Wednesday August 24, 2005
Different way of worship
Brother Roger\’s funeral was yesterday.
You may have heard in the news, a week ago, that Brother Roger, the founder of the Taizé religious community in France, was stabbed three times by a 36-year-old Romanian woman during a worship service.
You might also have read that he smuggled Jews and refugees across the border into Free France during World War II, and that several popes considered him a close friend.
But I\’m sure you didn\’t read any analysis of how he changed today\’s churches.
Roger Schutz founded the Taizé community in 1945 as a place for solitude and meditation. He and a handful of other monks took vows of celibacy, poverty, and meditation. That\’s not unusual. But his style of meditation depended a lot on chanting.
Aid to meditation
North American churches – especially mainline Protestant churches – don\’t take kindly to chanting. Perhaps it\’s left over from the Reformation — a desire to avoid anything even vaguely Catholic. We\’d rather sing a dozen verses of a dirge written 200 years ago, as long as the words change with every verse.
We are excessively word oriented. As if only words can convey meaning.
Brother Roger understood that endless repetition of the same words, the same tune, occupies just enough of the mind to set the rest of the mind free. Although most of Taizé\’s chants were written by Jacques Berthier, Brother Roger recognized that a chant works like a mantra, in eastern religions. Or like telling the beads of the Rosary, in the Roman Catholic tradition.
A Buddhist text on chanting says: “Chanting meditation means perceiving the sound of your own voice. You and the sound are never separate, which means that you and the universe are never separate.”
Traditional word-oriented Christians get antsy about chants. It seems to go on too long. They want to get finished, to get on with the next item on the agenda.
But that\’s exactly the point. There is no other item on the agenda. You chant, and keep chanting, until the words and music don\’t matter any more. Instead of getting into your head, it gets into your blood.
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For a lighter look at ethics, faith, and life, I recommend Ralph Milton\’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it at the Wood Lake Books home page in Ralph Milton\’s Site, or by sending a note directly to ralphmilton@woodlake.com.
It\’s also worth pursuing Richard Fairchild\’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating\’s \”SeemslikeGod\” page.
For the intellectually-oriented, chants are both mesmerizing and frightening. They work only as you abandon yourself to them, as you let go of your need to remain in control – of the situation, and of yourself.
But Brother Roger also recognized that the words – whatever they are – must suit today\’s circumstances. If they jar or offend, they will draw attention to themselves and interfere with meditation. So he rejected some traditional doctrines (of the Atonement, for example) as irrelevant to the life experience of young people today.
Young people caught on. They flocked to Taizé by the thousands, every summer. There were so many that some of Brother Roger\’s monks almost staged a coup. The crowds made silent meditation nearly impossible. But in the end they accepted that they had started a movement, and established Taizé-based communities around the world.
Farewell, Brother Roger.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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