The Side Paths

Wade asked me a simple question: What happened at Taizé?

What happened resisted the usual explanations — the ones that begin with it was beautiful or I needed the rest or it was good to get away. Those things were true. They were also entirely insufficient.

I stood there trying to answer and realized, somewhere in the middle of my own silence, that I wasn’t trying to describe a trip. I was trying to describe a transformation. And transformations are harder to explain than experiences, because they happen below the surface of what you can photograph or recount.

So let me try again, more slowly.

Paris: C’est la Vie

That’s Life

If you want to understand what happened to me in France, you need to understand something about how I normally operate.

I prepare. I plan. I anticipate. I keep myself slightly ahead of the next crisis so that when it arrives — and it always arrives — I am ready. This posture has served me well across thirty years of ministry, a decade as a chaplain in a pediatric ICU, a career built in liminal spaces alongside people in the worst moments of their lives. Being ready matters when someone’s child is dying.

The problem is that I don’t know how to turn it off. The anticipatory hum is always running. Not loud. Just constant. And it is not limited to crises. It is the background noise of my ordinary life.

Paris revealed this about me almost immediately.

Kelley and I chose public transportation, which meant learning passes and train lines and the particular logic of a city that had no interest in our learning curve. We got turned around. We got on the wrong train. We got off at the wrong stop. None of it was dangerous. None of it was even particularly consequential. But every wrong turn spiked something in me — the familiar frustration of a man who had not adequately prepared, who needed more information, who should have mapped this out more carefully.

By the end of the week I had found enough footing to enjoy myself. We settled into a neighborhood in the 15th arrondissement — local, quiet, unhurried — and developed a good rhythm. Days of wandering and beauty. Evenings of wine and neighborhood streets. The city gradually became more familiar.

And then there was the pizza.

One evening, exhausted and craving something simple, I walked into a small shop half a block from the hotel. I tried the polite opener — Parlez vous anglais? — hoping to smooth things along.

The owner scowled slightly. Peu. A bit.

I smiled, matched his scowl with full indignation, and said: Très bien! Je parle UN PEU français!

He laughed — a real laugh — and we worked out a vegetarian pizza together in broken English and broken French. He chopped the vegetables. We visited a little. I sat at a small table and people-watched while I waited. It was a great pizza. But what I remember more than the pizza is the feeling of having stopped needing everything to go smoothly — and discovering that it went well anyway.

I filed that away without fully understanding it. I didn’t know yet that something much larger was coming.

Taizé: La Grande Pause

The Great Pause

The community at Taizé sits in the hills of Burgundy, in a simplicity that feels almost aggressive after a week in Paris. There is not much to figure out. Three times of prayer each day, simple meals, open afternoons. The chants are short and circular, designed less to be mastered than to be inhabited. You don’t achieve anything at Taizé. You simply show up, and the structure holds you.

I resisted this. I noticed myself reaching for something to accomplish — a goal for the afternoon, a framework for what I was learning, some way to make the most of the time. The need to optimize is apparently not deterred by geography.

There was nothing to optimize.

And slowly — over walks in the meadow, afternoons beside the pond, mornings with coffee and journal pages that wandered in every direction — something began to release. I can’t tell you the exact moment. I can only tell you that at some point during those afternoons, sitting in the particular stillness of a hillside that didn’t need anything from me, I became aware that I was experiencing the most peaceful stretch of time I could remember in years.

Not peaceful because nothing was wrong. Peaceful because I had stopped managing my relationship to everything that might go wrong.

I wrote in the mornings — pages that didn’t go anywhere in particular, words and odd sketches scattering across the paper, making connections I couldn’t have forced. And what emerged from all that wandering was a single quiet realization: everything is related. The fragments of my life — work and grief, theology and exhaustion, writing and silence, love and loss — were not separate problems requiring separate solutions. They were threads in a fabric. The task was not to solve them. The task was to hold them together with enough spaciousness that they could become meaning.

I have come to believe this is what spirituality actually is: not belief alone, not practice alone, but relatedness — the lived experience of being woven into something larger than your own management of your own life.

And then the prior said something I will carry the rest of my life.

I had asked him a question — the shape of it doesn’t matter — and he looked at me and said:

First, you need to know that God loves you.

Not as a preamble. As the answer.

Most of my formation has been built around the grammar of usefulness. What can I offer? What do people need? How do I respond well? These are not bad questions. But they are not first questions, and I had been treating them as first questions for a very long time.

What he was pointing to — what the contemplative tradition has always known — is that identity precedes outcome. Being precedes doing. Before you are a chaplain or a pastor or a caregiver or a husband or anything else you have built your sense of self around — you are loved. That is the ground. Everything else grows from there or it doesn’t grow at all.

I knew who I was at Taizé. I am loved. I am, in the deepest sense, sacred — and nothing outside me granted that, which meant nothing outside me could take it away.

