Taiz�: A Parable of Reconciliation

On the evening of August 16, 2005, ninety-year-old Brother Roger Schutz, founder of the Taiz� ecumenical community in southern France, stood up from community prayer and was set upon by a woman, believed to be mentally deranged, with a knife. He died shortly afterwards. About two weeks later, I went to Taiz� on a kind of pilgrimage. It was my seventh or eighth visit in the past 25 years.

Each time I have been struck by the utter simplicity of the place and what happens there. This time, it was Brother Roger�s grave that carried the motif of simplicity. Marked by a plain, wooden cross and covered by flowers in the cemetery outside the Romanesque church in the Burgundian village of no more than fifteen stone buildings, Brother Roger�s grave typifies the gospel way of life that marks the community he founded.

On the cross is simply �F. Roger�. No family name. Not even dates of birth and death, usually considered minimal standard fare for gravesites. Just �F.� for Frere (brother) and his baptismal name. And the same with the burial sites of all the other Taiz� brothers, including the noted theologian Max Thurian (�F. Max�) alongside his in the village graveyard.

Origins

What were the forces which shaped the heart of this man who translated with his life the conviction that God offers a communion of love to every human being? Son of a Swiss Calvinist pastor and French Protestant mother, Roger Schutz was the youngest child in the family with seven sisters. Raised with a rigorous Protestantism, Roger�s parents allowed him nonetheless, at 13, to stay with a Catholic, Madame Biolley, while pursuing his studies in a nearby town. Their conversations awakened in him an ecumenical vocation at a young age.

His father eventually directed him toward studies in theology at the university of Lausanne, where he was elected as president of the student Christian association. In the Reformation era, both Luther and Calvin basically did away with monasticism as an expression of Christian life, but Roger was clearly looking at things with a fresh eye. He wrote his thesis on the ideal of the monastic life according to St. Benedict and its conformity to the Gospel.

In 1940, at the outbreak of the Second World War, he left Switzerland for the region of Burgundy in which his mother grew up in France. While visiting the ruins of the famous monastery of Cluny, razed during the Reform, he saw in the village of Cluny a notice in the window of local barrister of a �House for sale at Taiz�, ten kilometers away.

There he settled, and began welcoming political refugees, mostly Jews, whom the war had compelled into exile. After two years of living on meager resources, he was betrayed to the Vichy police, and only in 1944 was he able to return to the village of Taiz�. But during his exile in Geneva, a few young men had already joined him, attracted by his first booklet on community life. �Keep inner silence in all things in order to remain in Christ,� it read. �Be filled with the spirit of the beatitudes: joy, simplicity, mercy.�

At the time of the Liberation, in a crippled France, the first brothers of Taiz� were struck by the suffering of the German prisoners who were being held in camps nearby. They soon received authorization to welcome these prisoners for a meal once a week. In the simple and deeply human hospitality that was extended, a gospel reality was sown that would come to mark the life of their community: reconciliation.

The first seven brothers committed themselves on Easter Day in 1949 to celibacy and community life lived in great simplicity. In the silence of a long retreat in 1952-53 Brother Roger wrote the Rule of Taiz�. Monasticism was slowly re-entering the bloodstream of European Reform-church Protestantism.

�We don�t want to be more than fifteen,� Brother Roger said of their community of brothers, all of whose first members were Protestant. Not surprisingly, Catholics�both comfortable and familiar with this form of Christian living�began to present themselves as well. And so what has come to be called a �parable of community� and a �parable of reconciliation� began to take shape. To the diversity of the various Christian denominations was added the diversity of nations. Today, of the 100 or so brothers who form the community, approximately thirty countries and all continents are represented.

�When I was young,� Brother Roger once said in an interview on the community�s development, �I was astonished to see Christians talking about a God of love while at the same time wasting so much energy in justifying oppositions. And I said to myself: To communicate Christ, is there anything more transparent than a life that is given, a life where day after day reconciliation is accomplished concretely?

