My Take: Honor Jesus' journey during Holy Week

Have you made your plans yet for the Monday of Holy Week (March 25)? Christians Uniting in Song and Prayer (CUSP) invites you to spend an hour praying with us. We will be holding our annual community-wide Taizé Prayer to help area Christians get the holiest week of the year off to a great start. The service will again be held at 7:30 p.m. at St. Francis de Sales Church, 171 W. 13th St. (13th Street and Maple Avenue) in Holland.

As we move toward our commemoration of Jesus’ victorious confrontation with evil, let us gather in quiet prayer and song. We will hear Luke’s account of Jesus’ crucifixion, and we will sing hymns drawn from the Community of Taizé. Our time together will allow us to ponder the meaning of the events of Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

We know that while Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection inaugurated God’s reign here on earth, it did not usher in a sudden, complete vanquishing of sin and death. There is still much corruption and suffering in the world. The victory of Jesus is not a ticket to a passive, restful existence in the knowledge that the victory has been won. Rather, Jesus instructs us, “follow me.” That is, we Christians are called to continue the liberating, reconciling work of Jesus, strengthened by an assurance that the decisive victory has already been won.

As God’s ambassadors, we must strive to be one with God and with each other. Indeed, in John 17: 22, Jesus prays that his followers may be one as Jesus and the Father are one. Clearly, we have fallen far short of Jesus’s will for us, thus thwarting our effectiveness in contributing to the full realization of the kingdom.

The history of the community of Taizé, France gives us a model of faithful discipleship. Established as an ecumenical monastic community during World War II, it offered shelter to war refugees early on and then welcomed German prisoners after the war. The community has grown to more than one hundred Protestant and Catholic brothers from more than 25 countries, offering a place of prayer for pilgrims from around the world. What a beautiful example of coming together to continue the work of Jesus.

A fruit of the faithful witness of the Taizé community is the large repertoire of short, simple hymns that have now spread around the world. The development of these hymns grew out of the need to accommodate large groups of people of diverse languages gathered for prayer. The solution focuses on short melodies, with but one or two lines of text — in Latin as well as living languages — that can be quickly memorized and sung repeatedly in the form of a mantra. This approach unites all the participants in common song, while allowing each individual to simultaneously enter into personal prayer.

The concept has been highly successful. There is not Christian hymnal, Protestant or Catholic, published in the last 20 years that does not include numerous pieces from Taizé.

We members of CUSP also work and pray together for the coming of the kingdom. Our mission statement begins with the following. “In the crucified and risen Christ we are reconciled to God and to one another. This is at the heart of the Christian message to which the church is called to give witness in the world. Deep and painful divisions among its members today, however, obscure this message and therefore compromise its witness.”

Through community-wide public worship such as our Taizé Prayer, we aspire to foster the healing of divisions and the deepening of our faith. Please join us on March 25 to allow the music of Taizé to lead us to encounter the mystery of the cross, drawing us closer to God and each other.

— Mary Johnson is the chair of the Christians Uniting in Song and Prayer. She resides in Holland.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: My Take: Honor Jesus' journey during Holy Week