This Be the Place: Singing in Many Languages 

This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place.

In September 2002, before beginning university in southern France, I went to Paris for a month. I was 19 and broke, so it wasn’t much fun. I would leave my youth hostel in the morning and wander around all day with no funds for restaurants, clothes, or museums. Without a cellphone or GPS, I was lost most of the time; each night I patched the bleeding blisters on my feet with toilet paper and duct tape.

After more than a week of this, luck smiled: a serious and helpful young woman in my dorm told me that if Paris wasn’t working, I should go to Taizé. We were speaking French, and I didn’t understand what kind of place Taizé was—but I understood I could stay there for very little money and would be fed three meals a day.

“Allez à Taizé,” she said. “Vous chanterez en beaucoup des langues.”

Go to Taizé. You will sing in many languages.

I was sold. Back home in Tennessee, I had started singing in church when I was six or seven, and I played the lead in a musical about angels visiting Earth—disguised as orphaned children—to teach humans the meaning of Christmas. In middle school, I joined the Christ Church Youth Choir and sang onstage at the Grand Ole Opry. But after literature classes at a local homeschool co-op taught me metaphor and close reading, I didn’t get along with anybody at my church anymore. I never went back and never missed it. But I did miss singing.

I boarded the train to Taizé the next day.

***

Fewer than three hours from Paris, Taizé is an intentional community with resident Brothers—and some much less visible Sisters—from Catholic and Protestant backgrounds. Founded in 1940 by Swedish-born Brother Roger Schutz, the community has become an important stop in many religious pilgrimages.      
    
After the train from Paris, you take a short bus ride through the little hills to finally arrive at the hilltop, where a couple of horses and sheep are fenced in, and big patches of vegetable gardens surround the community grounds. It looks like a rustic campsite: golden-yellow dirt; orangish-brown benches that are just felled logs; wooden bunks with earthy, red-tiled roofs; gray, cement, semi-outdoor showers. The most commanding architecture is a giant, wooden bell tower with three brass bells. In addition to announcing each new hour, the bells signal when it’s time to eat and when it’s time to sing.

Regardless of faith, travelers of any kind are allowed to stay for several months if they want time to reflect and periodically talk with other reflective people. Everyone must work daily for an hour and a half, usually helping in the kitchen or cleaning bathrooms. In the afternoons, there is the option to study religious texts with the Brothers, but many of us read, journaled, or took walks instead. Four to eight travelers bunk together in small cabins, separated by gender. There is an 11pm curfew. Without any way to control the temperature, I spent my first night there balled up and shaking in my sleeping bag, with only my scratchy, thrift-store peacoat thrown on top, while sheep bleated just past the gardens. Since the water was freezing, I showered only once a week, and I stopped shaving altogether. Breakfast was a hard roll, a pad of butter wrapped in foil, a piece of chocolate equivalent to one stick of a KitKat, and a blue or red plastic bowl filled with weak hot chocolate. The rest of the meals were beans and grains.

The real joy of mealtimes was that socializing, rather than reflecting, was encouraged. I quickly made friends with Rita, a rambunctious, funny girl from Poland. Electing to stay for two weeks—I did the same—she identified as “boy crazy,” and that seemed to be what she wanted to reflect on at Taizé. All the photos we took together on my disposable camera were ridiculous, foolish, and mostly blurry. In one photo, Rita’s airy, white-blond corkscrew curls float as she jumps down from one of the log benches, trying to land on my back like a baby possum ready for a ride. She brought out my clown side. (A few months later, I spent Christmas with her and her loved ones in a small Polish town, and she gifted me big, fluffy, yellow, tiger house shoes.)

I also befriended Peter, a tall, Austrian architect who introduced me to the soundtrack of Bollywood musical Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham on my CD Walkman, while we strolled around the countryside in our free time. Peter was recovering from a love affair with a French nun in another city. His large, pointy nose was always rosy in the cold air. Likely because of the love affair, he decided not to be a monk, but he was still committed to a week of silence in Taizé to enhance his reflective abilities. We planned to leave notes for each other in the side of a crumbling building so that we could continue discussing other travelers, as well as our plans to spend New Year’s Eve together with Peter’s artsy-academic friends in Tyrol. Both Peter and Rita were invested in the Christian faith to some extent, but I was there because I liked singing and languages.

The singing happened morning, noon, and night in a long, spacious building that might have been a barn before its minimalist revamping. Hundreds of other young travelers and I sat on the floor while volunteers passed out stapled song booklets. Inside were vulnerable, soul-searching songs in Spanish, German, Italian, French, Russian, and English.

Where a stage would have been in most churches, white, oblong triangles of fabric stretched to the ceiling like sails. It looked like an art installation. Behind the sails, the wall was lit with marigold light. Nearby, stacked in a chaotic cubby-style, round black boxes held dozens of burning candles. There were no crosses, no doves, no palm or olive branches, no angels, no stigmata hands, no baptismal font, no collection plates, no pulpits.

Down the center of our singing space, a path was blocked off by long planters filled with dark green bushes. One Brother slowly walked down the center of us, holding a big stick. A chain dangled from it, and then an ornate, metal ball with diamond-shaped holes. Smoke fumed out of the ball, smelling rich, mysterious, and old, but somehow still bright. It was like the room was putting on perfume for us.

A soft-spoken, middle-aged woman told us what we would be singing. Many of the songs were sad and full of longing: “We long for rest. We long for peace. We long for the love of God. We long for the warmth of God’s bright face.” They were not the hymns or “praise and worship” songs I had heard in Tennessee.

Our voices were the only instruments. My favorite song was in Spanish, and instead of talking about God, it talked about trying to find a fountain at night:

De Noche Iremos
(by Luis Rosales)

De noche iremos, de noche
que para encontrar la fuente,
sólo la sed nos alumbra,
sólo la sed nos alumbra.     
    
At Night We Will Go
    
We will go at night, at night
to find the fountain,
only thirst lights us up,
only thirst lights us up.

“Lights up” can mean lighting us up like lanterns, making it easier to find the literal fountain. Or it could mean enlightening us—and maybe that means we were the very fountains we’ve been looking for? I was obsessed. I’d never sung poetry that resonated with my earnest, tortured emotional side as well as my joyfully obsessive, word-nerd side.

The performance departments of my childhood Nashville churches had bigger budgets than half of the universities where I went on to teach. As a teenager, I loved that I got to sing a song from the Sister Act II soundtrack, and a couple songs from the Mariah Carey Christmas album. But teen me also had had their brain blown by The Metamorphosis and “I Saw a Chapel.” I didn't identify with either the centuries-old hymns or the embarrassing rock’n’roll-inspired praise songs of Tennessee churches. Long before seeing a therapist was culturally normalized, and before I could even afford therapy, singing was a dreamy, exciting, cathartic massage that I could literally give my throat—a place that usually felt tight, choked, and blocked. Getting smaller and smaller, tighter and tighter, with lumps and knots, and a lot of things I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone, ever.

Through the simple songs of Taizé, where doubts and darkness were not only allowed but sometimes even centered, some of my inner turmoil had the airy roads of European poets’ laments to ride out on. Singing is a vulnerable act. You suck oxygen into your body, flavor it with the adulation, grief, or confusion living there, then eject it all out to fly around the bodies of your peers. Then, mixing with their grief-flavored oxygen, a new presence forms: a swell of sound and feeling that lives outside of us for a while, before drifting through the windows like dust over bridges of light.