Taizé Pottery

My Website

The monks in Taizé accept no money, no donations, no inheritance absolutely nothing, not one penny, they earn their own way in life. This attitude is very different to other religious orders who rely on donations, great benefactors, some have land and therefore income or they just expect their parishioners to pay for their services.

I had never really though about it before, but take today’s ministers of all denominations, they have a salary from their church. They are paid to counsel the parishioners, to run the church and its services. The monks of Taizé are counsellors to the young who need help, they guide bible study sessions, they assist in study groups and they run the services three times a day, but they still expect no income from that side of their lives - they do other work for a living. They have a press where they publish books, cards, posters, they make lovely enamelled dove-shaped Taizé crosses as well as other pendants and they make pottery.

The pottery is stunning in its simplicity which give it a style and beauty all of its own. You can buy a whole dinner service or you can buy the pieces which are “stand-alone”. Most notably the candle holders and the oil lamps. It all sound a bit twee and amateurish, but the quality and style of the pieces are a match to and are, one could argue, better than many of the other artisans in the area. Their aim is to “produce objects for daily use with prices everyone can afford” a goal they certainly achieve. Most of their pieces are “stoneware” with some objects cast using a porcelain paste, the lamps are made this way.

Stoneware glazes are formed by the fusion of mixtures of various minerals at high temperatures. Some are coloured by adding pigments such as iron oxides that produce ivory, green, black and brown glazes, cobalt or copper for blue and violet, titanium for orange-yellow. The glazes sometimes include vegetable ash composed of the minerals the plants drew from the ground.

Frère Daniel started the pottery workshop in the early days of Taizé and together with Frère Lutz, the pottery production has flourished over the years. Most of the work is done in the winter months when there are few visitors and then the workshops become factory-like in their scale of production. In fact some of preparation and initial firing of the pottery is done in conjunction with neighbouring potters as the demand for the pottery becomes too great for the monks to keep up with. The shop in Taizé is bursting with pottery in the days leading up to Easter, but by October, it is looking distinctively empty.

Some of the monks work in the pottery workshops all year round and when full production is not going on, they have the time to be more creative in their output In particular, this autumn, Frère Daniel is exhibiting his more creative works called “Metamorphoses” in Paris at the Compagnie de la Chine et des Indes. Click here for details of the exhibition which runs until the end of October.

Earlier this year Frère Lutz exhibited his pottery alongside the collages and aquarelles of Frère Stephen in Mâcon at the Galerie Mary-Ann. For more details of work in exhibitions check-out the Taizé website click here, they are usually announced on this page, but if nothing is there go to the books, CDs, DVDs.

But I like the simple stoneware dinner services, cups, bowls, plates and the lamps. For many people who stay with us, these are essential souvenirs to take home and something to use all year round. They make beautiful gifts for family and friends or in my case just as a treat for myself.

La Tuilerie Website

Taizé Silence

La Tuilerie Website

One of the underpinning concepts of Taizé is the use of silence. Each monastic community has a Rule, which is in fact a set of rules by which the community lives. In the Taizé Rule (which is called “The Parable of Community”) Frère Roger wrote that the brothers should "keep inner silence always”. In the world we live in today there is so much noise and distraction from without and within and he saw the use of “external” silence as the means to achieve “inner” silence and it is this inner silence that "makes possible our conversation with God."

There are special houses in Taizé for those who want to spend a whole week in silent contemplation, where no word is spoken even around the meal table. The people choosing this type of week only leave the house for the three services a day where they can sing along with the rest, but in principle not one spoken word will pass their lips while they are in Taizé. In the morning a monk or nun will give an explanation of the Bible reading for the day. This is not a discussion, it is merely to give a basis for the day’s contemplation. This type of week is not for the faint-hearted but it enables these people to come to rest, to give them a different and profound experience and to hopefully find that inner silence Frère Roger believed we should all aspire to.

For those seeking silence in smaller doses, there is the old Romanesque church in the village, around the St Etienne well and most of the time there is a room available so that you can spend your mealtimes in silence. Even if you don’t make use of these possibilities, everyone will experience silence during their time at Taizé because silence is an important part of the three daily services.

