Nativity Scene

For the first time ever The Taizé Community has built a Nativity Scene. The whole thing is at the road end of the Church of Reconciliation. The stable fits neatly under the roof but when I saw it, I was rather disappointed to see the stable empty. Quite unusual for a Nativity Scene - no nativity…. I stood looking for a few minutes and then I spotted them, Joseph with staff in hand leading a donkey with a very pregnant Mary on top. Logical really, Jesus isn’t due for a few weeks yet. I have never found it odd that the baby Jesus was in the stable for the whole of advent, but obviously the builders of this Nativity Scene had found it odd and had put some thought into their rendition of a Nativity Scene.

To quote from Taizé’s website “It is a sign of the Season of Advent, into which Christians have just entered. The liturgy also underlines this time of waiting.. ” and this novel approach to what is usually seen as just a bit of extra festive “tinsel”, makes us think about the whole story and about the waiting. The quotation from Luke 2 on the wall reads “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. And everyone went to his own town to register.” Reading that and seeing Mary on her donkey did get me thinking.

The distance between Nazareth and Bethlehem is about 130 km as the crow flies, how long would that journey have taken them? Cees and I have been know to do quite a bit of walking and when in form we can clock up to a maximum of 25 km a day so if we were fit and in tip-top condition it would take us about 6 days on the flat. But we are talking about desert here and we are talking about an old man who is leading a donkey with his heavily pregnant wife on it. We should also not forget that to get to Bethlehem, they would have had to travel across Samaria which was hostile bandit country in those days. Some people even suggest that they would not have taken the shortest route but a longer safer route via modern day Jordan. So whilst the bible gives no figures (as far as I can see) it would have been a very long journey more than a couple of weeks, which might explain why they arrived so late in Bethlehem and missed out on all the available rooms.

In any case I will be following events as they unfurl between “Nazareth” and “Bethlehem” and let you know.

Our gites are not very near Bethlehem, but they are near Taizé and they have availability! La Tuilerie Website

A missed Opportunity

Sitting at my desk yesterday afternoon, I heard the bells of Taizé ringing. Nothing new, I hear them three times a day every day except Sundays when it is only twice. But it was quarter past four in the afternoon! Any Taizé goer knows that Nothing happens at that time on a Sunday, in fact Sunday is dedicated to welcoming new guests and saying farewell to the guests from the previous week. A quick check on the Taizé website revealed nothing exciting, so what was going on? A mystery.

Last week when we visited a client’s home to check on the house, collect their newly issued house number (worthy of a blog in its own right!) and to empty the letter box, we found a magazine called “Le Lien entre Grosne et Guye” . Obviously some local publication (as the next layer up from our commune is the Communauté de Communes entre Grosne et Guye) and we put the magazine on one side eventually to be read or thrown away. A quick flick through revealed an article about Taizé that I wanted to read at my leisure, so the magazine went on to the “to be dealt with” pile. The date at the top of the page of this article must have stuck deep into my subconscious as in the middle of the night, last night, I suddenly thought that this article might give me some insight into the unusual bell ringing.

When he reads this blog, Cees will happily say “you should have read the article when you spotted it!” and on this occasion I will say, “OK you are right” because the little article actually gave details of an open day at Taizé for all the congregations between the river Grosne and the river Guye, culminating with a Catholic Eucharist at four thirty. Four thirty must be the time they allocate to visiting groups as it was mid one Thursday afternoon last summer when the Archbishop of Canterbury was visiting that the Anglicans were allowed to hold their Eucharist.

Yesterday the day in Taizé was themed “hospitality”. Hospitality is one of the key elements of the monastic tradition, chapter 53 in Saint Benedict’s Rule concentrates how the role hospitality plays a key part in the Benedictine order and as anyone who has seen anything of the Taizé order will know, the brothers there are no strangers to hospitality themselves, housing and feeding hundreds of thousands a year.

