CHAPTER 4: MONASTIC VOCATION WITH ECUMENICAL IMPLICATIONS 141 has probably less to renounce to than a Catholic, if he is used to some more Catholic, uh, traditional settings….342 The community opted for a monastic life in the rich Catholic tradition, which the founder, Brother Enzo, envisioned to rejuvenate fromwithin. Nevertheless, the communal liturgical life is quite sober and, according to BE, easy for the Protestant members to adapt to without compromising their own background. BG, a Roman Catholic sister, on the other hand, does not experience this as an impediment to engage with typically Catholic spiritual resources. In the context of her first visit to Bose with an ecumenical group of students, she articulates what she found attractive in the community: Because, the students, we have many differences, but Jesus is the same for all of us. And so, that’s why I feel well in a place like that. And uh, it’s possible to pray together, each days, to live the same things. Belonging at our churches, but every people can pray with us and if I want to pray a specific Catholic way, I can do it by myself. That’s nothing that I lose, so.343 She does not feel as if the community’s routine constrains her in living the richness of the Catholic tradition. She does, however, discriminate between communal and private practices. On the one hand, she is willing to limit herself for the sake of others: “we have to grow up in sensibility*,”344 she says. Yet, on the other hand, BG feels free to engage with the spiritual resources dear to her in her own time and space. BE agrees: I think what the community here allows is that everybody lives, we share what is essential to, to, for us all, uh, and then, perhaps, some richnesses, which are secondary, or which are just belonging to one of the different confessions, are just put into brackets in the common life. This doesn’t mean that one cannot live them personally.345 Thus, both feel that they share the essentials, and they are happy to pray and worship together while reserving the practices typical for their respective denominations for their daily moments of private prayer. Brother TB, in Taizé, recalls a decisionmade by the brothers shortly before he joined the community, and which has had a decisive impact on the liturgical course of the community. He explains that, for the sake of one common 342 BE-1,22. 343 BG-1,8. 344 BG-1,64. *She seems to mean ‘sensitivity’ here. 345 BE-2,22.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw