Christmas Presents

Back to the UK for a late Christmas

This year Christmas was delayed by Cees’ slipped discs and so we didn’t manage to collect our Christmas presents until into January. A part of our trips to the UK is buying essential things like peppermint tea and marmite either not available or so expensive we would have to mortgage the house to get them here. I also bring back black pudding, sausages and an Indian takeaway. But this year I left without the sausages - why? I hear you ask - well my present to myself was a sausage stuffer. Why buy yourself Chanel no5 when you can have something practical?

My present to myself

This week pork was on offer in the supermarket and so it was now or never for the stuffer. I started looking up recipes and they were all a bit too exotic for my taste, what’s wrong with plain Walls’ sausages, nice and pink, not too meaty and bland – very bland.

In desperation I resorted to asking my friends who run a small holding in the Vendee and who run min-courses in self sufficiency skills. They sent me a recipe which also sounded rather exotic – do mace and nutmeg really go in sausages? I trust them, so I decided to try it.

At least they look like sausages

The ancient, noisy meat grinder was my first port of call, twice through the grinder and then I had to take a fist full of aspirin to get rid of the headache. No matter, I was on a mission. After the mixing I was advised to make a small patty, fry it up and taste it – not a bad idea and I was amazed it tasted like Walls’ sausages!

Now on to the sausage stuffer. After a bit of trial and error (read meat mix all over the place and Cees hiding in his room) I managed to get the stuffer to stuff the casings I had bought. And guess what, they actually looked like sausages, which did rather amaze me to be honest.

A real English breakfast

Everything needs to dry for a day or so and so the tasting of the Chazelle sausages couldn’t take place until this morning. What better breakfast can you imagine than bacon, eggs and English sausages? They were scrumptious!

The rest of the batch has gone into the freezer and I will never have to buy additive filled sausages on my trips to England again!

New Year’s Service in a Romanesque Church

The welcoming interior of Taizé's Romanesque church

Every year the vast majority of the brothers and permanents go off to the European meeting over the NewYear (this year in Riga) and Taizé is practically empty. The last service in the big church this year was Christmas morning and then the remaining brothers retreated into the small Romanesque church in the village.

I have promised myself that I would actually go to the Sunday service between Christmas and New Year one year and this year that Sunday fell on the 1st of January - perfect timing.

The stained glass window above
the front door

I arrived well in time and the church, which is usually empty of all but a few wooden kneeling stools scattered around, had been decked out with benches for the older brothers who would be attending and for the older than average congregation that was expected. The church was heated with discrete electric heaters under the side benches which made it warm and cosy inside. It felt so much more welcoming than it does in the summer months when it is packed with the young visitors who make one feel uncomfortable about entering the building.

When I arrived there were “books” stacked at the entrance to the church and on one of the front benches, entitled “Cantique – Avent et nativité”. I have never seen these books before and they gave the full sung mass for the Christmas period and a number of songs I have never heard sung before. Interestingly these songs had verses, only 3 or 4, but still this is something that the modern song book shies away from.

By the time the bells started, there were 12 or 13 brothers and about 50 in the congregation. We all fitted easily into the church.

Sung mass for the Christmas period

I say there were 12 or 13 brothers as I am not entirely convinced that the priest was one of the brothers. The Eucharist is conducted by a priest of which there are a few within the community itself, but visiting priests also perform the task from time to time. Whilst I am sure that I have seen today’s chap before, his whole “way of doing things” didn’t seem to be the way it is normally done. He gave a short sermon, which is very unusual, whilst Brother Alois does that sometimes, I have never heard one on a Sunday morning. I also felt that the silence was shorter than normal, but maybe that was just me. But the real giveaway for me was that he waited at the door to shake the hands of the parting congregation, whilst the brothers snuck out through the side door.

Frère Roger with the original brothers
when this church was used every day

The whole atmosphere during the service was one of a real monastic order - or should I say what I think an old-fashioned monastic order would be about and I can well imagine that the brothers who partake of these days of intense quiet in this little ancient church must have a great sense of stillness that the large church, and certainly its thousand-fold congregations of the summer months, cannot possibly give them. It has been said that the original order sung all its masses from start to finish and that the Sunday mass is the only service that maintains a high level of singing in its content. This short week of the brothers returning to the Romanesque church also sees for them a return to these sung masses - I wonder how many of those present today were among the original brothers who started here so long ago?

After everyone had gone I returned to take pictures, the church still smelled of extinguished candles and even with its grim grey walls, it still felt very welcoming. For these few days a year, the church is returned to its original purpose, the holding of services and singing with acoustics that really zing - it is a pity it isn’t used this way more often.