After the morning service up until lunch was taken up to the study of St Luke chapter 10 which contains amongst other things the parable of the Good Samaritan, but in its totality it concentrates on the meaning of hospitality and the reciprocity of that hospitality. Having now read the article, I am very sorry indeed that I missed the day and the next time this magazine falls into my hands, I will read it from cover to cover to make sure I don’t miss anything like this again. Another lesson learnt!

La Tuilerie Website

Ecumenicalism

My father was a Congregationalist and my mother is a Welsh Baptist and I was brought up going to church in our local parish church which is affiliated to the Church of England, so to me Christianity is one broad group of people each worshiping in their own different way, but ultimately the same. I have never thought about it at all, ecumenicalism is how it is and how it should be, but not everyone thinks the same and times were not always so.

When Frère Roger first came to Taizé he worshipped alone in a room that he had dedicated for that purpose. When there were other Christians present they would join him in prayer, but as many of the people he was helping were in fact Jewish, he felt that it was totally inappropriate to make the prayer times communal. When he returned with some friends (later the first brothers) after the war with the purpose of setting up a community, they worshipped together in the original room but as the numbers of brothers and Christian visitors increased so did their need for a larger space. What is more logical than to use the small Romanesque church in Taizé, a holy place that had not been used for services for many years. But the Catholic church had other ideas about that. Despite not actually owning the building (all churches were seized during the Revolution and are now state owned) the Catholic church objected to having Protestants worshiping in their, albeit unused, church. An initial local agreement was swiftly rescinded and the request to use the church then went up through the bishop of Autun all the way to Paris where it ended up with Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli who was at that time the papal nuncio. He was a forward thinking man, he had also helped many Jews and other refugees during the war and maybe it was that common ground that helped convince him or maybe not, but he was the man who gave permission in 1948 for the brothers to have permanent non-rescindable use of the church for their daily prayers.

Allowing Protestants to use the church was one thing, but allowing Catholics to join them was another. Despite securing an audience with Pope Pius XII, Frère Roger did not manage to get agreement for ecumenical worship out of him. A big step for a pope to take of course. Ten years passed and the pope died and a new one, Pope John XXIII, was elected. This new pope turned out to be none other than the Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli who had granted permission to use the church in Taizé and despite being old in years, he was still very young and forward thinking in his ways and it was he who supported the community of Taizé and led the way forward for allowing Catholics to take part in ecumenical worship. Maybe it was their common experiences during the war that drew these two men together, who knows, but whatever it was, he paved the way for the close links between the Vatican and the brotherhood that still exist today and it led to real reconciliation between differing Christian groups.

So it saddens me when I read about the bitter row going on in the Anglican movement at the moment. Maybe they should “go back to core business” to quote something from my corporate past, maybe they should concentrate on the business of being Christians. What I find so refreshing about the community in Taizé is that they welcome all, they welcome the differences but more importantly they concentrate on the commonality. It all seems so normal to me, but of course this is not the way everyone sees the world. Just maybe one day all Christians in their churches can look and learn and get back to concentrating on what holds them together and not concentrating on the arguments that are splitting them apart.

La Tuilerie Website

Celebration of an Arrival and a Departure

On 20th August 1940 a young Swiss man arrived in Burgundy on his bike. He came to help those persecuted by the Nazis and he chose a little village near the demarcation line, just inside “Free” France with its puppet regime in Vichy. The village was Taizé and the man Roger Schutz. Not such an amazing event at the time, but it was the start of something very big. Roger stayed helping Jews and Resistance fighters until the Nazis collapsed the Vichy government and occupied the whole of France. Roger then became a target himself and he was advised to leave. He returned after the war with some friends to set up a community dedicated to help those who had suffered during the war, particularly the young people. His sister joined him, to run the children’s house. Roger was a deeply religious young man as were his friends and their vision was to create an monastic order outside of any church. This order was founded officially on Easter day 1949.

