The miracle of Taizé

If the Church is dying, why will thousands of young people travel to a small French village this Christmas to pray, meditate and work? Ruth Gledhill meets the saintly monk behind a modern Christian miracle

The plain concrete church built in the 1960s sits on top of a green hill in the verdant Burgundy region of France. At first sight it seems curiously at odds with the sandstone farmhouses and cottages around it. This is the village of Taizé, and thousands of young people from throughout Europe will arrive here over the next three days, transported by battered old buses, cars, train or on foot. They will stay for a few days, gather spiritual sustenance, and travel on to Barcelona, where they will be joined by many thousands more.

Taizé, which has not had a resident Catholic priest since the French Revolution and until recently consisted of little more than a few elderly pensioners on run-down farms, is the unlikely heart of one of the most extraordinary Christian revivals the West has witnessed in the modern era. It was founded 60 years ago by Brother Roger, the son of a Swiss Protestant pastor, when he was 25. At 85 he has luminous skin and silver hair. He is frail, and rarely gives interviews, but for some reason he has agreed to talk to me. As soon as we meet I feel in awe, and aware of my own sin. I feel as if I am talking to a saint and make instant mental comparisons with the Pope, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama and other spiritually heightened beings.

In the West the Church is dying. Yet hundreds of thousands of young people travel to Taizé each year to do little more than sing hymns, pray, meditate and perform manual work. I am trying to find out why. No one, not even the 100 brothers who will soon gather around Brother Roger for prayers after lunch, knows why the young people began coming in 1959. Those first visitors told their friends, and these friends told yet more. The trickle has become a flood and the community’s resources are fully stretched. While no one is turned away, there is a clear and unashamed bias towards youth. Many of the brothers first came as pilgrims themselves.

At Easter and in the summer holidays, the surrounding fields are full of the tents brought by the visitors. Feeding them is a miracle of biblical proportions, even if some complain that the menu is as monotonous as the “begat” lists. Taizé itself begets smaller models of its own patterns of worship throughout the Christian world. Its influence has already been so widely felt that Church leaders from the Pope downwards are now looking to it as a potential source of revival.

After visiting Taizé in 1986 the Pontiff said: "One passes through Taizé as one passes close to a spring of water."

Oxbridge college chapels, churches and cathedrals throughout Europe have begun to stage candlelit Taizé-style services on which youngsters sit on prayer stools or cushions and sing the distinctive, repetitive musical chants developed by Brother Roger. These are a fusion of many disparate elements, from Enya to the Benedictines. Even the new service book of the Church of England, Common Worship, introduced into 16,000 churches this Advent, contains Taizé-style chants and responses.

Brother Roger came across Taizé, ten minutes from Cluny Abbey, an hour’s drive from Lyons, in 1940. The war was under way and he wanted to help refugees, Jews, the dispossessed. He set off from his home in Geneva by bicycle, looking for a house where he could pray and offer sanctuary to others.

"I arrived in Taizé, a village where there was no proper road, no telephone, and no running water," he says. "I was struck by the warm-hearted welcome of a few elderly people. One invited me for a meal and suggested: ‘Stay here, we are so lonely’. So I decided to stay."

Jews fleeing the Nazis quickly started arriving. "We maintained silence in the house and whenever I wished to pray, I went into the woods, so as not to make the visitors uncomfortable." He did not wish to convert, just to save lives. And save lives he did - many hundreds, if not more. Brothers came, a rule was worked out, and the community grew.

After a simple prayer before a Russian icon of the Virgin, we talk and break bread in his sparsely furnished room, with its single bed, bare floorboards; a telephone is the only concession to modern life. Brother Roger talks about the formative influences in his life - his grandmother, great-grandmother, sisters and countless cousins. His was a family immersed in music. His great aunt studied music at Weimar in Germany and trained with Franz Liszt. His mother trained as a singer in Paris.

His childhood, interspersed with bouts of TB - one almost costing him his life - was spent singing with his seven sisters and his brother around the piano. When he was ill, he read everything he could and then began to write. His first book, Evolution of a Puritan Boyhood, was accepted for publication. And then everything changed. From his grandmother, a woman devout but "discreet" about her faith, he had inherited a vocation for helping the destitute. He read about a community of nuns dedicated to helping the poor and once visited by Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French philosopher. Brother Roger felt moved to set up a similar community.

At this point in our interview, Brother Roger rises from his stool and walks to the small empty fireplace in his room. We both stare at it. "The last time I read my book was here in front of the fireplace in 1944. I burnt it."

The shock of hearing this can barely be described. Brother Roger tries to explain. "I had this feeling that God does not want us to walk on two roads at the same time. One road for me would be through writing, trying to find a way to express myself to others, to express what was in me to others. The other road was to do with Christ and the Gospel, to search together with the other brothers, with the community, in order to be in community and fellowship. I did it for myself.

The brothers may have known of my choice, but that was not the important thing."

The expression on the face of the brother who sits with us suggests that others might regret his choice. Brother Roger smiles. The purpose of the community, he says, is "to love and be loved, forgive and be forgiven".

Later, we walk up the path to the church at the top of the hill. We enter through a tiny side door and a little tunnelled passage. I feel as though I have walked into C.S. Lewis’s magical wardrobe and emerged into a land of infinite possibilities and amazing beauty.

Most extraordinary is the well-tended privet hedge that runs down the centre of the church, literally hedging off a space for the brothers to pray, keeping them together but apart from the 6,000 worshippers. Sunlight filters through the stained glass created by one of the brothers, casting its coloured gleams on Russian icons. Unwanted chimney stacks create Post-Modern sculptures in which candles flicker. Wicker baskets decorate the sanctuary. A Corelli concerto sounds forth from the state-of-the-art music system.

From its exterior, the church had seemed a normal size, maybe a little smaller than Guildford Cathedral. But inside, Brother Roger presses a button here, or pulls a lever there, and walls apparently solid as brick glide seamlessly to one side, opening up expanse upon expanse of space for worship.

This church is regularly full and occasional tents are erected outside to take the overflow. Most of the worshippers are under 30 years old — the people the mainstream Church in the West is trying but failing to attract. This is a question that has preoccupied Brother Roger for many years and it is this need to develop a desire for faith in the young that drives his mission at Taizé.

Even the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, has visited with a group of 1,000 pilgrims. But there are no easy answers. "There are no methods at all to developing a desire for faith, an appetite for faith, in young people," says Brother Roger. "We do not want to create a movement here, we do not have any solutions to offer. A lot of people discover a desire for faith, an appetite, when they are here in the meetings. They begin searching and something grows within them."

He is concerned today for the developing world, and there are outposts of Taizé brothers in Africa and elsewhere. He is also concerned about Aids, and refugees. He has become close to two families, one from Rwanda and one from Bosnia, who are living in the village of Taizé. And he remains an optimist.

As he joins his brothers in prayer at the end of a meal, he makes repeated references to a man he met and reveres, Pope John XXIII. Forgiveness, love and the unity of all through Christ, no matter what their creed or religion, is the message he wants the world to hear this Christmas.

"On one side there is the gravity of young people leaving the Church, and this seems to be the only future. But it is always important that we do not let anxiety win us over. Instead, we can rejoice in all that is happening. In the last audience I had with Pope John XXIII, he said ‘I pray very humbly’. He had no pretensions about his relationship with God." He turns to the brothers and tells them: "Live and express that with your life."

No one could accuse Brother Roger of failing to set an example. Perhaps this is why Taizé is a success. It shares with Brother Roger the rare gift of being able to claim less than it merits, not more.

Ruth Gledhill, The Times

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