Seeking and Finding: The Youth and Young Adult Pilgrimage to Taizé

All throughout the year, the Taizé community draws young people from every corner of the globe, and this summer, seventeen of ours joined them. From July 10–20, nine young adults and eight high school youth – along with Andy Greenhow, Associate Pastor for Youth and Their Families; James Kealey, Director of Music and Fine Arts; and Kat La, Program Coordinator for Youth and Their Families – made the journey to a small village in France that has, since just after World War II, been home to an ecumenical brotherhood offering the world’s young people something increasingly precious: a place to simply be. 

Every year, the brothers of Taizé write a pastoral letter naming what they’ve heard from the young pilgrims who come to them from every continent on Earth. This year, Brother Matthew’s letter, “What Are You Seeking?”, names silence, direction, joy, meaning, a just world, community, and peace. Watching our own pilgrims on this trip, we saw those words take on specific, personal shape.

For our young adults, Taizé met them in seasons that can be genuinely hard — the lurch into college or the workforce, jobs that don’t feel like vocations, dreams that landed differently than planned. Amid quiet disappointments, or just the need to catch a break, Taizé gave them permission to set it all down for a week. No networking. No next step to justify. Just three prayer services a day, simple meals, practical work, and time to sit with the fact that it’s okay – and that they’re in good company – not to have it all figured out yet.

For our high schoolers, many of whom live inside the demanding crucible of elite sports and high-achieving academics, Taizé offered a similar gift. These are students used to being measured constantly: splits, scores, rankings, coaches, teachers, recruiters, test scores, on and on. At Taizé, nobody asked what they played, how well, or which schools they were considering. The day’s rhythm had nothing to do with performance. There were long silences in prayer, unhurried afternoons, late evenings of easy conversation, space to sit with big ideas in Bible study and small groups. For teenagers whose every hour is tightly scheduled, that slowness was its own kind of grace.

And for everyone, there was the gift of strangers. Taizé deliberately scrambles young people into small sharing groups with pilgrims from around the world. Ours sat alongside young people from Germany, France, Spain, Cambodia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and elsewhere. They were known there not by team, role, or résumé, but simply as themselves. And they got to offer that same welcome back.

Silence. Direction. Meaning. Community. Peace. Not abstractions from a pastoral letter — but what seventeen young people from BMPC actually found this summer, in this little village in France.