Sermon: Taizé and the Way of the Blessed

This sermon has been prompted by two things in addition to the second lesson and its central passage, the beatitudes. A few weeks ago I was loaned a copy of a new book about the Taizé community in France.  (Jason Brian Santos, A Community Called Taizé IVP 2008) Moreover, we have just past the fourth anniversary of the death of its founder Br Roger (16^th August 2005).   

As well as being a guide and resource for those who would visit Taizé, the new book tells the story of the development of this extraordinary contemporary religious phenomenon.  After the Second World War, Roger Schutz sought to set up a small community of Protestant men who would live a life of simplicity and prayer, seek reconciliation and offer hospitality to refugees.  A couple of decades later, Taizé was attracting thousands of young people and the decision was made to see this as a call from God to develop a ministry to the young.  A large chapel to accommodate them all had by now been built but the decision was made to knock down its west wall and erect a circus tent as a vast awning to accommodate the increasing numbers. Thirty years on from that the religious community has grown and has brothers from all over the world and the leaders of the main Christian denominations are all very keen to be associated with Taizé.  The Archbishop of Canterbury was there earlier this month, as indeed were a group of young people from our own diocese.

I won't bore you with the too many details of my own first visit to Taizé. It was the summer of 1977 and a friend and I arrived there a few weeks after setting off from Durham on our bicycles.  We were very tired and dirty by the time we arrived; we had been camping en route and were doing this trip (which did not finish until we got to Rome) on a very tight budget.  While there, I bought a copy of the Taizé office book and we used it every day as our cycling pilgrimage continued over the Alps and down Italy.  It was in the course of this journey that the prayer at the end of midday prayer got drummed into my soul: ‘Bless us Lord, now in the middle of the day, be with us and all who are dear to us and with everyone we  meet;  keep us in the spirit of the beatitudes: joyful, simple, merciful.'

The phrase at the end first appeared in a small pamphlet that Roger wrote at the very early days of his experiment with monastic communal living. ‘Every day let your work and rest be quickened by the Word of God; keep inner silence in all things and you will dwell in Christ; be filled with the spirit of the beatitudes: joy, simplicity and mercy.' (Santos, p60)

But if this prayerful précis of the beatitudes summarises the spirituality of Roger Schutz, what can be said about the theology of Taizé that has emerged since the 1940s?  I think this can be expressed in terms of three short statements, all of which suggest a ‘both-and' relationship between things we often hold apart. They are statements of paradox, tension - they are themselves signs of contradiction.  Let me express them as imperatives. The first is to accept the need for both discipline and provisionality. The second is to seek both reconciliation and solidarity with the poor. The third is to hold together both struggle and contemplation.

Struggle and Contemplation  

The essential ingredient in Taizé worship is not that it uses certain little chants. Rather that it is both communal and contemplative. There is practicality as well as spirituality in this. If you gather thousands of people in a large chapel from many different nationalities and traditions there are a lot of things that it might not be wise to do in worship. Very long readings, songs that some groups know but others have never heard, complex choral pieces, intellectual sermons: none of these things are going to work. But simple, beautiful, repetitive prayer, very short Bible readings - just a verse or two repeated in different languages - and every now and then a few words from the Prior. These things work and create a context for something which is absolutely integral to the worship at Taizé:  an extended shared silence. Taken together, these are the key ingredients of Taizé liturgy.  Attempts to export this are not always very successful - especially when they rely too heavily on the chants or see Taizé a style of music.   

If I might make a suggestion, the way to export the spirituality of Taizé is to seek to build the contemplative dimension into ordinary acts of worship.  As a parish priest I was quite intent on doing this and so was always persuading the choir and organist to use simpler music and to risk repetition. For my own part I introduced clearly flagged-up silences into the services; including a long one after the anthem at Evensong on Sunday.