The first time I experienced the silence was a very strange feeling. There is no clue that the silence is about to start, the prayers stop, no singing starts and silence falls. If you walk around Taizé during the day, there is always chatter and laughter of the thousands of youngsters who are there, but when the silence falls in the church every one of those people is quiet. That could be up to twelve thousand on a Sunday morning and all you hear is an occasional cough but further there is just an enveloping blanket of silence. It seems to go on for ever and not wearing a watch I had no idea how long it was, but my guess was about 5 minutes. The silence is broken by a lone monk whose task it is the bring the congregation back to singing.

I have read many stories of Taizé experiences and the length of the silence seems to cause a lot of discussion. After my original estimate of five minutes, I was perfectly satisfied and never gave it any more thought. But I have been intrigued by others’ experiences and interestingly many believe that the silence is 10 minutes and I read one account where the writer stated that the silence was 20 minutes.

This summer one of our campers was a person who had lived as a volunteer in the community for two years when she was in her twenties. She was returning to show hers kids and her husband the place she had spent so much time. She was telling me of a time when she went to a “Taizé” service near her home town in The Netherlands. Along with the singing there was of course silence. One of the participants was given the responsibility of timing the silence to ensure that it was exactly 7 minutes. The organisers had been to Taizé that summer and had used a stopwatch to time the silence during a service and this information had been brought home with them to ensure that the “rules” were followed correctly. This story amused me intensely as when I took my parents to a service, having warned them that there was a long silence, my Father timed it and agreed that my 5 minute estimate was correct. But it irritated our camper and she never went back for another service at that church and I understand now that she was right, these people had missed the point entirely.

The truth of the matter is that the silence varies in length at every service, the monk responsible for breaking that silence uses his own inner clock to know when to break. Also each individual in the congregation will experience a longer or a shorter silence depending on how restless he or she is inside. Sometimes 2 minutes is too long to be silent and sometimes 20 minutes is not long enough. If you experience the silence as too long, it is because your inner noise is too loud and you are a long way from reaching “inner silence”. So it is not the length of silence that is important, it is the process of silence in itself that matters so that we can all strive to find that “small voice within” which only emerges when we have inner silence and which has, since ancient times, been one of man’s goals no matter what his religion.

Campanology

My Website

I live within the sound of the bells of Taizé. When I hear the bells, here in Chazelle it reminds me three times a day what time it is. When the bells stop in the morning at 08.30, I know I should have got up, when they ring in the middle of the day at 12.15 I know I need to get lunch on the table and when they start in the evening at 20.15 and we still haven’t eaten I know I am running behind schedule!

When I heard the bells this morning I started thinking about how strange it was that I seem to have lived near bells almost all my life. As a child in Ickenham our house was within the bells of St Giles church, my first house in Worksop was next to the Priory church, my second next to St Leonards in Hythe, my third across the valley from The All Saints church in Highbrook, in the Netherlands whilst living in Benthuizen, I lived within the sound of a carillon that sounded the hour and now it is the bells of Taizé. I was struck by how all of these bells were very different and all were played differently as well.

How the Taizé bells are operated has been a mystery to me. I have always seen a monk scurrying into the services late after the bells have stopped ringing, I recognised him not only because of his lateness but that he look like a ex-colleague of mine, Rick. I was convinced that he was the “bell-monk” and he was the one that started and stopped the bells, but quite how that worked I had no idea.

In most English churches the bells are operated by one bell ringer per bell, each person pulling his rope and ringing his own bell on cue to create “rounds”.

To add variation to this process the director of the group will call out a change during the ringing to alter the order of the bells in the round, commonly called “change ringing”. This was the case for both the Worksop Priory and St Leonard’s at Hythe . However, the bells in St Giles were operated by one or other of the choir boys.

All the bell ropes came down into a box about 2 feet wide and one choir boy would operate the bells by pulling the ropes in the set pattern. I found it fascinating to watch the frantic action of these boys. As this was a tiring job, to complete the full ring prior to a service, two boys were needed, one taking over from the other half way through the ring. During the changeover the two would work together to synchronise the rhythm then one would duck out and return to the vestry.