The Taizé community was born. Frère Roger led the community from its beginnings of a small group of seven brothers to over 100 brothers, until he was murdered in the Church of Reconciliation itself on 16th August 2005.

Saturday evening there was a celebration of the 70 years since Frère Roger first arrived on the hill and a commemoration of 5 years since his death.

The service was held in the open in a meadow on the edge of Taizé with the buildings belonging to the community and the Romanesque church hung with icons. An area similar to the “garden” inside the community’s church was created for the monks to be together and the service began at a quarter to 8 by singing “The Lord is my Shepherd” in Filipino, courtesy of the Jesuit Music Ministry there. The service followed the usual lines of songs and silence but with Frère Alois also addressing the congregation of about 5,000 and telling them of Frère Roger, his life, his work and the influence he had had on the Christian movement throughout the world.

A special service for a special man.

Our website La Tuilerie.

The Silence Garden

We have had many visitors who have come specifically for Taizé, just to see what it was, to come for one or two services, to follow one service every day or to take part fully in what Taizé has to offer but who were not allowed to stay in Taizé because of their age or those who wanted a bit more comfort and/or privacy. Almost all of these visitors have mentioned the Silence Garden and the natural spring of St. Etienne and all have talked about how special it was.

You can see the garden from the Voie Verte the cycle route we use to go from Cormatin to Cluny and it has never looked very special to me. There is a lake, some trees and a grass area to sit on, big deal give me Wisley or Kew anytime! However, Cees convinced me a couple of weeks ago that we really should visit the garden and see what it was like and when we were on a walk through Taizé to Ameugny to visit some friends, we decided to see what the garden had to offer.

Unless you know where the garden entrance is, finding it is difficult. You walk down past the last building heading towards the “cliff edge” and then you take one of the many windy paths that travel steeply down the hill. Just the walk down itself is worth the effort as you meander through the wooded hillside. At the bottom you come out of the trees and into a lovely grassed area surrounded by trees and you see the lake and you see the real size of it. Further along you come to the waterfall which is where the natural spring of St. Etienne tumbles water down into the lake. There are several bridges that go over the lake to the other side and there are a number of little chalets where you can sit out of the sun (or rain!)

Dotted here and there on the grass and on the bridges were people sitting enjoying the silence, sleeping or reading. Just walking through the garden you get a real feeling of peace, people in groups talk at a whisper, but most people make no sound at all. This is in sharp contrast to the Frisbee games and general noise of the youngsters on top of the hill. I was dreading the hike back up the steep hill (244 steps I have been told), but actually it was not as daunting as I had feared and it certainly is a way to improve your fitness!

The garden in a horticultural sense has little to offer, but I now agree with our visitors, the garden is special, why or how I don’t know, it is just “special”.

More information about the accommodation we have is on La Tuilerie Website.

The Organs of Taizé

In the Church of Reconciliation at Taizé there is a large pipe organ. I blogged about it last summer when it was installed, but I have come to learn so much more about it and its predecessors and yet now I seem to know so much less! By finding old photographs, I have seen that the organ in Taizé has changed a number of times over the years and it does beg the question why?

From this very old photo probably from the 1960s you can see what I am fairly sure is the original organ. The niche in the wall fits it perfectly, or it fits the niche perfectly, whichever way you would like to put it, but in any case it looks like it belongs. I can’t find out who made the organ, but that will come with time.

Interestingly, I have found information about what is possibly the second organ in Taizé. This organ was built specifically for the church in 1974 by Jürgen Ahrend a German organ builder, however, that had a very short life in the church because it was dismantled and put into storage in the Bressse in 1979. Via a monastery in Switzerland this organ eventually ended up in Lyon Cathedral in 1996, where it still is today. I suspect it was rather too loud for Taizé if it can be used in a cathedral!

What happened in 1979, I have no idea, but when I first visited the church in 2006 there was definitely an organ, I never heard it played, but it was there. Obviously no one thought it interesting enough to take a picture of because I have scanned the web and can find nothing. However, a friend of mine did find this photo in her collection, rather out of focus, but clearly an organ. Apparently this organ became “unreliable” due to the hot air heating system in the church and so it was removed when the church was refurbished in the winter of 2008/2009.

I personally thought the church was a better place without that organ. An organ of that size seems to be out of place and too overwhelming for the services in Taizé. However, a new organ had been commissioned from Gerhard Grenzing, an organ builder from Catalonia. Rather unusually for a organ, part of the specification was that it had to be “quiet”! When I saw the new thing arrive I thought it looked as if it could blast you out of the church, but apparently the sound is very much in keeping with the quiet meditative nature of the chants. Also interestingly the organist sits sideways on to the church so that he does not have his back to the congregation. This must make it easier for the organist to still feel part of the community of singing.

Finding all this out, has made me hanker for more information. What happened in 1979? Why have there been so many organs over the years? How many have there actually been between 1979 and 2006? Maybe some of our new friends who have been coming to Taizé for years will be ale to fill in some gaps, I don’t know, but I will certainly keep digging. So anyone with any information or any photos throughout the years, let me know!

La Tuilerie Website

The Bells, the Bells

View of La Tuilerie from Taizé

I’ve mentioned before that the bells of Taizé are the first thing I hear when I wake up in the morning, OK I know I should be up before 08.15, but that’s life in Burgundy for you. In fact I was told that the reason that people sleep so well here is the extra oxygen in the air from being next to the forest. As you can see from the photo our house is nestled amongst the trees and when people come to stay here it is true that they sleep very well and deeply. I had always thought that it was the long journey they had just made, or the fact that at last they can sleep somewhere where there is no light pollution or somewhere where it is truly quiet, but Mme R reliably informed me that it is the potency of the air that does it.

Now Mme R is an interesting person, she has lived here all her life, she has an ingrained disrespect for all in authority be that local government, the police, the Catholic church or anyone else who puts their head above the parapet and she has an opinion on everything and she “knows” a lot. We love to listen to her rantings about local dignitaries, in particular the one about the Mayor (not ours I hasten to add) who was caught stealing milk from a neighbour’s farm to make cheese. His cheese farm is out of bounds to us now, we are not allowed to buy from there in case we incur Mme R’s wrath. She has a host of such stories which all go together to prove her general conspiracy theory of authority figures.

We were at Mme R’s house one day a couple of years ago when the Taizé bells started to ring and that prompted a story about how there had been a pond under the bells originally, to act as a “sound mirror” to reflect the sound far and wide. The local villagers had complained about the noise and these complaints had prompted the monks to change this situation. Another conspiracy theory, but at least the monks did the right thing in the end. We take these stories with the pinch of salt that they deserve, but we enjoy them none the less. Oh yes and don’t get her started on windmills, we have had too many hours of stories of money grabbing officials just after lining their pockets with gold at the expense of us residents!

Original Taizé bell tower

The other day I found a picture which shocked me to the core, I dragged Cees over to look at the picture and we finally agreed that some of what Mme R had told us was in fact true. As you can see in the photo, when the bells in Taizé were originally installed, they were indeed installed over water. What’s more, they were in a completely different tower construction, much more open and no more than 1 m from the ground with a small pond underneath. Also this old tower was in the middle of a large open space in-between the living accommodation of the monks and the new church. Those bells must have been deafening for many villages around. No wonder there were complaints!

Having said that the original bell tower is aesthetically pleasing to look at unlike the truly ugly gate-like construction the bells now hang in. However with the bells now at a height of at least 10 m above the ground, with them being relatively boxed-in in their new tower and of course with there being many new buildings around the bell tower, the sound of the bells is very pleasant indeed and not a bad sound to hear when you first wake up.

So I think an apology in order here: Sorry Mme R we will believe you next time!

For more photos of the house and where we are Click here.