“Tonight, we will be singing short musical responses, repeating them over and over.  The repetition of a short phrase helps to quiet the chatter of our monkey brains so that we can go deeper into our hearts and souls.  We encourage you to try the Latin texts, since the simple and clear vowels help to create beautiful and calm music, but if you want to sing the English translation, that will be just fine.”

That is the leader of the first Taizé service I have ever taken part in.  Taizé (teh-ZAY) is a small ecumenical monastic order in Burgundy, France that reaches out to any Christian communities that want to provide a “less busy” worship service for Christians of a contemplative bent.  Basically, the “service of prayer and healing” consists of little two- to seven-word Latin phrases in their original monastic melodies, intermingled with periods of silence and the occasional Bible verse.  In Nashville, Taizé services occur in only four churches across the city – one of which is my home church.

Advertised as “prayer that quiets the mind, opens the heart, feeds the soul,” Taizé did not disappoint.  I entered the calm sanctuary like a helicopter crashing into a mountain lake.  The nonstop thoughts flooding my brain felt like a violation of the stillness around me, but they just kept going: How long is this going to take?  I still need to run today.  Oh shoot, I forgot to return that Redbox movie.  Beans or peanut butter sandwich tonight?

This cement-mixer of random thoughts kept turning over and over again throughout the first song or two.  I mean, they gave me this book with the music in it, but I couldn’t find the right song, and they mis-numbered the next song – man, they really don’t have their stuff together.  I eventually just gave up and tossed the book aside, closing my eyes.  If I can’t sing, I figured, at least I can enjoy the music.

Somewhere between Confitemini Domino and De Noche (which I’m quite positive is not Latin), it started to sink in.  The improvised notes of the singers over the main chant  combined with the adventurous violin and meandering piano to create this swirl of music that effectively silenced that “monkey brain” of mine.  The simplicity of the melodies allowed me to move beyond making sure I was singing correctly, and the free and open environment they had created meant that it didn’t really matter if I sang it right anyway!

As a melody slowly faded away (there was no definitive end to a song; we just repeated it until it died off), the time for “silence” came.  It was printed like that on the program: “Song 13 / Silence / Reading / Silence / Reading / Longer Silence.”  That is when I finally understood the uniqueness of this service.  Those little two-minute intermissions of pure stillness showed me God in a splendor that put the intermittent music to shame.  I began to wait for those moments, yearn for them, sigh in disappointment when they ended.  At that point, any interruption was like Simon & Garfunkel’s “flash of a neon light” splitting the sound of silence.

Do you know where the verse “Be still and know that I am God” is located in the Bible?  It is in the book of Psalms – the song book.  The entire point of the book is to make noise, and it tells us to “be still.”  It makes me think there must be something to the whole idea of being still for the sake of being still.  Maybe it is in those moments, when we have completely quieted our mind, that we have real communication with God.

It finally all makes sense:  The service wasn’t about the beautiful music; it was about the silence.  We just sang the songs because the repetitive, soothing motion made our brains be still.  Once we shut our minds up, then we could really experience God.

We do a lot of talking and singing in churches these days, though usually there are places built into a service for silent prayer.  Is that enough silence for our souls, or could we do more to be still?  Can you know God if you don’t know silence?