Another type of bell and belling ringing are carillon bells. These are a set of bells that play full tunes rather than just ringing out.
My first experience of carillon bells was when I lived in Horsted Keynes. All Saints in Highbrook played tunes automatically at mid-day, three in the afternoon and six in the evening. The sound echoed through the valley and were clearly audible from our garden.
In my house in Benthuizen, The Netherlands, I was within earshot of the carillon mounted on a post outside the old town hall. When the town hall had been shut down and sold off as a private house the carillon had been in a poor state of repair and no longer worked. The new owner had the bells retuned and the whole mechanism overhauled and reinstated the hourly ringing, 24 hours a day. There was soon an uproar in the village as the neighbours started to suffer from sleep deprivation because of the noise! The bells were really deafening from close by, even in my garden (a block away) you could not talk over sound of the bells. Having said that they were beautifully tuned and from a distance they made a pleasant sound. Finally it was agreed that the bells could play a tune on the hour starting at nine in the morning with the last tune at nine in the evening.

Today I decided to get to the bottom of the Taizé bell mystery. The five bells are hung in a very ugly (in my opinion) tower. We had heard that originally under the bells there was a small pond, this was intended to act as a “sound mirror” and reflect the sound increasing its potency, but complaints from the neighbours have meant that the pond was filled in and now wooden planks lie under the bell tower. Each bell is operated independently by an electro-motor connected to the top of the bells by a chain. The motor makes the chain oscillate back and forward, waggling the bell, if you like. Each motor operates at a different frequency, with the motors for the smaller bells moving quicker than that for the largest bell. When the bells are ringing, the “tune” created by the bells constantly changes because of this lack of synchronicity. We lay in wait for the bell monk and he never arrived, the bells just started and stopped most probably and quite boringly on a timer switch.

So now I know the truth about the late monk, he is just late and nothing else!

The Archbishop of Canterbury

La Tuilerie Website

He was supposed to be in Taizé this morning. I have had this date in my diary for a couple of months ever since I saw on the Taizé website that he was arriving on Thursday 6th and leaving on Sunday the 9th . The Reverend, who had rented one of our gites, had assisted on Friday at a communion service where the Archbishop had officiated, along with the second in command of the Anglican church the Archbishop of York, so he had been seen. I was banking on the fact that as a very senior Christian “official” he would be invited to officiate at the communion, but as the more than 50 visiting clergy filed in, in their white cassocks and green shawls, he was not among them. There was a Cardinal and an African guy who could have been the Archbishop of York, but no sign of the Most Reverend Rowan Williams. Maybe I had just not recognised him.

As I was watching the monks walk in, I spotted him. Amongst the more than one hundred monks he walked into the church wearing the monks’ white cassock. He walked up through the church and sat simply amongst them. The only difference between him and them was the beautiful silver cross that he wore outside his tunic. I was moved by this humble action, it made the other clergy look garish with their green shawls, towering above the rest of the congregation on their benches.

The service progressed as normal for a Sunday morning, that means that if you sit at the front of the church you have to turn through 180 degrees for the readings to face the direction of the reader and as in other churches you stand for the Gospel. You then turn back 180 degrees and sit down again. What I didn’t spot until I was back on the ground was that the monks had not turned to face the altar, they sat still facing the back of the church. I quickly returned, (not an easy job when the church is that full) and I saw a single monk standing in the middle of the church at the lectern, it was the Archbishop himself. He then read out what I would call a sermon. This was translated into French in stages by one of the monks. For regular churchgoers there is nothing odd about this, but because the average Taizé congregation will consist of people of probably more than 50 nationalities, the explanation of the scriptures is left to the small groups that meet in the mornings where a monk will do that in the language of the group. So to my knowledge, this is the first time a sermon has been ever given in a service at Taizé, a very special occassion.

After that, the service continued as normal, however, none of the visiting clergy were invited to celebrate the communion, that was done by the monks themselves as is the case in the winter when there are no visitors around. Not even the Cardinal was invited to join in.

