154 PART TWO: AN EMPIRICAL ACCOUNT the individual monastics have managed to enter this dynamic relationship. The priority of lived faith over reflected faith as expressed in section 4.4 seems to play a role in this. In addition, in section 5.3, the monastics speak about their ecumenical process as a process of growth, particularly in the sense of coalescence. Brother TA, for example, specifically accounts for how he ‘grew into’ the common life and Taizé’s Eucharistic practice. This shows his process of entering the dynamic relationship between common life and shared Eucharist. Section 5.4, finally, articulates the basic attitude underpinning this process: trust. The monastics elaborate onmultiple interconnected dimensions of trust: trust in God, the mystery of the Eucharist, the Christian tradition and the church, the communities, and the mystery of the individual and one’s personal relation to God. Trust, the monastics indicate, opens space for the Holy Spirit to reestablish unity. Trust and surrender to God, thus, is the very basis of the practice of sharing the Eucharist and of entering into the dynamic relationship described in the first sections. 5.1 COMMON LIFE RESULTS IN COMMON EUCHARIST A counter-experience In this section, I will focus on a very powerful story by Brother BF. Quotes from other interviews echo his experience. BF joined Bose in the Summer of 1972 at the age of eighteen. Just two months later, he was sent to Switzerland to start a small community with Brother Daniel, a Waldensian pastor. He lived for over two years in this intimate setting in a context that was completely new to him. Not only was he far from home, but the ecclesial reality was totally different from what he was used to. As mentioned in section 4.2, BF was raised in an almost exclusively Roman Catholic environment. In Switzerland, however, he found himself in “a total double confession reality,”370 with Catholics being the minority. BF elaborately describes his life in that context in the following excerpts: Daniel was the pastor in charge of this whole village, and of the uh… youth program of a larger… Uh, and I lived with him, making the same life [-], so, a life of prayer, work, I was studying… (…) 370 BF-1,2d.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw