Finding festival: a man who experienced Easter joy every day

Ben Cribbin discovers happiness, springtime and commitment in the diaries of Brother Roger of Taizé.

A literary diary is a strange beast. We often read them as companion pieces that tell us something about the writer whose work we love, not as the text itself. Burrowing through a diary’s pages we might find an anecdote, a scrap of conversation that became the seed of a novel, a few scribbled lines of poetry that get shaped into a mature work of art.  

In a literary diary, the sublime and the commonplace get jumbled together, complaints about toothache interspersed with meditations on the sun setting over the fields, the shadows of the poplar trees. We have to search the pages for beauty hidden among the everyday, the prosaically human.

But what if a diarist wrote no great poetry, no epoch-defining plays? What if the poetry, such as it is, is here? 

Brother Roger (1915-2005), founder of the Taizé community, a monastic-style form of living in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region in France, is such a diarist. An early ambition to become a writer never came to fruition, and in 1940 he left his native Switzerland and travelled to France, determined to find some way to work for peace in a continent that was being torn apart. 

He bought a house in the isolated village of Taizé where, accompanied by his sister Genevieve, he began to shelter refugees fleeing the Nazis. They came, he wrote in his diary, ‘like hunted animals’. The fledgling community frequently went hungry, often surviving on bread and nettle soup. During these years, Brother Roger dreamed of a community living according to the monastic principles of poverty, chastity and obedience, a community that would be, in his words, ‘a parable’: a concrete example of reconciliation in a continent torn apart. 

“I know well,” he wrote, “that I will have to undertake it. I have spent so much time trying to thwart God’s plan. I would prefer the beaten paths, fearful as I am of the bitter struggles involved.”

And he was true to his word. On Easter Sunday 1949, in the Romanesque village church that had long been left empty, he and six other men made a commitment to celibacy, to sharing possessions in common, and to praying thrice daily. 

The birds sang as they stepped from the church into the sunlight, the signs of spring were everywhere. “Ah Taizé, that little springtime!” Pope John XXIII would later say, seemingly spontaneously, upon a visit to the Taizé community. His words captured something of the energy and joyfulness that makes Taizé so popular with young pilgrims today, who visit in their thousands every year inspired by the community’s example and keen to return to their own communities with some of that springtime.

Throughout his life, Brother Roger had the habit of scribbling down his thoughts in journals which in the early 1970s he began to publish. These diaries form a kind of spiritual autobiography, allowing the reader to trace the contours of Brother Roger’s life, from the early idealism of his youth, his struggles and disappointments, to the hard-won wisdom of his later years. 

His dream of being a writer found its fulfilment. There are passages which rise to the level of poetry, a cast of deftly sketched priests, monks and young radicals, and insight that deserves to be reflected on for a lifetime. A theme is introduced as a question in an entry, before reappearing several days later, answered and seen in a fresh way. 

“I have always thought it was pointless to keep a journal,” he writes in one particularly lean season. “I am afraid of taking myself too seriously and no longer taking seriously Christ the Lord.” 

And then, with the benefit of a day’s living, he writes, “This notebook must allow me to take stock of my life, to insist on what must last, to recall truths I consented to and then neglected.”

It is these truths ‘consented to and then neglected’, recalled with the benefit of experience, which make Brother Roger’s diaries so compelling, and place them alongside the greatest of literary diaries. 

There are passages that rise to the level of poetry, and insights on how to live a meaningful life that deserve to be read again and again. We get the feeling we are reading a spiritual autobiography, tracing the contours of Brother Roger’s inner life from his early idealism to the struggles and disappointments of midlife to the wisdom of experience, expressed in beautiful, poetic terms. 

There are several themes which stand out clearly, but one I would like to explore now is the tension between here and elsewhere, the temptation to long to be somewhere else or not to persevere in the commitments one made in youth.

“Perseverance is not a law,” Brother Roger reflects. “It is a continual creation. It is the struggle to live a love with no turning back.”  

***

One balmy spring night, in the midst of the lambing season, Brother Roger looks out from his window over the valley bathed in the moonlight mist. A woodthrush sings in the silence, and the flowering trees by his window are cloaked by dew. Through the dusk he can just make out the nearby hills of Cormatin and Bray; how does the moonlight look over there, he wonders. Are there thickets with spring blossom, owls in the dark, the sound of running water? “Happiness,” he writes in his journal, “there it is, within reach.” 

