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March 11, 2011
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Sharing the same bathroom

Allie Lundblad In January, I had the opportunity to spend two weeks at the monastery in Taizé, France. The community in Taizé is the origin of the worship style — beautiful, simple chants and long silences — and affiliated songs known here in the US as Taizé worship. In Taizé, everyone gathers three times a day for this common prayer and also shares in the practical work that keeps the place running.

I quickly discovered that in such a spiritual community, all of the practical things I was learning also had a deeper, more metaphorical meaning. For example:

If you don't take care of the slimy grey vegetable at lunch, it will come back to haunt you at dinner.

Even in a place as holy as Taizé, sometimes you look out your window and see a dazzling sunset of orange, magenta, and navy blue, and sometimes you look out your window and see a dump truck.

If you don't watch where you are going, you will trip over the giant cement block in the bathroom, which really hurts. I don't know if this holds any deeper meaning or not.

My favorite metaphor of the whole trip, though, was the bathrooms. Don't get me wrong, they were real bathrooms, and we really cleaned them, but they also functioned as a truly excellent symbol of what Taizé is about, at least in my understanding.

First, the bathrooms symbolized the communal nature of, well, the world. Everyone has to use the bathroom sometime, and it's a need we're all born with, like the need for food, clean water, shelter; it's not a right we have to earn. Thus, we all used the same bathrooms. Those with cooler hair or more money didn't get fancier bathrooms, and no one was ever kept out. So while I was wiping down showers, cleaning toilet bowls, and pulling hair out of drains, I was neither doing something entirely for myself nor simply doing someone else a favor.

Looking at the world, I think it's easy for us to forget that we are all using the same bathroom. We look around and see other people's messes caused by natural disasters, poor political leadership, or simple lack of education. We think those messes have nothing to do with us, so we don't help. Or alternatively, we do help, but we do it in a way that only recognizes their messes, as if we have never made a mess of our own. We help, but we act like we are doing some grand, righteous favor, when in reality we are simply doing our share as fellow humans and bathroom users.

Second, cleaning bathrooms shows solidarity with others that goes down into the really messy, really hard stuff. It's easy to love people when they are well-dressed, polite, and seemingly without needs. It's harder to love people when you are pulling their hair out of the drain. But as Christians, that is the level of compassion that we are called to. Jesus didn't talk only to those who met him in the temple for a respectable chat about scripture. He met people in their grief, their disabilities, in their hypocrisy, and in their fear. He met people in the midst of their messes.

Finally, the bathrooms were just as great (if not greater) an image of what it means to follow God. I don't know about you, but my quest to be like Jesus, to be a disciple of Christ, is not a particularly neat and orderly thing. It's messy and tedious and requires constant attention. But hopefully when I'm finished, some part of our great, communal world will be I little cleaner and a little nicer for someone else.

Allie's previous stories:

Allie Lundblad is in her third year as a HELM Leadership Fellow and is a member of First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Asheville, North Carolina.

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