Everyone centered around the musicians, clapping, and if you were close you got a bench to sit or stand on. Around the periphery of the crowd would be groups or people dancing.
• Crazy American people obsessing over the Fanta bottles. Their soda is better than ours.
• Some guys with guitars singing Country Roads Take Me Home, among other songs. They also LOVED Hit The Road Jack and Land of 1000 Dances, probably because they require no lyrical memorization at all, the Backstreet Boys, and Lemon Tree, but not the version you’re thinking of, the one by Fool’s Garden that starts, “I’m sitting here in the boring room…”. They all knew all the lyrics to everything, too. People from Siberia knew more popular American music than I did.

I think that to understand Oyak you really have to be there, plus I’m tired, so to close here’s a video of Oyak: centering on people who don’t know each other, or if they do they met two days ago singing and dancing together, which is a pretty awesome experience.

At least until you got a headache from hearing Zombie for the twelfth time and went back to the tent to take aspirin.

 

For MORE OF THE OYAK EXPERIENCE visit youtube and type “taize oyak” into the search box.

 

This was taken while I was there so I might even be in the background somewhere…but I didn’t look closely enough to tell.

Ethel the Singing Cow Goes to Paris

There is this children’s book called “The Cows are Going to Paris”. So naturally, I had to take our very own Ethel to Paris with me and do pictures of her in front of touristy places!

This is on the first day on the bus, right after we’d gotten off the plane. Yes, my hair is in braids; I know that I never, ever, ever, braid my hair, but I did at Taize. It’s still me, OK? My brother kept squinting at photos and saying, “Which one are you again?”. It’s embarrassing.

We then did about a week’s worth of touring in 2 days with very little sleep, so consequently I have no idea what order these were taken in. This is Ethel in front of Notre Dame.

All the carvings on Notre Dame were amazing. Also, I had no idea that The Hunchback of Notre Dame was written to raise money for the reconstruction of the cathedral! Also, our guide would point to a carved person and say something like, “This is Saint Dennis of so-and-so, who did something famous and then had his head chopped off in Ireland or somewhere and walked 25 miles holding his head in his hands and was canonized in 1873 under the reign of Pope Urban the 16th” and I wished that I was Catholic. But only shortly. (I know that the real phrase is “only briefly” but I met non-American people who said “only shortly” and I found it rather charming. More translation stories to come.)

This is Ethel and my hand on TOP of Notre Dame. We got to climb all the way up, something like 844 stairs on a teeny winding stone staircase, which was very cool but I would not do it again unless there was an elevator. Whatever tour we were on should have been called “The Steps of Paris”. My legs hurt a lot by the time we got to Taize, and then the first afternoon we did a hike involving steps.

But back to Paris.

This is Ethel in front of Sacre Coure. I’m not sure if I’m spelling that right but it’s a cathedral built on the biggest hill in Paris, apparently. They call it a hill, but it’s about 40 times bigger than Mount Sunflower, so that shows you cultural differences right there! We climbed the hill, and then we climbed about 30 million steps to get to the actual cathedral. (hyperbole: gross exaggeration for comic effect) (just in case you are one of those irritatingly technical people who are always saying things like, “well, actually, it’s roughly 437 steps”) (man, that bugs me)

One thing I found interesting about Sacre Coure is that there were breakdancers on the way up, which sounds reasonable, except that they were dancing to Britney Spears. Foreign people like the worst of our music. That comes in later in my post entitled, “Oyak”.

Eiffel Tower Ethel!!!!

This is Ethel (duh) on a boat cruise of the Seine. If you look closely you’ll be able to spot the Bishop’s head in the background!

Guess Who’s Back from France?!?

And I’m not really in the mood to write right (write/right, get it? oh, I just crack myself up) now, but my trip was great, the flights were fine, and I’m glad to be home.

And here’s a preview of what’s to come here on Lapsus Calumni:

• Olivia learns deep inner spiritual things about herself, such as the fact that she cannot sing in German and juggling is harder than it looks
• Sometimes, the stuff you think is most pointless in school, like knowing when the Baroque Era occured (answer: in the past) or how to type on a French keyboard, comes in the most handy.
• When Chanting Becomes an Obsession
• Olivia thinks France could be Improved By:
• Ethel the Singing Cow Goes to Paris
• Olivia Really Should Not Be Here, She Should Be Preparing Her Presentation for Saturday
• But She Is
• And She Is Also Chatting on Facebook
• And Bread and Chocolate for Breakfast is really really good
• Also, It’s Weird ReLearning How to Use a Knife, Fork, Chair, and Napkin
• I’m Not Sure Why I’m Referring to Myself in the Third Person
• But I Can Now Chant In About 16 Different Languages
• I Just Thought You Needed to Know That

If the autoposter is working…

I should just be getting on the plane to France!

I’m sure I’m having a great time so far.

Love you all!

Goodbye!

I leave for Taize tomorrow morning, so I just wanted to take this opportunity to let everyone know I won’t be posting (actually, I have a few things on the AutoPoster but I’m not sure I did it right) for the next 10 days or so, although I promise to post lots and lots of pictures when I come back! Seeing photos of other people’s trips can get rather boring though, can’t it? I have been thinking of different sorts of trips lately:

• Mission trips, where you go to help others and usually become very very dirty in the process
• Pilgrimages, such as to Taize, where you look for God in yourself
• Vacations, which are usually fun fun fun, but not always
• Trips. I think everyone knows what I mean when I say, “trips”.