When the communion was distributed, the Archbishop stood in line with the other monks simply waiting his turn.

A moving experience and one I am happy to say I witnessed.

Singing in Taizé

La Tuilerie Website

The beauty of Taizé songs is that they are sung in many languages, most of which I and most of the people around me do not understand, but their meditative quality is quite mesmerising. I have spent many hours struggling at home with the German ones, just so that I can sing along on my next visit, in particular “Gott is nur liebe” has been a serious tongue twister for me over the years. I have just about cracked it and so I was very disappointed last week when I discovered that all my work had been in vain, this year the song is sung in Polish and is now called “Bóg jest miłościa”, an even worse tongue twister, so more homework to be done!

Sometimes songs are in English, Dutch or French which makes pronunciation for me easier and even Latin is not a problem. It is just the German and Slavonic ones I struggle with.

There are some beautiful singers every week in the Church but there are some not too good singers as well, but it is the enthusiasm that is the most important thing. It can be a bit off putting sometimes though if you are stuck next to someone who is a bit too loud, like last Sunday, I was sitting just behind just such a chap. He sang VERY loudly, he also sang slightly out of tune and he was always a semi quaver behind the rest. It made singing along with the rest of the congregation a bit tricky, but hey he was involved and doing his best. The first half of the Sunday service is the Eucharist and that part follows a special song sheet all in Latin, as the communion is being distributed the “real” Taizé songs start, what did we get? Yes you guessed it “Bóg jest miłościa” Oh well I did my best, but this English chap with the loud voice was definitely not singing the same words as me, also not last year’s version, it didn’t take me long to realise that he was singing English! Maybe he hadn’t spotted the change of language or maybe he knew the song in English or maybe…..who knows. I joined a difference queue for communion from him, to get out of earshot.

Returning to our places and more songs and one of my favourites, “Singt dem Herrn”.
My over-loud neighbours gustily sang again in English. He was getting a touch annoying at this point and a large circle of emptiness was being formed around him as people moved, which of course made his voice even clearer for me and less easy to ignore, when he started singing a French song also in English, I left, I was even out before the monks.

I must say that it puts singing songs in many languages into a different perspective and one I hope never to repeat!

If you click on either of the songs you'll get to the MP3 and podcast page of the Taizé webiste, for their homepage click here.

Cardinals and Archbishops

La Tuilerie Website

During the Sunday morning service at Taizé, all the visiting clergy sit at the front left of the Church of Reconciliation dressed in special white cassocks and they wear a cleric’s stole. At this time of year the stole is green which it is for most of the year. All the clergy wear the same outfits except for their head gear. Orthodox priests wear their traditional hats, not dissimilar to a mitre and Catholic Cardinals wear their red calotte (small cap). This morning in Taizé there were two cardinals which for some reason I always find rather exciting even though I am not a catholic myself.

If there is a Cardinal present he will normally be the one to open the service and to officiate at the blessing of the bread and wine. All the clergy at the front take part in the blessing process by standing with their hands outstretched but there are usually three clergy at the altar who do all the talking. Today the two Cardinals and Brother Alois were at the altar. The Cardinal who conducted most of the service was a Spanish guy with a very long bushy beard. When the second Cardinal (who was out of my view) took over, I heard a familiar voice. To my amazement it was Cardinal Murphy O’Connor, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. There is something very special about hearing an English voice officiate at a Taizé service, it happens so infrequently. Somehow I have managed to be at a service where Cardinal Murphy O’Connor has officiated for three years in a row now. I don’t go to a service anything like once a week so it is a really special coincidence as his visits are never made public in advance. However, the visit of the Archbishop of Canterbury has been announced, he is coming to Taizé from the 6th to the 9th of August. As the head of the Anglican church his visit is considered to be very prestigious to the Communauté. I have never heard him in a service so I will definitely be there on Sunday the 9th and hopefully he will conduct the service. As an Anglican, that will be for me a very special moment indeed.

