Brother Roger

Roger Schutz, founder of Taizé, died on August 16th 2005, aged 90

DEEP quiet was what first drew Roger Schutz to Taizé. The young Swiss theology student, climbing off his bicycle one summer day in 1940 after riding a strenuous 70 miles north from Geneva, found himself in the wooded hills and valleys of la France profonde. A few sandstone houses, some unlived in, made up the village. The road was unsurfaced, and there was no telephone; the world did not come through here. No priest had been resident since the Revolution. He might have pushed on, but an old woman offered him a meal and pressed him to stay with them. “We are lonely,” she told him.

This lost corner had not always been so silent. Ten minutes away lay the ruins of the great Benedictine abbey of Cluny, which had once been full of melody and chant sung to the glory of God. Taizé, on that same “inspired hill”, still echoed with what Shelley once called “the memory of music fled”. It was the ideal place for Brother Roger, as he soon became, to found an order whose religious life was based profoundly on the principles of music and silence.

Establishing a monastic order is always a struggle, not least in the 20th century, and in wartime, and for a Protestant pastor’s son whose knowledge of the subject had been gained from his theology studies in Lausanne. He meant, at first, to be a writer. But his father’s mysticism infected him; he decided on the religious life, and burned his first published book in the fireplace of the broken-down house he bought in Taizé.

In its first years, the house was mostly a hostel where Jewish refugees were offered soup and a bed on their way through to safety. Brother Roger, a classically trained musician brought up in a household of singing and piano-playing, wanted music at its centre, but not yet. Out of respect for his guests, he would go away and sing Divine Office in the woods, restoring sacred music to the landscape again.

From these humble, almost naturalistic, beginnings sprang an extraordinary Christian revival. On the day Brother Roger died, 2,500 people were in the church in Taizé. More than 100,000 visitors now come each year, so many that they stay in tents on the surrounding slopes. The order itself has 120 monks, some in the monastery and some, as Brother Roger always wanted, living with the poor in the world, in the slums of Kolkata and Manila and New York. Taizé prayer-groups meet in every continent.

Leaders of the established Christian churches – popes, metropolitans, archbishops of Canterbury – would visit with amazement. They could not understand how, as the world turned unremittingly secular and their own churches dwindled down to congregations of old women, one monastery in France could be crammed with the noisy, enthusiastic, back-packing young. Pope John Paul II called Taizé “a spring of water”. Little like it could be found in the Vatican’s gilded halls.

Brother Roger, too, was perplexed by what had happened. His monastery had never recruited, advertised or sold itself. It was never – he insisted it should never be – a “movement”. He only knew that, from 1959 onwards, young people had started to

come to Taizé, and the word had spread. Some said that he himself, a tiny man with a luminous, sweet smile, was the reason they came. He doubted it but, just in case it was true, granted few interviews and kept apart from the theological wranglings of the day. Taizé was, and always had been, resolutely ecumenical, taking brothers from all Christian sects and basing itself on love, reconciliation and forgiveness; there was much space for searching there, but none for dogmatism. Hence its attraction for the alienated souls of the modern age.

Brother Roger offered, to anyone who wanted it, a way to the spirit of the risen Christ through light, music and silence. The services he devised at Taizé were often held by candlelight. The music, based on ancient mantras but developed by him, was simple melodic phrases sung over and over again until they became a meditation, sometimes continuing under and through the prayers in what he called “a pillar of fire”. In between these chants would come long spells of silence when, as Brother Roger put it, “with a childlike trust, we let Christ pray silently within us.”

Listening, rather than preaching, was the essence of Taizé. Christian leaderswould have done well to imitate that secret. As it was, churches all over the Christian world borrowed the Taizé songs. Fame forced Brother Roger to worry about copyright and piracy; it also gave him critics. For some he was too Catholic, allowing masses and observing the Marian feasts. For others he was too timid, championing the oppressed but disbanding branches of his order when they became politically violent. Brother Roger ignored all this. Moral and political reform, he believed, would come only when bitterness and resentment vanished from human hearts.

He was attending the evening service when a deranged woman cut his throat, killing him almost instantly. He died in the midst of the reviving music he had brought to Christianity. Had anyone asked why, he would have gently reminded them that he did not leave a silence that was empty.