We often go on trips to the Midwest, where there is a lot of empty land. We’ve seen the great sights of America, such as Mount Rushmore, which consists of the heads of dead people carved in stone; EVERY DARN ONE  of the Laura Ingalls Wilder historical monuments, including the dugout on the Banks of Plum Creek, which interestingly enough has quite a bit of marijuana growing near it; or the Geographical Center of the 48 Contiguous States, which is in the middle of nowhere Kansas and is extremely windy. It does have a cute chapel though. Also, the Land of Oz theme/adventure park, which if I remember correctly is in Garden City Kansas, and is made up of a) a yellow brick road, b) a swingset, c) an old train, for some reason, and d) a mysterious red barn with pictures of the flying monkeys that is never open.

Other people may go on trips to the Scottish highlands, where they can meet braepeople and watch men in skirts singing songs containing words like “brankie”, while eating haggis; or they may go to the Milford Highlands, where they can stay at the Scottish Inn, and, during select weekends such as Milford Music Festival weekend, experience the charming quaintness of Milford by getting stuck in traffic made up of 1400 people from New Jersey, shop, and listen to music, much of it provided by people not yet out of high school. (I just had to find a way to work the Milford Highlands in there cause I find it highly ironic.)

Anyway. Goodbye for now, I love you all, pray for me, see you in August!

Au Revoir!

Taize

Taize is a monastery in France.

This is taken from their website (find it here), explaining why someone would want to spend part of their summer holiday at a monastery in France: A stay at Taizé is an opportunity to seek communion with God in prayer, singing, silence and reflection. It can be possible to rediscover an inner peace, a meaning to life and a new impetus.Experiencing a simple life shared with others, reminds us that daily life, as it stands, is the place where Christ is waiting for us.Some young people are looking for ways of following Christ for their whole lifetime. A stay in Taizé can help discern this call.

Plus, “Stay at Taize” rhymes.

Each day, the brothers will introduce a bible reflection, and there will be small groups and bible studies devoted to that theme. In the afternoon there are workshops. There are worship services before every meal, mostly focused on silence. They differ from our worship in that it’s totally between you and God; there is no sermon. The non-silence parts of the service have a lot of chanting, in all different languages. There are three “simple but ample” meals daily, plus “tea”. I leave on the 24th.

For more information:

Wikipedia on Taize

Taize Official Website

Neat video of last year made by the same group I’m going with…our bishop is pretty obvious, but if you look closely you can spot Danielle too.

 

Three Weeks!

exactly! Until I leave for France, that is. I’m starting to get excited. I’ve bought a new duffel bag, and yesterday I put all my stuff in it to make sure it would fit—it does. I have to bring a sleeping bag, sleeping mat, pillow, and obvious stuff like ten days worth of clothing. The advantages of having a brother in the Scouts is that we already have about sixteen sleeping bags and eight sleeping mats, plus little cool camp doodads like a telescoping cup and those plasic ponchos that never hold together. Ben and Dad’s Official Camping Motto Stolen From the Boy Scouts is: Be Prepared. Last week to church Ben wore a swimsuit under his clothes- I guess in case he had to rescue someone from the pond in the meditation garden? He also stuffed his pockets with: a whistle, a flashlight, bug spray, a knife with folding saw, nail clippers EVEN THOUGH he never clips his nails until he absolutely has to, and pliers. 

Tomorrow: For All the Church People Who Read This, and The Rest of You If You’re Interested: more on Taize.

I think I am telekinetic

or is it psychic? Anyway, in my last post, I closed by saying, “Go Red Sox”. And guess what? BOSTON HAS WON THEIR LAST TWO GAMES!!!! Rah! I am sure that this is because of my own indiviual affirmation, and of course it has nothing to do with the fact that they are amazingly talented people. AND the Royals have been playing a series with the Yankees, and they actually won one of their games! The Yanks won the other two, but for the Royals, that’s pretty darn good. So, that made my day!

Anyway, yesterday I had my last Taize meeting, which required driving to NJ and reading the map. I suck at mapreading. If I had to give directions to somebody, odds are that they would end up in a different state. Also, when Mom was trying to merge, she wanted me to tell her when to go. I didn’t understand that, and she yelled, “what color is it?”. Meaning the next car. So I said, “grey.”. I didn’t realize that I what I was supposed to say was when to merge. Huh.

The meeting itself was really good though. Then we went and did some shopping for the trip. And it was 100 degrees out. And on the way home we stopped for pizza. So all in all an okay day.

Ben and Dad were camping this weekend, and they came home with five fish (the legal limit) and fried them for supper tonight. I have a new personal policy against eating anything with the head still attached now. Ben won third place in the fishing contest with a 14.5 inch trout, and so he gets an MP3 player as a prize. He also got a horrible sunburn, through a) being pale, b) using spf 15 sunscreen, and c) wearing a top with a really wide neckline. You can even see where his glasses were.

Tonight I performed for the PCYC’s annual fundraiser dinner as second violin in a quartet, and it actually went better that I anticipated! That’s taking into account that we had exactly one hour and ten minutes of practice time together beforehand. I was subbing for a girl who couldn’t make it, and last weekend the other violinist broke his collarbone, so both Josh and I were first-timers in the group. The only thing was that it was in a non-airconditioned restaurant and it was really really hot on stage.

 

I am now going to eat dinner, but not before making another of my telekinetic/psychic encouragement statements: Go Red Sox!