Expanding Churches

La Tuilerie Website

You can tell that Taizé is filling up to its peak occupancy when the number of hitchhikers at the bottom of the hill starts to build up. We call them “escapees” as these are the kids who are fed up with attending bible readings or workshops or they are the kids who are just here for a cheap holiday, pretending to their parents that they have a higher mission in life! During the height of the summer, you see rows of them at the bus stop at the bottom of the Taizé hill from about ten in the morning until lunch time all looking for a lift to the nearest town. On a busy day there could be up to fifty in total which actually pales into insignificance when compared to the 6,000 (yes, six thousand) young people that Taizé attracts per week.

Driving through Taizé is almost impossible at this time of year, outside of the church service or activity times, as the whole lot of them swarm over the road. That is not to mention the numerous bus loads of tourists who go to see what it Taizé is. They are greeted by eager, earnest youngsters in the welcome centre who are more than happy to explain what Taizé is all about. They come to look and be amazed at the numbers, they come for the beautiful pottery the monks sell to fund their life in Taizé and they come to attend a service.

Taizé is an ecumenical community which tries to get Christians to see through the differences and to concentrate on the central core themes of what Christianity is all about. The future of Christianity lies in the common factors and not in the differences, but these differences should be cherished and celebrated. Just as each person is different, each group of Christians should be allowed to be different and they need to accept and enjoy the differences in their neighbour’s group. The monks themselves come from catholic, protestant and orthodox backgrounds so there is a wide-spread of understanding in the community.

The services are a mixture of songs, prayer (in various languages), a short bible reading (repeated in various languages) and silence. The songs are normally multi-voiced and to get everyone to sing, the church needs to be “full”. There is nothing worse than a large church with a few people, hardly anyone sings and the thin sound dwindles into nothing. So, how do you solve a problem like that? In the middle of winter on a Sunday morning, the congregation will be about 200 locals plus the monks so maybe 300 in total. In the middle of summer on a Sunday morning the congregation will be more then twelve thousand. So how do you always keep the church full? The ingenious Taizé solution is: you create an expanding church!

The Church of Reconciliation was built with just this idea in mind. The “core” church, remains a church all year long and all day long. According to the number of people who have signed up to attend a week at Taizé, and according to the service (some are more popular than others) the church expands and contracts to make sure that it is always full. The church building is in fact a series of smaller rooms with vertical roller partitions.

During the day these rooms can be used for discussion groups and during the services the rooms disappear and they become part of the church.

So the church is always full, the singing resounds around making everyone join in. Having said that, when the church is at its fullest at this time of year, the shear quantity of voices is quite something, when I am there within the singing on a Sunday morning it surprises me that the people here at La Tuilerie can’t hear us and join in as well.

If you want to read my other blogs on Taizé go to the Category list on the right-hand side of this blog page and click on Taizé.

The photos have been taken from the Taizé website. To get to the Taizé website click here.

Non-changeover day

La Tuilerie Website

It is Saturday morning, I don’t have to dash around and clean the gites and I don’t have to fight for washing-line space with the campers - I have a non-changeover day. I must say it is really nice for a change, but it means that we have no-one in the gites. Well actually that’s not true. We do have a mother and son in one of the gites, they have come to Taize for a long weekend.

They have been watching the website very carefully and spotted a non-changeover weekend and have been monitoring it for a couple of weeks now and last week they asked us if we would do a long weekend. Great for us and just what they wanted! What I am also very impressed with is that they have been analysing the photos and spotted that the large double bed in L’Etable (the gite with the bedroom upstairs) can be converted into two singles (spot the legs!). So even better for them, two single beds and no need to put the son in a blow up bed on the floor. All they had to do was bring their own duvet and hey presto.

This is not the first time we have had two people stay in that gite in separate beds and it works well. This is our first “Taizé long weekend” and so far that’s working well too.

What is this phenomenon called Taizé?