But, he reminds himself: “Never seek it, it would only flee. It lies in attentiveness and wonder. Happiness seems sometimes to disappear for a long, long time. And there it is, when eyes meet. There it is close at hand, when a man loves without knowing if that love is returned.”

He put this philosophy into practice by observing and reflecting on the world immediately around him. A few days prior to this, he had taken a walk down through the meadows to the lambing sheds, from whence came a soft, braying hymn. One voice apart, not in tune with the rest. A newborn lamb lying beneath the nearby hedge, bleating softly, unable to walk. He picked it up, it rested its head on his shoulder. The next morning, he hurried back to the lambing shed to find it, ‘wiggling its tail’ at the sound of his voice.

But ‘attentiveness and wonder’ did not shield him from pain, or from the less pleasant realities of life. A few days later, Brother Roger had to write: “The little lamb is dead. The peasant in me is deeply affected.”

One of the recurring struggles of Brother Roger’s life was the struggle to be here, in the village of Taizé he had chosen, and not somewhere else, just over the hills. “I don’t know why I still have nagging regret that I didn’t go to live close to [the nearby town of] Macon, a region more welcoming, more cheerful, and more alive than our valley.”

And yet he stayed where he was. For Brother Roger, there is something noble about persevering in commitments that one made long ago. He chose Taizé as a young man: idealistic, innocent, or perhaps, he might later think, God chose for him; certainly, the choice of Taizé remained a mystery. 

He seemed to want to hold on to those commitments from the past, to find in them some seed of who he is, and what matters to him, and let it flourish. “The unity of personality,” he writes, “requires remaining steadfast in one’s earliest commitments, taking responsibility on every occasion for the decisions of the past.”

“The festive joy continues,” he writes during one particularly fine summer. “Never has our countryside seemed to me more adorned, more hospitable, more fresh and radiant.” He finds himself thinking, as he looks out over the ‘soft hues’ of the sky, that this paradise is enough.   

***

That word ‘festive’ is a curious and significant one that Brother Roger uses to describe nature, giving a window onto how he sees it. “Woods and fields hold festival”, he writes, “the light dances between fleecy dawns and sunsets, growing softer with every day. The festival goes on with no end in sight.” 

He often recalls his childhood in the Swiss mountains, and his diaries are peppered with his observations of the birds, the blossom, and the sky, which throughout his life remained a fascination for him.

As a Christian, the major festivals for brother Brother Roger were Christmas and Easter, the seasons when God’s grace breaks through into a darkened world, and heaven and earth fleetingly touch. 

At Christmas, in the Christian understanding, God was born into a stable in Bethlehem; at Easter he emerged from the tomb, conquering death. However, reading Brother Roger’s diaries, one gets the sense that the Christian life is saturated with festival – in any season, and our task is to find it. 

Brother Roger found it in the woods and fields of his home, the dancing of the light, even in the barren and grey months of winter. These were often times when the loneliness and separation, and emptiness of the village of Taizé particularly affected him, and he longed for the bright lights and bustle of a busy town of Christmas shoppers. “The streets alive with people”, he writes, “the light, the overflowing life. There is no way out but to stop making comparisons.”

There it is again, the longing to be somewhere else. Reality can be so much plainer than that which the imagination, aided by loneliness and nostalgia, can dream up.

Brother Roger acknowledges that his longing is driven by homesickness, for the ‘intimate Switzerland in winter time’. He thinks it is the only time of year when he misses it.

His solution requires a gathering of his inner resources, it requires intention, discipline, and curiosity to find the festival, even in this dark season. “Love solitude”, he tells himself. “Profit from this time of year to become perfectly oneself.”

He looks out over the darkened, muggy fields and hills one December day. “In the city, there is an announcement of Christmas that appears in the shop windows,” he muses. “Here, we must discover the announcement of the son of God in this land of fields and woods.” They are, he realises, in this isolated hamlet, ‘in Bethlehem with the shepherds, not in Jerusalem’. Yes, it is in Bethlehem, amongst the brute creatures, that God was born. In the silence they must ‘listen to the sighing of nature, and Christmas will burst forth in triumph’.

That promise of ‘bursting forth’ found its fulfillment every spring. As Brother Roger stepped from the old village church into the sunlight that Easter Sunday in 1949, we can imagine the fields, woods and hills bursting forth ‘in triumph’. Almost seventy years later, Taizé has retained its Easter spirit of joy and spontaneity. It is still a ‘little springtime’.

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