�Since then, this intuition has never left me: a life in community could be a sign that God is love. Little by little, the conviction grew within me that it was essential to create a community with men who would give their whole life, and who would seek to understand each other and to live continually in communion; a community where goodness of heart and simplicity would be at the center of everything.

�It is urgent to do all we can so that a new breath of communion spreads out as far as possible. It is fundamental for Christians to enter on the way opened by Christ when he says: �Go first and be reconciled� (Mt 5:24). �Go first!�, not: �Put it off until later�.�i

The Community�s Development

The aroma of authentic gospel living went out, and people began to come. Already by the end of the 1950s, young people were finding their way to Taiz� in increasing numbers. From 1962 on, brothers and young people sent by Taiz� began to come and go quietly and with discretion in the countries of Eastern Europe. In the West, Brother Roger saw that the political activism of the late 1960s among youth did not go deep enough. On the one hand, they were fleeing institutions, deserting parishes and movements; and on the other, they demonstrated a thirst for God, friendship, and a quest for purpose in life.

In 1970 at Easter, with 2500 young adults present, Bro. Roger called for a Council of Youth that was launched four years later with 50,000 participants. Since then, Taiz� has also played a key role in terms of grassroots organization for the World Youth Days, and its International Meetings, held between Christmas and New Year�s in different European countries, have drawn up to 100,000 from around the world.

I have watched the community�s attraction and outreach�and with it their on-site Church of the Reconciliation--expand over the past twenty-five years. In my first visit there in 1980, western Europeans and North Americans accounted for most of the crowd, and big circus-like tents extended off the back of the church (which the founder feared was too large when it was built but which had already proved too small.) With the fall of the Iron Curtain in the second half of the �80s, Eastern Europeans began coming in busloads. In the early-to-mid �90s I noted new dormitories with Eastern European architectural motifs, built to provide another option for pilgrims to the small city of backpacker�s tents in the open field across from the church and gathering areas. Pilgrims from Asia, Africa and Latin America were finding their way as well to this hilltop in the Burgundian countryside.

One of Brother Roger�s books is entitled The Dynamism of the Provisional. Nothing serves as a better metaphor for it than the way the church itself on the grounds of Taiz� has evolved over the years. The big-top tents off the back of the concrete nave gave way to temporary siding walls. These in turn have given way to split-log exterior walls, and a roof topped with the onion-domes associated with Slavic church architecture. The Church of the Reconciliation-- half constructed in Western church style and half in Eastern-- now offers a striking visual metaphor of the �two lungs� with which the universal church must breathe for a fully vitalized existence.

It is very important that Orthodox Christians should go to Taize, says Russian Orthodox theologian Oliver Clement. �There they feel welcome, respected, and loved; there they find a Western world which does not seek to conquer them or to convert them�as has so often been the case in history. They find a western world which does not consider itself superior to them, but which expects something from their testimony. And their testimony is extremely important for everyone. But at the same time they will be able to discover that the others are Christians, too, and that there is a profound Christian life in the West.�ii

There is a real beauty in the sobriety of words and gestures received from both western and eastern traditions of Christian faith, deployed in a liturgy of nations and an interplay of lanaguages which flow one after another like waves upon the beach. Youth, whether from East, West, North, or South, are by no means the only ones who fill this church three times daily to pray the office with the brothers. Previous generations of young adults now return with their spouses and children. When Pope John Paul II was in the neighborhood on a visit to Lyon in 1986, he, too, came to Taiz� saying �I felt myself pushed by an interior necessity�. Archbishops of Canterbury, Orthodox Metropolitans, the Lutheran Bishops of Sweden, General Secretaries of the World Council of Churches, and pastors from around the world have felt the same pull. It was Pope John XXXIII who once called Taiz� �that little springtime.� The loveliness of Spring is that it simultaneously represents both continuity with the past and something fresh and new.

