162 PART TWO: AN EMPIRICAL ACCOUNT communion. That I'm gonna receive Communion, no, it would be a kind of contradiction, and uh... I remember one bishop saying this at Taizé, there is a pastor asking, can I receive Communion? And he wanted the bishop to say no. {laughs} He wanted him to, because then... And the bishop said, well, why not you think about it, no? Do you want to be... and you feel that you want to work towards unity, now, and then... he wanted to leave the decision with him, no?... ...uh... .... If I receive the Eucharist [-] I want to show that I'm... [-] not in communion {laughs} no? It's kind of interesting that there's a truth of gestures... there's a truth of... ... ... ... .... The Eucharist makes sense really, when we enter into that life of.... reconciliation and sharing and... .... ... ....388 To TC, the question of whether one is in formal communion is subordinate to the desire for unity, or lack thereof. Eucharist and reconciliation amongst Christians go hand in hand. This reconciliation, of course, originates in Christ’s paschal mystery. TC recalls the comment of an African bishop, who referred to the resurrection as the reason for the Taizé community to be together in the first place: I once made the, one of the first videos we made on Taizé, I made in 1989, was called ‘Trust Is at Hand’. And it starts off with ‘Surrexit Christus’* {laughs} And it ends, we put on the screen something that an African bishop said here once. He said to Brother Roger, I think Brother Roger quoted it in one of his books. He said, if Christ was not risen, you would not be here... if Christ was not risen, you would not be here....389 It is worth noting that the Eucharist is interpreted as the raison d’être of the communities. The paschal mystery, symbolized and celebrated in the Eucharist, is the reason to be together in the first place. Completing the circle, BF asks: “If we share the word of God, if we share charity [charges], why you have to stop when you celebrate the reason for which you do something together?”390 Brother TB agrees that the Eucharist is a source for the common life and the reconciliation that takes place in it, yet he adds that this should not be understood in a mechanical way. In a section in which I encouraged him to 388 TC-1,28b. 389 TC-1,36. *A song from Taizé. 390 BF-2,4.
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