Taizé is a meditative style of worship that blends music, word, and silence. It is both a communal and a personal activity.

This style of worship originated in a monastery at Taizé, France and has spread throughout the world. We at Highland Park join in this deeply moving spiritual experience.

Taizé Service is held in the church atrium at 7:30 p.m. on the second Sunday of each month..

In the soft glow of tiny tea lights, there is a quiet respite of prayer and song. Once a month Highland Park folks and other faithful worshippers from outside our membership come together for a reflective and meditative time of prayer, song, communion, and quiet. It is Sunday Evening Prayers, and you may hear it referred to as the Taizé service.

It’s not really so mysterious, though the word is mystifying perhaps. Taizé is simply a town in France where an ecumenical community was formed, dedicated to this contemplative and prayerful worship style. The community has flourished over the years since the early 1940s. Outliving its founder, it continues to thrive and grow as thousands of people, particularly young people, journey to France to experience this worship.

Our setting is the atrium, transformed on every second Sunday into a worship venue. There is Scripture reading. There is beautiful music in the Taizé style, led by a small band of our musicians: voices, guitars, flutes, and often a violin. The songs are simple and repetitive, learned easily, and sung from the heart. As each of us lets his or her voice join in at times and be silent at times, we become givers and receivers of the blessings of the Word and of the words set to music.

Melissa Russell guides our meditation time which is interspersed again with the music and quiet. There is a time for sharing our prayers, a time to speak out the prayers in this community of faith. It’s a holy place of pooling our thanksgiving, our petitions, our hurts and our joys. There is a connectedness in joining hearts and voices in prayers that we rarely achieve in other settings. Praying with our family of faith binds us together.

There is a time of quiet meditation, for silent prayer or receiving the Lord’s Supper, a singing of songs, lighting candles, praying with a prayer minister — a few moments for personal and private worship. It is a rare commodity and, in our own candlelit atrium, those who attend find a spiritual centering place that helps in all the other endeavors of our lives. It is a place where at every meeting, the healing, restoring work that is going on at Highland Park is prayed for aloud and in the hearts of those gathered together.

All who yearn for quiet, all who want to pray, all who love to feel the words of Scripture and faith wash over you in the notes of song, come. It may feed your soul in a sustaining, deepening way that will equip you for the everyday-ness of life, the crises and the humdrum, the good times and the bad.

Come pray with us.