A Work of Grace Defying Easy Categorization

One can only be amazed. Here, on a hilltop in the countryside outside a village so small it is not even on most maps of France, is this community that has no confessional identity, no canonical status or juridical constitution. It is not trying to corral anyone. It is not a church and it even resists becoming a movement. It only wants to be a sign of the Church and a way into it. It only wants to witness to the one Church that is the secret bedrock of all the churches. It just wants to say that unity is not something to be built but something to be discovered. It simply seeks to embrace the gospel and live its essential message that we are reconciled to God and to one another through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Its message to all those from different races, cultures, languages and denominations, is simply: �Come and see. Christ destroys every separating wall.�

In his Letter for the European Youth Meeting in Milan in 1998 Brother Roger wrote: �Without reconciliation, what future is there for this unique communion of love called �Church�? Ecumenism becomes immobile when it creates parallels which do not become joined and which ends by exhausting the resources of energy for reconciliation. It is like two trains traveling on parallel tracks. From time to time they stop and allow an encounter and then everyone gets back on their own train. When the ecumenical vocation does not concretize itself in reconciliation, it goes nowhere and the flame is extinguished.� That daily concretization of reconciliation in lived experience is what makes Taiz� a parable of community.

But it would be a mistake to think that the reconciliation of Christians is the goal. It would be truer to cast it as a step towards the ultimate goal which concerns the entire human family, not just Christians. The goal is to live as people who are reconciled in order to be a leaven of peace where humanity suffers and where people are in conflict. Thus do a few of the Taiz� brothers live among the poor in various countries simply as a sign of God�s love. The ultimate goal is the reason-for-being of the Church: to be a sacrament of God in the midst of the world offering a communion of love to every human being.

The brothers of Taiz� have, over the years, evolved a very simple formula to which they remain utterly faithful. And that formula reflects a central truth for every religion: the experience of God is first. The cover story of a recent issue of Newsweek magazine featured �Spirituality in America� and at the heart of it identified a �passion for an immediate, transcendent experience of God.�iii

Such experience occurs in two ways: through prayer and through action in the world. These two themes are the object of constant reflection and discussion in the meetings at Taiz�: inner life and human solidarity. The more our lives become rooted in prayer, the more our eyes are opened to the needs around us and the more responsibility we assume for becoming the change we want to see in the world.

But action in the world is derivative from and dependent upon an experience of communion with the Divine. The lynchpin, in other words, is direct religious experience. It is not reserved for an elite few, but is the birthright of all, young and old alike. And in offering an experience of transcendence in prayer and worship to young people within the context of church and Christian faith, the Taiz� community is in the vanguard of the new evangelization. Young people who may know little about personal prayer or liturgy are introduced to both.

Today, spirituality�the impulse to seek communion with the Divine�is thriving. Increasingly, people define themselves as �spiritual but not religious�. Healthy spirituality, however, leads to religion within whose province falls the concrete texts, rituals, symbols and sacraments that embody the encounter with the Divine. Generally those who come to Taiz� are invited to stay for a week, culminating in the visually rich and powerful celebrations of the weekend where every Friday is Good Friday with prayer around the cross, every Saturday is Holy Saturday with a vigil service by candlelight and chanting, and every Sunday is Easter Sunday with a celebration of the eucharist.

There are, of course, some awkward anomalies in a worshipping community made up of people from backgrounds across the Christian spectrum. Daily mass is celebrated in the church crypt at 7:15 a.m.(open to any, but on the early side for the young), and consecrated bread and wine from this eucharist is distributed at certain stations by some of the brothers at the end of the 8:15 a.m. morning prayer service, while elements consecrated at a Protestant celebration of the Lord�s Supper are made available at other stations by young adults. It is an obvious effort to be faithful to the disciplines of the churches from which they come. There are some secondary anomalies that will only be rectified with the healing of the primary anomaly: the scandalous and still-existing divisions between our churches.