La Tuilerie website

I am woken up every morning by the bells of Taizé, the single bell for the monks rings out at 07.45 for about 5 minutes, calling the monks to their morning prayer then the bells start in earnest at 08.15 and ring until 08.30, letting all the pilgrims at Taizé know that the service is about to start. When the bells stop I know I really must get up. The bells ring from 12.15 to 12.30, so I know lunch should be on the table and if dinner is not ready when the evening bells go at 20.15, I know I am very late. And that was what Taizé was to me when I arrived here in 2005.
After Easter in 2006 we went to Taizé to have a look around and we were amazed at the number of young people milling around. We didn’t go to a service as that seemed inappropriate, with all these kids around it seemed like a young person’s thing. I wanted to go to a service, but I didn’t know how it worked, so I didn’t dare go alone. In July some campers (Ans and Simon) arrived, she had been to Taizé for the first time that spring and wanted to camp nearby to take in a few services and tempt her husband to go too. He however wasn’t interested and she didn’t dare go alone. At last my chance to go to a service, so on a Friday evening Ans and I went up the hill to Taizé.

The services are made up of singing and silence. The songs are mesmerising. With pilgrims from all over the world the songs need to be simple to enable everyone to sing. There are a mixture of languages, Latin, German and some sort of Slavonic language are the most popular with French, English and Spanish there too. Each song has two lines and these are sung over and over again. The songs are a mixture of four voices, rounds and solo singing with the congregation singing the chorus. It is not to everyone’s taste, but I absolutely love them. In every service there is silence, five minutes of it. Five minutes is a very long time and it is quite amazing that a church full of people can be so quiet for so long. The singing continues after the monks have left and on a Friday and Saturday night this can go on into the early hours of the morning I have been told.

The peace that pervades in a service is tangible and I can quite understand why some people come back year after year, just to regain that and to take a little bit of serenity back home with them. It is definitely not just a young person’s thing at all. Everyone is welcome to the services. Many, many of the visitors in our gîtes or on the campsite come for Taizé, to take part in a couple of services while being on holiday and enjoying other things that this area has to offer.

The photos are from the Taizé community website. For more information click here

Changes in Taizé

The church of Reconciliation in Taizé had a monstrosity of an organ mounted on the wall on the left-hand side when looking to the altar end of the church. Tall pilgrims could hardly stand beneath it and I have seen one man hit his head. Frère Roger thought that the organ was too big, pompous and loud for the community. Taizé’s music is simple and requires little or no accompaniment, so the little organ, played by one of monks within the “garden”, that usually sounds like a guitar, suits the whole service.
During the refurbishments of two years ago, this ghastly thing was thankfully removed which did wonders for the simple beauty of this end of the church. The orange curtains draped at the altar end church and the small stain glass windows are the only adornments in the church and they achieve the right effect.

So what has happened in the last two weeks? Suddenly a new organ has appeared, at the same spot as the old one and as big and as ugly, just a little bit more shiny and maybe with a bit more head room underneath. It could even be the old one polished up and returned, I don’t know. It looks like it could blast out music and drown the singing. At the service today it was not in use, so I will have to wait and see whether it is as loud as it looks. What would Frère Roger make of this?

Our website

How we got here

September 2005 the huge removal lorry containing all our worldly goods arrived in front of a barely habitable Tuilerie with lots of potential and very little dry storage space. Unbelievably less than a year later our brand new campsite had completed a very successful season and the two gîtes were ready for tiling, painting and furnishing to accommodate our first guests in April 2007. When you hear all the stories of nightmare rennovations, ours had gone very well indeed, but we had a clear goal in mind and nothing would stop us getting there. We were supplying simple but roomy and comfortable accommodation to people who wanted to visit this beautiful area of the world.

Burgundy, in particular this part, has so much to offer, beautiful rolling hills ideal for walking and cycling and you can choose your route from flat (along the Voie Verte) to seriously steep Mont St-Romain or Mont St-Vincent and everything inbetween. The are numerous Romanesque churches to visit and chateaux in abundance. Many of our visitors come to experience the religious orders near here, Taizé a Christian ecumenical monastery order that attracts thousands of young people througout the summer or La Boulaye a Tibbetan Buddhist monastery, the first in Europe. Other people come here to visit Cluny and Beaune with both Dijon and Lyon (two magnificant cities) being easily accessible too.

Life in Cormatin can be exciting, just watch this space!