Taizé is a place where you do not look back. Where vaccum cleaners have names like "joie", "misericorde", and "bonheur" (joy, compassion, happiness). Where you don't judge a week according to Monday. There is no television and no radio. A place free of commercials, "your partners", media influence, and agendas. Being in Taizé is living here and now. Plans do no go further than Saturday and life does not take place in the past but in every present moment. It's a life about communion, simplicity, liveliness, and inner freedom.

There is not a lot of choices to make. What to eat, where to sleep, what to work. Things are given. But this frame is to be filled with life, spirit, and warmth. In Taizé you get everything. Maybe not everything you want but everything you need. You just have to be attentive to what that really is.

In a recurring daily rhythm of prayers, work, common meals, meetings, and free time you find the space to comtemplate what matters in your life without being under the influence of popstar casting shows, political debates, commercial interests, HDTV flat screens, and braindead talk shows.

The people you find in Taizé are not representative for the structures of our society. People with a background of migration or a low education, unemployed persons, mainstreamers, members of the wokring class - they are either underepresented or not present at all. Many are well-educated or on the way to get there. And they are unified in their believe in Christ or at least in an openess for or interest in Christianity.

All this is not to distore the realities that exist in Taizé. There are beauty queens coming to spend a week, young people who fancy Spongebob, adults arguing about how Christian it is not to let 14-year-olds participate in the program without their parents, cell phones happen to be stolen. There are a lot of people and that always entails conflicts between those who live and work together, just like everywhere else. Taizé is still a place in this world. But we can always remind ourselves of what kind of life we committed ourselves to with the choice to come there and what it actually is that we want to live.

To contemplate this opens a way to reconciliation. To recall that we are all on the same search even if we might take different ways offers us the chance to live in peace with ourselves and the people around us. It gives us a vitality and makes it possible to live in communion with God and with each other.