Perpetual Change

Zagreb, Croatia - The Way There

So, I mentioned in my last blog that Gino and I would start my next big adventure, the next day…

but first a little background. About 30 years ago, a Christian monk, named Brother Roger, started a community in Taizé, France. The idea was to bring Christians from different sects together in a community that actively involved lay people. He was quite successful. His prayer services focus on simple songs, and actions or silence that should carry personal meaning to each participant. The community grows enormously each summer, when thousands of pilgrims from all over the world, but mostly Europe, come to participate. They live in tent cities and they work and are fed at the community. About 15 years ago, they started organizing youth conferences. The conference happens over New Year’s, in a different European city each year. It lasts 5 days, and they try to place all the participants with host families, which is usually between 25 –40,000 people, depending on the city logistics. The point is for the youth of different nations to come together to celebrate and pray during the New Year. The prayer is a big part of the program, but not over-emphasized, and although the goal isn’t stated as such, it quickly becomes clear that it is to get youth out and travelling, constructively spending the holiday, and to promote world peace through brotherhood. Subtle is the word to describe Taize. The conferences fees are less for nations with weaker economies. These are my opinions. You can check it out at www.taize.fr

A good friend of mine, Jura, has been to the community or these events 12 times. He organizes a big trip every year for the local church diocese, and since Sando and I have a tradition to visit a new country every New Year, but this year he couldn’t because he was saving for his wedding, I signed up to go. I didn’t want to be sitting around by myself. The more I learned, the cooler I thought the whole idea was, and so I tried to get others involved. Gino was one of the ones that I was successful with.

Since Sando religiously keeps a journal of our adventures, I felt the task fell to me this year. So here it is; dedicated to you, Sando. (Did you keep a journal of what you did?) By the way, I am kidnapping you and Rella to go this next year. It will be in Geneva, Switzerland. I’ve already told my friend to sign us up. Is anyone else interested? I am so glad that I wrote notes and entries as we went, because as I expected, my impressions changed in the short time that I was there.

Quotes show actual journaling; the rest was compiled from notes.

…So, early in the morning we go to meet the 80 people that are going on the 2 busses from my town. There is prayer service first, which we don’t all fit in the chapel at our youth center, and then we waited around for awhile for the busses to get there. Gino is a very good discussion partner, and as he now is in India pursuing his metaphysical roots, we launched right into a discussion on religion. We didn’t know each other that well, and I figured we might be spending a lot of time together so I figured we might as well get each others’ opinion. Plus, I didn’t recognize anyone else waiting, so there was no need to try to keep up a Ukrainian conversation. There was a couple standing nearby that seemed to be listening. Turned out that they were friends of Jura’s from a town far away, and also knew no one else. In fact, many of the people in our contingent weren’t actually from my town. We got along well with them and sat near them when the bus finally came. We left 2 hours later than planned, and so had to stop for a bathroom break after about an hour. 3 stops later, after nightfall, we finally got to the border between Ukraine and Hungary. It basically took us all day to drive what should have been about 6 hours.

“Yesterday, we got to Budapest after travelling all night and spending forever on the border. It was beautiful! We spent all day walking around, although a lot of things I wanted to see were closed for the holidays; or else, they were out of the price range of the Ukrainians who said that they wanted to go with my plan. I had spent much of the bus time planning it from a Lonely Planet book. Both my diligence and the book greatly impressed them. I liked the city a lot, but 10 hours is an absurdly short time to see it. I, unfortunately, didn’t get to do anything with wine L. The Four Seasons Hotel there is incredible; I’m thinking of applying. Gino said the whole city looked remade from just 3 years ago, when he was last here.”

“Then we went all night again, and made much better time to Zagreb. We were shorter at the border, and I slept more this night, but I felt less rested. Father Hoy was very friendly this morning; he isn’t always so ‘thrilled’ to see me, when I see him weekly at his youth center where I have adult English club. Things were very well organized at registration in Zagreb. Each arriving country had a different school around town to go to. I was designated as an “animator”. We were briefed on procedures and directions, and then took are bags and boarded the city’s public transportation with our new free-to-ride-on-anything cards. We were off to find our host families. It was funny to see 30,000 people, virtually none of which speak Croatian, navigating the city’s public transport. I saw 2 people I knew from other Ukrainian contingents (a nearby volunteer’s, Edwin’s, first coordinator, and Velodia from a Caritas volunteer conference that I had been to).”

There were about 2,000 Ukrainians in all. Some people were taken to be volunteers. I almost went – long, not interesting story. The volunteers are 10 % of each contingent and they run everything at the conference, except for all the registration and departures which is done by the hosting city. Some of the Taizé brothers come 3 months ahead of the conference to live and work with the parishes and establish all the logistics. The organizational qualities are mind-boggling and incredibly executed. This year, all 30,000 people lived with host families. If they can’t arrange that, then they at least find one to host you for New Year’s Day dinner, and you sleep in a school or a church, Jura told me.

“At the Parish, the family assigning process was a bit chaotic but we- Jura, another Jura, Gino and I- ended up with a great family, after some waiting (found out later we came in at an incredible rush; our parish hosted the 2nd most people and we showed up en mass - 130 people at once.) I didn’t yet find out what it meant to be an animator, but I was told I had to be back at the church after evening prayer. Our family fed us excellently with cream of mushroom soup; they are very dramatic which makes communication easier; plus Croatian and Ukrainian are so close, that I understood a good bit. We also got to shower before they sent us on our way. The father is from here and the mother is from Montenegro. They are very friendly, but we had to hurry out to get to the center of town for the first prayer. Our host’s son, Nikola, is about 22; he is an engineering student and very friendly and jovial. He speaks some English. He has a great, very communicative whistle that he uses like a part of his vocabulary; it was extra interesting because in Ukraine there is a superstition that if you whistle inside, you will be poor. He came with us to the center, and we went first to tea with Petra, also a local from our community, who studies Ukrainian! Then we went to the dinner pavilion; they feed 30,000 people in an hour and a half. It is amazing. Tonight it was hot, canned soup – no frills anywhere, but all so very organized.”

“Then was our first group prayer. All the conference attendees come, but there are several halls split up by language. If there isn’t one with your language, they give you a small radio and they broadcast a translation of your language on a posted frequency. There were 40 nations of people present this year. The prayer doesn’t really have a start or a finish; it involves lots of singing, candles and prayers in different languages. It has a very neat (and tidy) effect but I don’t feel much moved by it [this changed as the week went on, more next time]. Many people don’t sing, and they take a while to get settled during the silent parts [this also changed, as well as the fact that they stopped announcing when the silences would be, as the week went on]. They try to make the songs simple, and they repeat them many times, but to get the melodies and foreign words is hard enough. They come out a lot like chants, but they are songs without much umph. There’s an altar but no one does anything with it. There was a very old icon also, but no one bothered with it either; Jura didn’t know what it was.”

So then Nikola took us home. They sat around talking, but I had to go back to the local church to find out what it means to be an animator. I talked with people of many different nations; in our parish there are groups from Italy, Germany, Poland, Montenegro, Latvia, Bosnia and of course Croatia and Ukraine. I found out that I would help with the morning prayers at the local church and be a small group discussion moderator immediately after the prayers. It sounded interesting and easy.

Labels: Taize

posted by jjs @ 12:14 PM