Turning to this Cathedral, I think it is fair to say that there is something of a contemplative dimension in our worship here. I have noticed how choirs visiting for the first time take a while to settle into the pace of Evensong but after a few days they seem to see the point and begin to love the silence that follows the readings and which is often incorporated into the prayers.  They also appreciate and comment on the prayers when they either connect with another aspect of the service, especially if it is the anthem. But people also comment when they notice in the prayers a serious attempt to engage spiritually with the tensions, ambiguities and pain of the world.  ‘Struggle and contemplation' is an excellent summary of Christian spirituality.  If we accept the need for both then slowly but surely our Christianity becomes deeper and more engaged.

Reconciliation and Solidarity with the Poor

The chapel at Taizé is called the Chapel of Reconciliation. I was surprised by this dedication when I first encountered the vast, dark, open space where people sit and kneel directly on the floor for the prayer services which happen three times a day every day.  I was familiar with churches dedicated to saints and the Holy Trinity but never to a principle or process. There are dangers in focussing on abstract concepts like reconciliation but Taizé avoids many of these by twinning its aspiration for reconciliation with solidarity with the poor.  Life for pilgrims at Taizé is basic and food portions are not large. More importantly, the ethos of the whole place is permeated by the fact that some of the brothers do not live on the Burgundy hillside but share in the lives of some of the poorest communities in the world; they live among the poorest of the poor.  It is by such practical and communal sharing that this spirit of solidarity with the poor is built up. This is for me a deeply challenging but highly appropriate value for a Christian community, especially when connected with the rhetoric of reconciliation. All too often our longing for peace is a desire for a comfortable life, and far too regularly reconciliation projects, not least those with an so-called interfaith dimension, become too cosy: ‘nicey, nice interfaith' as it has been called.  Solidarity with the poor, physically sharing in some of the intractable deprivation, fear and chaos that is the daily life of so many of our brothers and sisters on the planet, is a vital antidote for the naïve, word-filled, platitudinous approaches to peace and reconciliation which often give our spiritual aspirations a bad name.

At this cathedral we are reflecting deeply on what the words ‘outreach' and ‘engagement' might mean to us over the coming years.  One symbol of this is our growing relationship with Durham prison.  It does seem to me, however, that it might be good for us to try to introduce the notion of solidarity into the process of discernment here. What might it mean for Durham Cathedral to be in solidarity with the prisoners and staff of the prisons of the diocese, with the parishes of the more deprived deaneries, with congregations who fear that their church will be closed and clergy anxious that one day no one will turn up? Solidarity with the poor is an aspiration and a practice which needs to be held alongside all that we can do to promote practices of reconciliation.

Discipline and Provisionality

It is the last contradiction which is for me the most powerful: discipline and provisionality.  The Taizé community is a group of men who have taken vows to live an obedient, celibate, disciplined religious life. It is sometimes easy to lose sight of that when faced by thousands of visitors, but it is the bedrock of the whole enterprise.  There would be nothing without it.  Monasticism is discipline and commitment, living sacrifice; it is as simple as that. However, at Taizé this monastic environment has been informed by a radical doctrine of provisionality in order to allow it to offer serious and challenging hospitality to millions. 

It would be very interesting to consider Br Roger in a study on leadership. For instance, against much current advice his method was not to create a vision of the future and then devise a strategy to achieve it. On the contrary, he was moved by openness to God's call in the post-war era to do one thing and then in the 1960s was moved by the needs of young people to do another and towards the end of the century developed the ministry to engage much more with formal groups and church leaders.  The decision to knock down the west wall of the church to accommodate visitors is both an example and a symbol of what this provisionality means. Provisionality means being ready to change and develop and move on in a way which has spiritual integrity.  Provisionality and discipline are the underling virtues of any community that would both provide an environment where people can grow in faith and exercise true Christian hospitality.  They too are words that we should hear and use more often. 

Br Roger's prayer on the beatitudes was that we should be joyful, simple and merciful.  I hope that I have suggested to you that such a prayer will not deliver joy, simplicity and mercy on their own.  Rather, a prayerful response to the beatitudes will take us on a journey far away from a nice, bland or merely aesthetic approach to Christianity and plunge us into the world of gritty contradiction; the world of discipline and provisionality, of reconciliation and solidarity with the poor. And it will affirm us in the daily duty of struggle and contemplation with our brothers and sisters in the community of faith.  Such is the way of the blessed.