A School of Prayer

In spite of this considerable handicap�or perhaps because of it!�Taiz� has evolved a way of uniting people in heart, mind, and voice before God that qualifies it as a school of prayer. Reflect for a moment. When you hear Taiz� mentioned in some context, to what does it usually refer? In my experience, it is usually an adjective attached to the word �prayer�. Prayer around the cross on Friday nights in churches and in living rooms. Prayer at an ecumenical gathering. A chant sung by your choir on Sunday.

But it�s not just any type of prayer. It�s a form of meditative prayer in community that takes people to a very deep place inside themselves and gives them a taste of inner stillness. And in that silence they come to rest in God.

�Resting in God� was St. Gregory the Great�s way of describing contemplative prayer. Over the years, I have come to the conclusion that prayer in the style of Taiz� has introduced hundreds of thousands of people to contemplative prayer. My theory is that one of the main reasons Taiz� continues to draw people the way it does is that it has never lost sight of what people yearn for most: an experience of God.

And God�s first language, as the saying goes, is silence; all the rest is translation. You only have to walk the streets of any big city in the country to see how silence is a foreign language. Everywhere people are coming and going listening to their Ipods or talking on their cell phones. That is why the time of silence experienced during the prayer at Taiz� between the chants is both radical and fundamental. Those gathered in prayer learn that silence is not an empty wasteland, but respite for the soul. They learn that the silence is inhabited.

Latin, which once assured a unanimity among worshippers, is now one of many languages used in the simple refrains, tirelessly repeated, that open up the same kind of inner space as did Gregorian chant. Space for ruminating the meaning of the words, and then letting go of the words and sinking beneath them to a quieter, more contemplative place in the heart where, in the silence between the chants, one simply rests in God.

But prayer at Taiz� is not just served up as an introduction to the spiritual life for young people. It�s the prayer of the brothers� community, simplified over time by daily contact with its guests and universalized by their diversity. The brothers do not see themselves as animators of prayer for others. This is their prayer in community, entered into three times daily in fidelity to their monastic vows. It is this firm spiritual identity which grounds the place and provides a secure foundation from which it can freely open to people around the world.

While the sense of the universal is there, at the same time, the identity of each person is preserved. The differences of nationality and church background are an occasion of mutual enrichment and acceptance. This is where the parable of community and reconciliation come clear: the divided Church remains the one Church. By their common life, the brothers allow the undivided Church to become visible, not only as a distant memory of the first millennium but as a reality which is there today and needs to be rediscovered and made increasingly visible. This is the best experience Christian faith has to offer: simple communion in love.

To support young adults in their search for meaning and purpose, the Taiz� community has launched a �pilgrimage of trust on earth�. This pilgrimage stimulates them to be bearers of peace, reconciliation, and trust in their towns, their universities, the places where they work, and in their parishes. As a stage in this pilgrimage of trust on earth, a five-day European meeting at the end of each year brings several tens of thousands of young people to a city in eastern or western Europe.

�Through the young people we welcome at Taiz� or whom we go to meet in their different countries,� said Brother Roger, �we are strengthened in this certainty: when faith is lived out, it becomes believable and it is communicated. In the same way, when communion between Christians becomes real, it radiates hope. More than that: it can sustain the search for world peace.�iv

Ecumenical Trends,Vol. 34, No. 10, November 2005

Thomas Ryan, CSP
Paulist North American Office for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations
415 West 59th St.
New York, NY 10019
212-265-3209 x 290

i Meditations by Brother Roger in Taiz�: Openings Paths of Trust (Taiz� Press, 2003), 29-32.
ii Olivier Cl�ment, Taiz�: A Meaning to Life (Chicago: GIA Publications, 1997), 64.
iiiJerry Adler, �In Search of the Spiritual,� Newsweek (September 5, 2005), 49.
iv Meditations by Brother Roger, op.cit., 31.