Why Thousands Of Young People Spend Their Holidays At This French Monastery
(ESSAY) A small boy slowly wanders through the rows of monks in white robes, a candle in his hands. As he reaches the front of the church, he bows down to one of the monks and passes on the light.
The light spreads through the dark church. Everywhere, candles are lit, accompanied by meditative chants. All around me, I see dimly-lit faces, many filled with tears. The evening prayer continues for 30 minutes, then the brothers start to leave. Most of the visitors do not, however.
Some of them have traveled thousands of miles to continue singing and praying throughout the night. In a country where churches have been losing members for decades, the scene feels almost out of place. Across much of Central Europe, religion is seen as a relic of the past. There are places, however, where such assumptions are questioned — and this is most certainly one of them.
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The Taizé Community in east-central France is an unusual kind of monastery. Composed of around eighty brothers from thirty countries, monks and visitors share a lifestyle of prayer, work and simplicity.
Located in the countryside of Burgundy, it attracts over 50,000 guests a year — mostly young people between ages 16 and 35 — from all around the world. Together with the brothers, they follow a traditional monastic way of life: Three prayer times a day, characterized by silence and the well-known Taizé chants, simple meals, practical work and Bible study in the mornings.
On crowded weeks, several thousand visitors will fill the building that has been called “beehive” rather than monastery.
What makes the community so unique is that the brothers themselves stem from different denominational backgrounds: Taizé, Catholics, Anglicans and other Protestants are all part of the same order and celebrate the eucharist together. The radicality of this conception can hardly be overstated: In the heart of a religious landscape characterized by confessional fragmentation and seemingly unbridgeable boundaries between Christian denominations, a monastic community attempts to live out a “parable of communion.”
Exceptional even by today’s standards, the community seemed an impossibility at the time of its conception. It formed in the years after World War II around Roger Schutz, the son of a pastor later known as Frère Roger, who sheltered refugees, including Jews, in the small village of Taizé during the war. After the end of the war, he began to work with children who had lost their families and German war prisoners.
In 1949, he and seven brothers agreed to a life-long commitment: For the first time since the Reformation, a group of Protestant men formed a monastic community. Quickly drawing attention from various Christian communities, Taizé emerged as a site of reconciliation between the churches.
From 1969 onwards, Catholic brothers entered the community, attracting visits from various popes such as John Paul II, who described visiting Taizé as “coming to the source.”
Over the coming decades, Taizé would establish itself as a major religious actor in Europe, establishing small fraternities around the world, forming a “council of youth,” facilitating inter-religious dialogue, and welcoming ever-increasing numbers of visitors from around the world.
This attempt at bringing together the scattered church is, however, not uncontested. Brother Sebastien, the media representative of Taizé, told me that living together with brothers from 30 different countries is “a constant fight” one has to be “very humble” about.
The challenges range from everyday habits, such as diet, to bigger cultural differences. What is central to Taizé’s vision of communion, Brother Sebastien argued, is “to live basic values. Simplicity in Taizé makes it easier to understand one another. Silence is a universal language.”
Eastern-Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément went as far as to claim that in Taizé, he encountered the “undivided church.” This sense of unity emerges from practice rather than from doctrine. Frère Roger frequently said that “there is no theology of Taizé” and that it was to be a “parable of communion.” Concretely, this means that unity is to be approached from shared life and prayer, not from theological argument.
Theology is to follow the experience of union, Brother Sebastien said.
This insistence on the concreteness of shared life is also reflected by Taizé’s deep commitment to hospitality as a theological virtue.
“Everything in Taizé goes through hospitality,” Brother Sebastien insisted, “we are made for contact.” This culture of hospitality might be one of the reasons why Taizé attracts so many young people who otherwise have little contact with churches.
“I would like young people to not only meet religion over the internet, but in places”, he added, “when people don’t meet anymore, they radicalize.”
This non-judgmental welcome is deeply reflected in the perception of young visitors who frequently employ the language of ‘safe space’ to describe their experience at Taizé.
“We are allowed to be broken people here,” one of the volunteers told me.
This openness is deliberately encouraged by the brothers who are committed to a “deep respect for the inner spiritual life of each person,” the volunteer added.
Paul Ricoeur, a philosopher and a frequent visitor to the community, said that “what strikes me about this place is the total absence of relationships of domination.”
Whether Taizé offers a model for the future of the church remains an open question. What is clear, however, is that it has become one of the few places in Europe where young people encounter religion as shared practice.
In this sense, Taizé will remain a vital actor in shaping the role of religion and confession in the post-secular societies in Europe. According to Brother Sebastien, overcoming boundaries set in place by confessional self-delimitations requires a deep reconnection to a shared past.
Rather than being a post-confessional experiment, he said, Taizé seeks to be a reminder of “what the universal church has always been.”
Jonathan Bühne is currently studying religious studies in Leipzig. He was born in Menden in 2005, grew up in Tenerife and Germany and spent a year in Kyrgyzstan after graduating from high school. In addition to his studies, he works as a journalist, editor and author.