That is a disarmingly simple sentence. It took a trip to Burgundy to let it land.

C’est Une Nouvelle Vie: A Different Man Running

It’s a New Life

After Taizé, we had two final days in Paris before flying home. On the second morning, I decided to run the Champs-Élysées. I had wanted to do it all trip.

The night before, I tried to map a perfect route — a clean 10K with a logical start and end. Every option I tried had some problem. Something wouldn’t connect. I kept adjusting and re-adjusting until I finally stopped, set the phone down, and did something I almost never do.

I decided to just run toward it.

I stepped out of the hotel with a destination in mind and nothing else planned. No route. No mapped distance. Just: that direction.

I ran fast at first — parkour style through the rush hour pedestrian foot traffice — and quickly recognized I couldn’t sustain it. So I slowed down and started looking around. I found myself running along the Seine, the Eiffel Tower materializing on the horizon, growing larger without my rushing it. I reached the Champs-Élysées and ran to the Arc de Triomphe.

Honestly? It was a little anticlimactic. Crowded. Touristy. Not the thing I had imagined.

Then I glanced down a side street. Quieter. Calmer. Prettier than the boulevard.

I turned and ran it. Then another. I ended up back at the Eiffel Tower, so I ran around it. Then I did it again, just because I wanted to. I made my way home through neighborhoods I hadn’t planned, through streets that had no strategic significance, because I was present to where I actually was rather than managing my way through where I thought I should be.

My phone died somewhere in there. I shut it off and kept running. Within a few blocks I recognized the edges of our neighborhood — not because I had mapped it, but because I knew where I belonged — and I found my way home without navigation.

In the last block, I ran past the pizzeria. The owner was outside. I shouted across the street: Bonjour, mon ami!

He waved and called back.

Relatedness.

I had a destination. I simply wasn’t afraid of the side streets anymore. And I realized, running those last few steps toward the hotel, that this was new. Not the running. The not-being-afraid. The external city had not changed. I had.

Rentrer à la maison

Going Home

I timed my sleep and flight to arrive home as exhausted as possible, went straight to bed, and spent the next day in something I can only describe as spacious contentment.

Then ordinary life arrived, as it does, with considerable intensity.

A family member in crisis. Surgery for one of my dogs. A lightning strike on our church building. The emotional weight of returning to the pediatric ICU, where suffering never pauses for anyone’s sabbatical. Sermon preparation for a congregation navigating its own uncertain future.

All the things that have always overwhelmed me, arriving at once.

And here is what I noticed — the thing I had not expected to notice, the thing I was trying to explain to Wade: I never fully lost myself inside any of it.

I felt the weight of each thing. I did not pretend any of it away. But underneath the weight, something had changed. There was a quality of groundedness I had not carried before — a capacity to be present to crisis without becoming the crisis. I knew my destination. I was not afraid of the side streets.

The external circumstances were the same kind that had always destabilized me. What was different was what I knew about myself: that I am loved and I am sacred — and that none of those things are granted or revoked by what is happening around me. The overwhelm was real. It simply no longer reached the ground.

I have overcome overwhelmed. Not because overwhelm went away. Because I stopped treating it as the thing that defined my situation, and started treating it as one of the side streets — present, navigable, not the destination.

Un nouvel élan et un nouvel espoir

(A new momentum and a new hope)

What changed in France was not the external world. Paris was still crowded and confusing. Taizé was still simple and quiet. Home was still waiting for me with everyday crises, uncertainty, responsibility, love, and all the ordinary complexities of life that had already been unfolding before I ever boarded a plane.

What changed was the way I moved through it all. Or maybe more accurately, the way I moved through it all, and the way I learned I could set a direction without trying to control every step along the way.

I went to Taizé searching for something I could not yet name. I had been moving through so many changes — work, identity, relationships, calling, family, writing, questions of self-worth, questions of meaning, questions about what kind of life actually gives energy instead of only consuming it. I think some part of me was searching for a way to live inside all of that without constantly bracing against it.

I left home carrying the familiar weight of anticipation and responsibility, trying to stay slightly ahead of whatever might happen next. In Paris, I loosened my grip a little. At Taizé, I stopped gripping altogether. And somewhere between the meadow paths, the chants, the silence, the journals, and the side streets of Paris, I began to trust that I did not have to manage every moment in order to fully inhabit my life.

I came home to the same life, but with a different relationship to it.

The responsibilities are still here. Difficult moments still come. Anxiety and worry still visit from time to time. But they no longer reached all the way down into my identity. I no longer confused the challenges around me with my worth within me. I am more grounded, more resilient, more curious. And instead of fearing every unexpected turn, I found myself beginning to explore the side roads along the way with a strong sense of curiosity to see where it will lead.

I’m learning to bring retreat with me everywhere I go — and realizing that retreat was never about running away from something, but seeking sanctuary within it.