Montclair Presbyterian Church

Talitha writes:

Great thanks to the Spiritual Activists committee! Betsy King, Eloise Gilland, Barbara Peters and Jean Gregory worked together to bring the community an experience of Taizé prayer last Wednesday (3/30). It was a quiet, reverent, and peaceful time full of meditative singing and long silence. Many of us found our hearts were opened by the simple time of prayer. Many also participated in the “wilderness journey” set up around the sanctuary, leaving their mark in the sand of our Godly Play “desert box,” or adding a leaf to a dry branch, or lighting a candle in the darkness. In all these ways and through spoken and silent prayer, we had a time of reflection and celebration.

The Taizé community in France (from which this prayer style originated) has found it to be a powerful way of bringing people together across boundaries of nation, language, culture, and even denomination. (More here: http://www.taize.fr/en_article3148.html) Brother Roger, Taizé’s founder, was a great bridge between the Catholic and Protestant churches. He received Catholic mass daily, and even received it from the pope, yet remained Protestant and never converted to Catholicism. The brothers at Taizé are a unique mix from the Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches. By singing simple songs in many languages, people discover that they are able to pray with people of other nations. People who cannot share a conversation can share a deep spiritual connection, and can pray together this way. Taizé has a rich history of hospitality, from war refugees in 1940 to the thousands of young people who now come on pilgrimage each week, many of them non-Christian, seeking a spiritual experience.

I wonder how the meditative style of Taizé prayer can help us bring people together. I wonder whether it will help us build any bridges, or connect what has been torn apart. I wonder how we can best welcome a stranger, a seeker.

Hello from Talitha!

I’m usually the person behind the posts that show up on our Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Montclair-Presbyterian-Church/133926043339703). This is just a small part of my newly expanded job responsibilities (I changed from 10 hrs/week to 15). I have a long relationship with Facebook – since I was in college, back when you had to be a college student to sign up!  

Someone recently posted on our new page “I like the facebook page. How do we use it to enhance community?”

This is a great question. What is important to realize is that facebook IS a community, in a different kind of way. My generation grew up keeping in touch primarily by electronic means. It became really important for me as a high school grad, when my group of friends relocated to various colleges, and we stayed in touch by reading one another’s blogs and chatting on AOL Instant Messenger. Facebook status updates are an easy extension of AOL “away messages” or comparable to micro-blogging.  

For those who just don’t “get” Facebook, you should know that it is just a different mode of keeping in touch. Facebook users don’t often have long face-to-face conversations catching up on “what’s going on” in your lives, because they already know what you’ve been up to – perhaps even what you cooked for dinner last night. Each little bit of information passed on through facebook may be small and even mundane, but they add up to a general knowledge (it’s been called an “ambient cloud”) of your friend’s interests and activities.

On Facebook, our page “likes” a lot of pages that are of general interest to our church members – from Food Inc, to Covenant Network, to the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program. I look through the list of what these groups are up to, and post one or two for our page. It’s a way of staying up to date on these great groups and their news. If you find something you think other church members would be interested, I encourage you to post it on our page! I also encourage you to be facebook friends with other church members, to get to know one another in a new way.

Thanks for letting me have such a fun element in my job! ~Talitha~